Abstract
American citizens require solid foundational knowledge of mathematics and science to secure quality, high-paying jobs along with broad familiarity of mathematics and science to be informed citizens. Unfortunately, achievement and opportunity gaps continue to plague racial minorities, particularly those who attend urban schools in our largest cities. Mathematics and science educators have researched a myriad of methods to close the performance gaps, but, in spite of the ongoing research, initiatives, and reforms, minority students continue to score significantly lower than their White counterparts on achievement tests. As Tan and Barton (2012) explained, “most researchers are generally familiar with the chilling statistics that describe high-poverty and minority urban and rural students’ differential access to resources in US schools, and are aware that these trends have changed little in the past three decades” (p. 7).
Scholars, including Tan and Barton (2012), argue that the persistent achievement gaps constitute a social justice issue. Tan and Barton offer clear insights about how educators can empower urban student learning by applying social justice theory to classroom instruction through critical discourse, mathematics, and science agency, and the creation of hybrid third spaces. They maintained, “math and science classrooms are replete with practices that are culturally grounded and sit at ‘the junction of cultural artifacts, beliefs, values and normative results’” (p. 9). To promote culturally grounded discourses in mathematics and science classrooms, they recommended that hybrid third spaces should be constructed, which are places where students can unite various diverse funds of knowledge, multiple resources, relationships, competing discourses, and self-identities to understand mathematics and science. Although there is debate concerning the exact definition of hybrid third space, they argued that
[it is] the kind of space that allows for cultural, social, and epistemological change, [which empowers students toward] a way of understanding how learning in these disciplines involves learning to negotiate the multiple texts, discourses, and knowledge available within a community as well as learning particular content and processes. (p. 29)
One of the central themes of mathematics and science education is one of equity. Tan and Barton described equity in education as “provid[ing] access to all [students], so they can learn [mathematics and] science” (p. 34). The concept of fostering “[Mathematics and] Science for All” is “grounded in the belief that all students can learn [mathematics and] science if they are appropriately scaffolded” (p. 32). The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have been structured in a way to make science and mathematics accessible to all students by “. . . provid[ing] the context for student diversity by addressing changing demographics, persistent achievement gaps, and educational policies affecting non-dominant student groups” (National Research Council, 2013, p. 11). Furthermore, the final version of the NGSS, which were released on April 9, 2013, contains valuable case studies of diverse student groups, which help to demonstrate how students of underrepresented groups can engage in standards-based learning.
Unfortunately, Tan and Barton barely recognized that the CCSS and NGSS exist. In addition to questioning what knowledge educators should teach and whose knowledge has the most worth, the authors should have clearly addressed how educators should implement the CCSS and NGSS to provide learning opportunities for urban youth. School districts across the country have already started or will be building curricula that are rooted in the CCSS and NGSS. Educational scholars must share curricular best practices with practitioners, so that all students, including young people of color, will have access to a high-quality mathematics and science experiences. The authors, virtually having ignored the importance of the CCSS and the NGSS, made a critical oversight in the text. The authors should have considered the potential for using the standards as transformative learning tools in urban mathematics and science education.
According to Moje, Collazo, Carrillo, and Marx (2001), discourses are “ways of knowing, doing, talking, reading, and writing, which are constructed and reproduced in social and cultural practice and interaction” (p. 470). Clearly, it is difficult to build on students’ scientific literacy if they are unable to speak and write in a scientific manner and have no capacity to use academic language. Because minority students often have unique ways of knowing, doing, talking, reading, and discussing, cultural and language issues that are embedded in math and science instruction often alienate underrepresented groups of students. Therefore, it is critically important for mathematics and science teachers to engage students in culturally relevant social problem-solving related to injustices to attract attention to the content material which they are learning and to engage them in critical discourses. And, it is also critically important for teachers who seek to engage students in critical discourses to not position themselves as authority figures but as facilitators of the learning process. Tan and Barton (2012) provided readers with example scenarios about teachers who took mathematics or science curricula and modified it to empower themselves to engage in student-centered mathematics and science discourses. Furthermore, Tan and Barton conceded that producing authentic mathematical and scientific discourses “[are] complex and messy” (p. 179); however, they failed to provide practitioners with details or directions about how to take the CCSS or the NGSS and develop critical student discourses with these standards to produce powerful, student learning outcomes.
Also, the authors cited one teacher, Mrs. Tiller, who successfully generated student discourses in a lesson about nutrition and the human body. First, Mrs. Tiller engaged her students by enticing them to the fresh, hot smell of French fries. Second, she followed up by asking them if anyone would like to eat some of the fries. Student groups then collected data about how many students wanted to eat French fries on the basis of the pleasing smell. Third, after collecting data, the students engaged in critical discourses about why there were so many students craving French fries. These discourses enabled Mrs. Tiller to introduce the reason why our bodies are naturally hardwired to want fast food, especially unhealthy, fried foods. The final class discussion involved the science of nutrition, energy, and the human body. How the lesson played out clearly demonstrated that Mrs. Tiller wanted her students to engage in an authentic, unconventional learning experience. The introductory activity engaged the students in discourses, which connected the students to the underlying science principles which are part of the students’ everyday lives. These types of interactions provide students with learning opportunities that are rigorous and relevant to everyone’s lives.
Mrs. Tiller, who served as an example of a teacher who used critical student discourses, taught science content outside of her area of expertise. Although it is true that many mathematics and science teachers in urban schools are not properly licensed in their respective fields, a critical question remains: How do highly qualified mathematics and science teachers successfully step away from deep content knowledge and enter into a learning environment filled with critical student discourses? If Tan and Barton were able to answer the aforementioned question in the book, the content and standards-centered teachers would be much better equipped to construct classroom environments that are imbued with critical student discourses. Highly qualified mathematics and science teachers have the propensity to teach students in a verbose fashion, so Tan and Barton (2012) should have provided some insights about how classroom teachers from diverse backgrounds should integrate rich student discourses into mathematics and science instruction.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1993) critiqued the “banking concept” of education as a narrative in which “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” (p. 72). According to Freire, traditional education minimizes students to mere vassals which are filled with information from the teacher, who has the full authority of knowledge. This “banking” system of education has historically oppressed and alienated minorities and has inhibited them from attaining a transformative educational experience or the ability to engage in “problem-posing education” (p. 86).
Freire also argued that the oppressed should “write the world” by moving beyond just understanding what was happening in the world (Freire & Macedo, 1987). To “write the world,” mathematics and science students must have a sense of what Gutstein (2003) described as agency, “a belief in themselves as people who can make a difference in the world, as one who are makers of history” (p. 40). Once students become empowered to become social actors in the world, then the mathematics and science fields are opened up to a plethora of possibilities for building a just and equitable society (Gutiérrez, 2012).
Tan and Barton explored critical mathematics and science agency by highlighting how inner city students can develop what they termed “figured worlds” (pp. 111-115). “Figured worlds” are worlds created and sustained by individual participants in which they imagine how they fit into the larger context of a real-world situation (p. 111). Although Tan and Barton included detailed project examples (e.g., the Urban Heat Island [UHI] and Green Energy Technology in the City Projects) about how urban teachers can develop critical mathematics and science agency in after-school and summer programs, the text lacked critical details about how traditional classroom teachers should approach, foster, and sustain the development of critical mathematics and science agency for urban youth (Turner, 2012).
Tan and Barton expertly framed the need for mathematics and science educators to develop hybrid third spaces, sometimes called participation spaces, in classrooms to provide students with authentic, interactive learning experiences. As noted earlier, hybrid third spaces are places where students have the ability to converge critical discourses, knowledge from outside of school, cultural experiences, and academic content knowledge to build authentic learning environments that help to form a sense of identity. Successful hybrid third spaces permit students to build a mathematics or science learning environment that is neither at home nor at school, thus combining a mathematics and science learning experience from multiple places. These hybrid third spaces also empower urban students to “[become] a legitimate participant in the [mathematics and] science learning community” which is atypical because traditional mathematics and science learning environments exclude and alienate many minority students (Tan & Barton, 2012, p. 14).
The authors also successfully managed to explain how hybrid third spaces can allow urban students to merge their worlds with the mathematics and science worlds that are being taught by teachers. For instance, Tan and Barton (2012) described an UHI science study conducted by urban youth during a summer program in 2007. The students generated hypotheses about the UHI, located the materials they would need to collect data, and then they collected data around the city. By the end of the study, the students had become critical science experts—they had developed critical science agency. As Tan and Barton described, “using an iterative process of storyboarding, video editing, and concept-mapping, the youth produced three video documentaries: (1) Where Da Heat Go?, (2) We Be Burnin’, and (3) We’re Hot! What about You?” (p. 121). The video productions clearly demonstrate that urban youth can be introduced and hooked onto community-based science investigations if they are properly scaffolded and developed into critical scientists.
Regrettably, in spite of the wide range of collective third space and sociocritical literacy literature that is available in the education and sociology communities, there are still few examples about what these hybrid third spaces should look like in very traditional school settings. Tan and Barton outlined eight case studies about what hybrid third spaces look like in traditional classrooms, including examples from summer programs, but there is still work and discussions that need to be prepared to make this type of curriculum accessible to all teachers and students. Furthermore, the authors should have considered how blended learning could be utilized in urban schools to develop student agency and critical student discourses in the mathematics and science classroom. Although Tan and Barton detailed how students used computers to create digital movies, they did not consider how online interactions could empower students to generate digital hybrid learning spaces. Blended learning continues to expand in the United States with more than one million K-12 students enrolled in online courses in 2010 (Picciano, Seaman, & Allen, 2010). The question remains to be answered about whether blended learning will be able to become a transformative tool for urban youth in our largest cities in the United States.
Overall, Tan and Barton successfully developed a concise and powerful overview of how urban educators should integrate sociocultural and sociopolitical elements into mathematics and science instruction. The colorful examples and case studies provide mathematics and science teachers with illustrations that urban youth can become empowered and developed into critical actors within the contexts of hybrid third spaces. The theoretical underpinnings of hybrid third spaces are compelling, including the theoretical support from hybridity and social justice theories.
Practitioners, including inner city mathematics and science teachers, will likely have difficulty integrating the principles of critical discourses, agency, and hybrid third spaces into current standards-based curricula. Even so, Empowering Science and Mathematics Education in Urban Schools offers a bold step forward in helping educators to unravel the effects of the achievement and opportunity gaps. The authors’ noble efforts have generated a critical look at how “empowering learning environments” (p. 182) in urban schools garner “deeply meaningful [learning experiences]” for urban youth, while also developing “positive [math and science] identities” for these students (p. 183).