Abstract
How can teachers enact a curriculum that is responsive to students and emergent from them when teachers are under enormous constraints to cover specific course content and to prepare students for standardized tests? Rather than an either/or perspective, this article embraces a both/and approach based on the belief that teachers can do both. Drawing upon qualitative classroom data gleaned from 3 years of research in an inner-city high school, four “best practices” inform a science curriculum model based on student voice and choice. In a recursive fashion, both the evidence and aspects of the curriculum that instantiate these practices are described. The end result is a new way of thinking about high school curricula that is situated in the students’ lives and experiences and has room for their voices and choices while addressing content standards and the development of critical thinking skills. It also demonstrates how research can inform curriculum development in overt and significant ways, when empirically identified best practices are made visible in a curriculum’s organization and implementation.
Against the backdrop of No Child Left Behind, Annual Yearly Progress, and high-stakes testing in the United States it might seem out of place and out of date to suggest connecting science with students’ interests and culture. But it is precisely because of this backdrop that we must investigate such approaches, particularly in schools that serve African American students and others from marginalized groups whose education seems not to have been improved by recent policy changes and reforms. Using data from the National Science Foundation Statewide Systemic Initiative, Wood, Lawrenz, and Haroldson (2009) created a strong case against traditional classroom power structures that are detrimental in shaping positive learning experiences for nonmainstream students in science. They noted that consideration of students’ culture and practices in relation to science learning and performance “has been kept on the margins of national political/reform discussions” (p. 422). Despite abundant research around science teaching for marginalized groups in recent years, few examples of concrete, research-grounded curricula have been provided. This article and the curriculum model described herein offer such an example.
Since the suggestion of a student-emergent curriculum in the context of a science lunch group (Seiler, 2001), thoughtful readers and listeners have asked: How can teachers enact a curriculum that is responsive to students and emergent from them when teachers are under enormous constraints to cover specific course content and to prepare students for standardized tests, 1 particularly in science? Declining to take an either/or perspective, I embrace a both/and approach based on the belief that teachers can do both. In doing so, I present not just a curriculum, but a model for developing a curriculum with/for nonmainstream youth. Drawing upon qualitative classroom data gleaned from 3 years of research in an inner-city high school, four strands of evidence informed this biology curriculum. These strands of evidence are referred to as “best practices” in that they build on routine student practices (inclinations or propensities), and when they are maximized in classroom environments, student engagement and learning appear to flourish. The best practices were incorporated into the design and implementation of the curriculum as summarized in Table 1.
Best Practices in the Curriculum.
The curriculum is enacted in the following way. Six driving questions, generated in advance with student input, provide overarching contexts for each of six units. In each unit, students collaborate in inquiry groups to consider the driving question, generate additional subquestions, and carry out learning activities to gather and evaluate information in a recursive effort. The student-generated subquestions drive daily and weekly plans, as students and teacher plan and organize lessons to insure that subquestions as well as the needed science topics are explored. The end product is a new way of thinking about high school curricula, in science or other subjects, which are situated in the students’ lives and experiences and have room for their voices and choices while addressing content standards and the development of critical thinking skills.
The article is structured so that I sequentially provide evidence for and describe how the curriculum instantiates each best practice. This presentation demonstrates how research can inform curriculum development in overt and significant ways, when empirically identified best practices are made visible in a curriculum’s organization and implementation. Suggestions for how this approach can be applied in other content areas and other contexts are presented at the end of the article.
A Tale of Two High Schools
This article involves two high schools located about two miles from each other in Philadelphia. City High 2 has been serving African American students since the 1970s. It has had a troubled history and faces many of the challenges described for de facto segregated, urban schools (Kozol, 1991). Charter High, which opened in September of 2001, serves a student population that is similar to that of neighborhood comprehensive high schools such as City High. For example, the percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch programs at each school is similar (City High, 90%, and Charter High, 80%). I was part of a group engaged in research with teachers and students at City High for several years before being asked to develop a biology curriculum for Charter High, and so the curriculum for the new charter school grew out of the research findings at City High.
Charter High was “created to address the failure of the traditional high schools to prepare urban students with the academic and critical thinking skills required in 21st century society.” 3 Like most charter schools, it would be judged largely by student performance on state-mandated tests. Therefore, it was imperative that the biology curriculum was designed to address state standards for biology content and science literacy as well as meet the challenge of engaging students who did not traditionally experience success in science.
Method
The research that informed the development of this curriculum model was undertaken over a period of 3 years at City High where I was a participant observer and worked as part of a university teacher education program at that location. I participated in multiple ways at the school: I mentored and taught student teachers at the site, worked with teachers and administrators in two small learning communities, organized a science lunch group, and worked with students and teachers as coresearchers on the larger project. 4 Data collection methods included science classroom observations and interviews of students and other participants. The data that are presented here and that informed the curriculum were obtained from audio and videotaping of a science lunch group that met weekly over one semester (Seiler, 2001) and of a one-semester biology course taught by a preservice teacher (Seiler, 2002; Seiler & Gonsalves, 2010). These data allowed for microanalysis of specific interactions and the identification of best practices specifically related to teaching and learning in this context. 5
A Sociocultural Understanding of Science Teaching and Learning
Inasmuch as sociocultural theory describes how cultural tools mediate the individual and collective construction of knowledge, it supports the idea of linking in-school teaching with students’ out-of-school experiences. A growing body of research and practice (e.g., Calabrese Barton, 2001; Tobin, Elmesky, & Seiler, 2005) uses this approach in understanding the participation in science among students from underrepresented groups. Despite abundant problems that have been described related to teaching and learning in low-income, inner-city, predominantly African American high schools in the United States, our research in such schools has documented many instances when science classrooms buzzed with students engaged in and learning science. Several theoretical constructs have helped us understand these classrooms and have informed the biology curriculum as it was developed.
When and why students participate in these unique ways can be understood using the concept of emotional energy. Collins (2004) describes such instances as representing successful interactions that generate an emotional state of feeling empowered, confident, strong, elated, and possessing initiative toward action. Structuring teaching and learning to maximize such emotional energy was a goal of our work at the school and a guiding principle for the development of the curriculum described here. Specifically we found that when students used their repertoires of practice and funds of knowledge as they participated in science classes, positive emotional energy was generated and new forms of science culture were produced.
Repertoires of Practice
As we looked closely at instances of high student engagement we saw that, as the students worked, they relied on ways of communicating that were familiar to them, employed their own ways of being and sense making, relied on shared cultural referents, and often smiled and joked with each other while doing science. Specific abilities, dispositions, and inclinations, such as communalism, orality, verve, and movement (Boykin, 1986), were identified as embodied resources among many students at City High (e.g., Elmesky & Seiler, 2007; Seiler, 2005; Seiler & Elmesky, 2007) and can be thought of as components of students’ repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003).
Funds of Knowledge
Evidence from City High showed that students often made efforts to connect science with experiences and knowledge from their lived worlds. Such experiences and knowledge constitute funds of knowledge, which are “historically and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills” (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992, p. 133). Like Moll and his colleagues, we have found that learning can be effectively organized around these out-of-school cultural and cognitive resources. Rather than asking students to abandon who they are when they enter the school door, seeing their cultural ways and experiences as repertoires and funds of knowledge enables them to be resources for teaching and learning and the production of new culture.
Cultural Production
In this work, the concept of culture is used in a way that recognizes that culture is produced and negotiated in action. Science can be thought of as a form of culture that seeks to explain or understand the experienced events and phenomena of the natural world. Thus, learning science can be understood as cultural production; in many ways, it is similar to other forms of cultural production in which students participate on a daily basis, both inside and outside of school. In producing culture, students draw upon their repertoires of practice in a variety of fields (Bourdieu, 1977), including classrooms, workplaces, homes, and community locations. Owing to the porous boundaries of fields (Sewell, 1999), classrooms are sites for cultural production that draws on practices and ways of being from other fields; likewise classrooms are sites for cultural production that can then be enacted in a variety of other fields.
It was well described by Bourdieu (1977) that culture is a source of domination in which certain individuals are in key roles as specialists of cultural production and creators of symbolic power. In schooling, curriculum developers and teachers, as curriculum enactors, often play this role. Thus, curricula play a pivotal role in whether cultural reproduction or production (transformation) occurs in the teaching and learning of science. Standardized, highly specified curricula often serve a gate-keeping function for marginalized groups, lacking an entry point and denying access to full participation in the capital spiral in which cultural, social, and symbolic capital can be accrued and transposed. In contrast, a student-emergent curriculum (Seiler, 2006) that is open to student voice and choice affords teachers and students greater agency, that is, the power to act, appropriate resources in new ways, and alter the structure of the field. To demonstrate that this can be done in ways that address science standards was a primary goal of the biology curriculum designed for Charter High.
The Charter High Biology Curriculum
Based on what was learned from research at City High, the new curriculum took a semistructured approach and was designed to provide direction and resources within which student choice could be expressed. The curriculum included the following:
Driving Questions
Provide context for each major unit of the course
Emerge from student interests, current topics, or social issues in the news
Intended to be changed from year to year with student input
A set of teacher resources
Suggested lesson plans, activities, readings, and assessments to address each driving question
Matrices to show alignment of driving questions and anticipated student-emergent subquestions with state and national biology standards
Suggestions on how to implement inquiry groups
Suggestions on how to use the driving questions to engage students in the generation of subquestions and in planning the sequence of lessons
Suggestions on how to identify funds of knowledge and generate and revise driving questions from year to year
The centrality of student choice is maintained during both curriculum development and enactment. This is accomplished through student input in the generation of driving questions and in the choice and sequence of the lessons and activities within each of six units. Thus, the role of the teacher becomes one of setting the stage by introducing the driving question and then guiding the generation and investigation of student-emergent subquestions. 6
Best Practices in the New Curriculum
As shown in Table 1, four strands of evidence representing best practices in this context informed the curriculum for Charter High. In the following sections, each best practice is described and illustrated with data from City High 7 ; this is followed by details on how each practice was embodied in the new biology curriculum.
Best Practice 1: Students Connecting Science With Their Lives
When science topics emerge from students (rather than from well-meaning teachers who attempt to impose connections to their lives), more promising patterns of student engagement emerge.
The possibility of science emerging from students’ interests and lives was very evident at City High both in informal and classroom interactions (Seiler, 2001, 2002). We found students’ ability and willingness to form connections between science concepts and their own experiences to be nothing short of amazing and quite contradictory to the ways urban, African American youth are generally portrayed.
Delpit (2002) described connecting middle school curricula with the interests of African American students through the study of hair and hair products. In some ways, this approach is not new; teachers frequently use student interests to stimulate engagement in classroom activities. Sometimes these efforts by teachers to employ real-life examples are successful, but, at other times, they are not. For example, Olitsky (2005) reported on a physical science class in which she used force problems shaped around Philadelphia Eagle football players. But as Olitsky noted, teacher efforts such as these are often not sufficient to generate sustained interest. Rather, they may be perceived by the students as inauthentic particularly when suggested by the teacher. Our experiences in urban classrooms told us that teachers and curriculum developers often do not do a very good job of picking topics that students see as relevant to their lives. As one student told us, “I mean you can’t think that just cause you think it’s fun, we gonna think it’s fun.” However, we have found that when science questions, topics, and examples emerge from the students themselves, they can foster promising patterns of student engagement.
The Evidence
In the informal science lunch group at City High, I asked the youth to talk about their interests outside of school. Together we raised the question, “Is there science in that?” (Seiler, 2001). Each week’s lunch group activities were based on topics or questions raised by the participants during the previous sessions, and week after week they found science in their hobbies, passions, and curiosities such as drumming, video games, wrestling on television, and sports. The taped recordings of the science lunch group sessions were filled with examples of students voluntarily making connections between science and their funds of knowledge. The following discussion of sound illustrates this disposition. One participant, Lamar, worked in a barbershop. He used those experiences to build on experiences of Jermaine who played drums. As the excerpt begins, Jermaine was explaining how to tune a drum.
And what does that do?
Changes the sound. When it’s tighter it sound one way and when it’s loose it sound another way.
It’s the same way at my job, right. When I’m cuttin hair, if the clippers don’t sound a certain way I take a screwdriver and twist the screw in the side. Somethin getting loose. So if it gets low and slower or increase the sound and become faster.
In their talk about drums and hair clippers, the students connected their everyday funds of knowledge with science, and this knowledge contributed to the cultural production of science that honored their experiences. Though they did not express it using scientific terminology, both Jermaine and Lamar showed an understanding of the connection between the frequency of vibration and the pitch of a sound. Not only were there numerous other examples of students finding science in their lives but a distinctive style of discourse emerged in which student ideas built on each others. In other excerpts not shown here, there were long sequences of student cross-talk uninterrupted by teacher talk, which is uncharacteristic of science classroom discourse at this school and of traditional talk in science classes (Lemke, 1990).
Evidence such as this, that students who were not normally successful in science readily connected science to their lived worlds when the opportunity was provided, convinced me of the power both of connecting science with students’ lives and of creating opportunities for students to do the same. Thus, it was clear that the biology curriculum had to do both.
The Curriculum—Relevant Driving Questions
From this evidence arose the idea of contextualizing and driving learning with topics that emerged from student interests. Each of six units in the Charter High biology curriculum is powered by a driving question, and biology content and science process skills are approached through the students’ attempts to answer each one. The driving questions may change from year to year in response to student interests and topics in the news, and it is crucial that student voice is a part of the development of the driving questions. Table 2 shows the driving questions that were employed in the first year that the curriculum was enacted.
Driving Questions.
This first set of driving questions was derived in several ways. For example, conversations in the science lunch group (Seiler, 2001) provided two of the questions. Several students from City High had been involved in working with our science education research group (Elmesky & Tobin, 2005; Tobin et al., 2005), and they provided abundant suggestions of topics they, and students like them, would like to know more about. Cogenerative dialogues, a powerful type of discussion involving students, teachers, and researchers that have been described by Tobin (2006) and Emdin (2007), also contributed to the driving questions.
Best Practice 2: Students Posing Questions
When science activities are aimed at answering specific questions that come from students and when students are encouraged to offer such questions, more promising patterns of student engagement emerge.
Evidence from City High pointed to the idea that students not only were proficient at connecting science with their lives, but often spontaneously generated inquiry questions related to these topics.
The Evidence
In addition to frequently making connections between science topics and their own lives, students also used their experiences to pose actual questions related to science (Seiler, 2001, 2002, & 2005). Often their questions were crudely expressed, using their own linguistic styles and vocabulary. They sometimes drew upon movies and television to express wonder about things they had never seen in the city. They asked whether animals play, how they navigate long distances, and how they communicate. They cited the Discovery channel, TV reruns like Lassie and Flipper, and movies such as Air Bud, Homeward Bound, and Ol’ Yeller as they posed questions. Other questions that emerged from the students addressed the intersection of science and their lives much more directly. One student asked,
How come somebody I knew got shot in the leg 11 times and he didn’t know it until he sat down and saw the blood. They were shootin at him and he was still out on the street and he still runnin. He said he didn’t feel nothin touch him til he got to his girl house and he sat down on the steps and he saw all this blood leakin down.
This led to a discussion of the location of pain receptors in the skin and the pain center in the brain. Reports of the presence of high amounts of lead in the water of many Philadelphia schools, including City High, had been in the media, compelling students to question the preparation of the food provided in the cafeteria under the federal free lunch program (“freebie”): “I got a question, yo. If there’s lead in the water, how they cook the freebie?” This propensity to take or create opportunities to pose questions related to science topics was significant, and curriculum was built on this.
The Curriculum—Student-Generated Subquestions
Creating continual opportunities for students to raise inquiry questions was seen as critical in the new biology curriculum. So the curriculum was designed so that students would work from the driving questions (developed in advance with student input) and generate subquestions to be understood in connection with the driving question. Examples from the initial enactment of the curriculum best illustrate this idea. In understanding Alonzo Mourning’s kidney condition (focal glomerulosclerosis), subquestions were expressed in the form of topics or actual questions (e.g., “I think we need to know about urine,” or “What does the kidney do?”). New questions were added throughout the unit, as new awareness and connections developed. For example, though it was not initially apparent to the students that they would need to know how osmosis, diffusion, and active transport work and the role they play in the functioning of the kidney, these questions emerged later from their attempts to understand “Zo’s” fate as a basketball player.
As this process unfolds, connections between student-generated subquestions are forged with standard science topics. The first column in Table 3 illustrates the subquestions that emerged from the students in the first year as they explored Alonzo Mourning’s kidney condition (Driving Question #1). The second column illustrates connections between these questions and the biology content standards.
Best Practice 3: Student Choice
When science students are able to exert some power in determining what they study and learn, more promising patterns of student engagement emerge.
Our research at City High indicated that students viewed school as something that was done to them and they experienced symbolic violence in school on a daily basis. This has been well documented by other researchers who have described the emergence of a culture of sabotage in the face of such treatment (Martin, 2008). However, our research demonstrated that students at City High responded in dramatically different ways to situations where they had freedom to express their preferences and some control over what they were expected to learn. It appears that providing student choice can play a positive role in student engagement in learning, verifying recent neurological research that provides evidence for links between emotions and cognitive tasks (e.g., Dolan, 2003).
The Evidence
In the elective biology course at City High, the students repeatedly asked to do dissections and suggested organs and organisms that they wished to study. After considerable effort by the teacher, specimens were obtained for dissection, and audio and video-tapes featuring dissections showed that these class sessions were unique in several ways. As described elsewhere (Seiler, 2002; Seiler & Gonsalves, 2010), analysis revealed that there were marked differences in the level and type of student engagement during dissections, which had been requested by the students, compared with other types of activities, which did not emerge from the students. One example is provided here.
In the following transcript, two male, African American students were dissecting a preserved sheep brain partially encased in the cranium. A teacher-made handout provided suggestions on how to proceed, questions to consider, and diagrams to label.
His nasal cavity right there.
Wait, wait. Where the nasal cavity at? This part right there?
Yeah. And here go his eye sockets.
Here the ear holes right here.
Oh snap, man.
Yo, where the spinal cord at? Back here? Where the orbits at?
They the eye sockets.
So everything alright on this one? (Pointed to the handout.)
Where the adipose tissue?
Hello Mr. Sheepie Poo. You know there’s a sheep pokiemon?
It say describe the adipose tissue.
Where that?
On many days in this class, off-topic comments and behavior were more common than science-related comments and actions, and they often continued for lengthy stretches. However, on this day the pair worked in tandem to efficiently identify the anatomical parts. This transcript illustrates and additional data support the relative absence of off-topic talk and actions compared with other class periods. Juwan’s off-topic utterance in Line 13 did not derail their focus on the brain and handout, as it might have on another day. Instead the pair quickly returned to their task, providing more evidence that something different was happening on this day.
Also at City High, Cristobal Carambo (2005) reported significantly more engagement in and attention to science lessons when high school students were allowed to select topics to investigate. He recounts several instances in which students, when allowed to pursue their own interests, participated more and stayed involved for longer periods of time. Carambo described it this way.
In viewing the tapes of the student suggested laboratory activities, I finally saw the energy, participation, curiosity, and natural intelligence that were not obvious in other day-to-day classroom activities. (2005, p. 169)
On the weight of such observations, the biology curriculum was configured so that students would play a significant role in decision making.
The Curriculum: Involvement of Students in Planning
In addition to the use of driving questions, which were generated with student input, to frame each unit of the curriculum, inquiry groups play a key role in student choice in curriculum enactment on a daily basis. The inquiry groups are similar to those described by LaVan (2005) in which students learn to formulate questions and use evidence in the practice of science. Students sit in inquiry groups within the classroom and meet and work in their groups for all or part of each class period. This is where subquestions come from, which are considered by teacher and students in making decisions about the sequencing of activities. In addition, cogenerative dialogues can play a role in student choice shaping the enactment of the lessons. Examples of these from the initial implementation of the curriculum at Charter High are provided later in the article to illustrate how this might work.
Best Practice 4: Student Voice
When science students are able to participate using their own repertoires of practice in ways that are validated in the classroom, more promising patterns of student engagement emerge.
Our research at City High demonstrated that student engagement and focus increased and positive emotional energy was generated in situations where students had freedom to participate in science using their own ways of speaking and sense-making, that is, when they were not asked to leave who they are at the school door. Others have also found evidence that links positive emotional reactions with student engagement and ability to learn (e.g., Dolan, 2003), particularly among nonmainstream youth (e.g., Bailey & Boykin, 2001).
The Evidence
Data from City High indicated that not only did students attempt to participate in science using their own repertoires of practice but that greater engagement occurred and positive emotional energy was generated when they did so. The previously discussed transcript of students dissecting a sheep brain illustrates this best practice. Juwan and Cedric effectively used their own discourse patterns (e.g., “Oh snap, man,” and “Yo, where the spinal cord at?”) as they worked. Although these were not science like or school like in a traditional sense, they enabled them to effectively complete the dissection, identify the parts of the brain, and label the diagram, while appropriating new vocabulary. The use of verbal humor, student-generated analogies, and other figurative speech along with nonverbal representation of concepts have also been documented for these youth (Seiler, 2005). Analysis of video segments in which students productively utilized their own repertoires while doing science showed that there was a shared focus, their actions and words were often synchronized, and they effectively communicated using verbal and nonverbal means (Seiler & Elmesky, 2007), all signs of positive emotional energy. These and other instances of students using their own ways of communicating and sense making reveal that positive emotional energy (Collins, 2004) was generated and that these were different from instances in which student use of their repertoires of practice was restricted by school, classroom, or teacher norms.
The Curriculum: Participation Using Their Own Ways
One of the roles of inquiry groups in the curriculum is to foster “science talk” as students tackle content on a need-to-know basis. In these groups, students are encouraged to start at a place where they feel comfortable talking, representing, and comparing their ideas using their own ways of interacting and communicating. As students incorporate new vocabulary and practices, their repertoires of practice are changed and new forms of science culture are produced.
Our research also led us to understand that not all teachers routinely see the cultural practices of inner-city African American youth as acceptable resources for participating in classrooms but that repeated engagement with youth, particularly outside formal classroom settings, can be transformative in this area. We found that the involvement of teachers in discussion and planning groups with students and ongoing reflection and research related to the process helped to alter teachers’ deficit views of students and their ways of participating in school.
Students’ Role in the Implementation of the Curriculum
Data from the implementation of the curriculum 8 at Charter High provide some insights into how these best practices can be operationalized. When the biology teacher at Charter High started the asthma unit, she posed Driving Question #2 (“What is asthma and why is it so common in urban areas?”) and the students began with a Know-Want to know-Learned (KWL) activity. Here is how the teacher, Jen Beers, used the KWL as a starting point for inquiry group work and student voice.
And in your group, you’re going to sort of consolidate these things into at least four “knows,” like what you know, and four “what you want to knows.” OK? So we’re then going to share out, and we’re going to make a list like we did for kidney disease.
When Jen told the students of her plan to type up their list of questions after the whole class sharing and to give each of them a copy, they reacted favorably.
What I was gonna do was type it up, print it out, and photocopy it.
Ooh. You can do that?
That’d be nice.
The list of student-generated questions became a vital part of the daily enactment of the unit. The questions were augmented over the next few weeks, checked to see which were still unanswered, and used to decide what to do and where to go next.
Once the students had discussed the driving question and generated subquestions, the teacher was faced with critical decisions related to how to proceed. Jen elicited student participation in making those decisions, giving them choice in shaping where they would begin and the sequence in which the questions would be answered. She put it to them this way.
I have a favor. I need some help after school for maybe about a half hour on Thursday. What I need is I need a couple volunteers, possibly four, to come and stay and have a conversation with me about how we should attack this unit, how we should go about answering all of these questions. So, if you will, please think about it and get back to me if you’d like to do it. I’ll remind you again tomorrow. But I need help, so on Thursday afternoon, OK?
And students did volunteer for participation in this group, which was modeled after cogenerative dialogues (Emdin, 2007; Tobin, 2006) wherein power differentials are minimized and students cogenerate classroom plans with the teacher. Jen began the cogenerative dialogue this way, “Here’s the list of things you said we need to know in the asthma unit. It’s a really long list. I would like to know where we should start.” The group continued to meet weekly with some variation in membership. They came together as representatives of the class to select from the resources provided in the curriculum or request new activities with attention to the initial questions and other questions that arose. Simultaneously, all students maintained their own list of questions, checking them off as they were answered in relation to the initial driving question about asthma.
What We’ve Learned: Student-Powered Curricula
The research carried out in Philadelphia provided evidence not only of the power of foregrounding student funds of knowledge but also of putting curricular choice in the hands of students and encouraging use of students’ own voice. Providing opportunities for student voice and choice changes the classroom dynamics and fosters different patterns of participation among marginalized youth. While recognizing that this is not the only way to improve the teaching and learning of science for students in low-performing, inner-city schools, extensive field work and research provides strong support for its effectiveness.
In this article, I have endeavored to show how what was learned through research was applied to the development of a new biology curriculum—one whose structure attempts to deconstrain student and teacher actions and instead create opportunities for improved teaching and learning. By altering structural and organizational features of the classroom, the curriculum model attempts to fuel greater engagement for marginalized youth. It illustrates that classroom learning environments should not be thought of as separate from curriculum. Rather, the classroom environment can be shaped in positive ways by a curriculum.
Students in many high schools, such as City High, are routinely given little control over decisions related to their own learning; likewise school curricula rarely connect with students’ funds of knowledge because teachers are expected to rely largely on a body of materials prepared in advance. This was described as preactive curricula by Jackson in 1966, and this trend has increased under pressure of recent practices. For African American students who live in de facto segregated inner-city neighborhoods and experience lives of economic poverty, a preactive approach appears to have dire consequences.
Enacting a curriculum that values student voice and choice has implications for teachers who feel constrained by the need to follow heavily prescribed scope and sequences, as well as for inner-city African American students who feel disconnected from science instruction. Positive aspects of repertoires of practice and funds of knowledge of African American youth, such as those illustrated here, have been largely unrecognized by schools, and this is worsening under the force of standardization (Ayers, 2000) where there is little room for student interests and experiences, such as drumming and cutting hair. Making room for student voices in school and in curricula rarely occurs, and students continue to be the “silent recipients of schooling” (Nieto, 1999, p. 191), but new ways of thinking about curricula development and implementation might change that.
The curriculum described in this article demonstrates several important innovations. The structure of the curriculum shapes pedagogy, that is, what happens in the classroom. The curriculum responds directly to “best practices” identified in research with a similar student population. And lastly it demonstrates the possibility and the potentiality of both addressing national and local science standards and meeting the needs of nonmainstream students, in this case, by giving them choice and voice in the curriculum.
How to Apply This Approach in Your School and Content Area
Curriculum development that does not challenge what schools do and how they do it is not only naïve, but it also represents what Bourdieu has labeled an example of an “ideological apparatus” in which the school reproduces the established order and hides the perpetuation of domination in the process. (English, 2010, p. 45)
The development of the biology curriculum described here was an attempt to interrupt the “ideological apparatus” (Althusser, 1989) and challenge what school does (i.e., reproduce social positions and marginalization of oppressed groups) by changing how school does curriculum development. The following outline of the process is offered as a guide for other teachers or schools wishing to attempt similar disruptions of social reproduction. 9
Step 1—Learn about and from the students: This can be done either informally in conversations and out-of-class activities or through a more systematic approach including ethnographic research involving teachers, students, and even families and communities. The important ingredients here are time and depth of the relationship developed between teacher and student(s).
Step 2—Identify students’ funds of knowledge: This involves the recognition and description of students’ interests, activities, hobbies, knowledge, and concerns. Identification of these funds of knowledge will come from students and teachers working together to reflect on the information gathered in Step 1. Study groups have been used to accomplish this or it has been part of ongoing ethnographic research in which both students and teachers are involved.
Step 3—Identify potential topics in the content area (or interdisciplinary topics): These will emanate from student interests and relevant current events in the news and/or youth culture and will be identified by students and teachers using the information acquired and documented in Steps 1 and 2.
Step 4—Develop driving questions: Drawing on information from the previous steps, teachers will work with students to link funds of knowledge and potential topics with local, state, and national content area standards and competencies as a small number of driving questions are generated. The key here is to arrive at driving questions that will engage student interest and motivation as well as lead to subquestions that address relevant topics in the content area standards. How can this be done? The tasks involved are as follows: (a) generate a possible driving question, (b) generate possible subquestions, (c) align subquestions with the relevant standards, (d) revise driving question, and (e) repeat as necessary.
Step 5—Assemble resources: Once Step 4 is completed, Step 5 will fall largely on the teacher or curriculum specialist to locate appropriate resources to address the driving questions, and most important, the possible student-generated subquestions. These resources might include suggested activities, readings, assignments, and assessments that the teacher may draw upon with the students as the curriculum is enacted. These resources should then be organized to show their alignment with the relevant standards and with the possible subquestions (similar to Table 3).
Step 6—Provide teachers with preparation to implement the curriculum: This may entail professional development focused first on understanding that the curriculum should not be used preactively, but rather interactively with the students. Teacher preparation may also address the use of inquiry groups in the classroom and how to incorporate student voice and choice in day-to-day and long-term curriculum decisions, including the use of cogenerative dialogue groups or consensus-building approaches.
Connections to Standards.
Beginning in Step 1 and continuing throughout this process, the teachers and other school-level participants will come to see students in new ways and understand the abilities, dispositions, and skills that they draw on both inside and outside school. The process of documenting the funds of knowledge and interests of students is crucial; however, it is also important to note that this curriculum development process can do more. It can undo prevalent deficit stereotypes of minority students and diminish a deficit perspective of students among teachers as they participate in the process with students.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. REC-0107022 and by a Research Training Grant from the Spencer Foundation.