Abstract
Building upon a Freirean notion of dialogic education, the purpose of this multi-case study was to explore what happened when secondary science teachers came together with Latinx parents for their children’s science learning in the context of a community-based science learning program. Constant comparative analysis of data revealed similarities and differences among the cases that were analyzed in three categories: recognition, adaptation, and pro-action. Implications are that in-depth exposure to content-based cultural immersion programs with parents can be beneficial for teachers to cultivate a broader vision of science (and other content area) teaching linked to students’ lives and communities.
Keywords
It was 7:30 am on a winter’s Saturday morning. The icy wind, forcing the tree branches to dance in harmony, blew the cold straight into my face. As I hurried toward the building through the howling wind, I placed several signs on the brick walls of the building that read, “Steps to College through Science Bilingual Family Workshop (Pasos Hacia la Universidad A Través de la Ciencia Taller Familiar Bilingüe),” and “Bilingual Family Conversations (Conversaciones Familiares Bilingües),” and “Take the Elevator (Toma el Ascensor).” As soon as I finished this job, I came inside to warm up. I took the elevator up to the second floor and entered the hall that was crowded with people. I was surprised to see that there were more than a hundred-people clustered in the hall despite the inclement weather conditions. I saw Latinx middle and high school students, parents, siblings, secondary science and ESOL teachers, and graduate assistants who worked as the project researchers. Everyone was energetic and excited about the day and seemed genuinely happy to be actively engaged in the event. The hall was filled with the noise of families chatting, enjoying snacks and soft drinks, calling out, and lining up for their turn to sign-in. On the far left, one tall male student wearing a red hoodie was explaining something to his friends with animation. Next to him, three groups of families sat on a bench eating their snacks. Further to the right, four teachers were having a conversation and looking at the agenda that was attached to their clipboards (Excerpt from field notes of the STC workshop, February 28, 2015).
As we launched the Step to College through Science bilingual family workshops (STC workshops hereafter) in 2009, we have had the privilege to work closely with groups of urban Latinx families and secondary English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) and science teachers from five middle and three high schools located in two small Southeastern cities that have become new Latinx diaspora destinations. The STC workshops were one component of a larger National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research project, aiming to enhance Latinx middle and high school students’ science learning and college preparation (Buxton, Allexsaht-Snider, & Rivera, 2012). In the course of these projects, we regularly heard from parents who shared their thoughts and their gratitude for the learning opportunities that STC workshops provided for their children. But what about the teachers? How did being present in those workshops over several years influence their thinking about their roles as urban educators and their relationships with Latinx emergent bilingual students 1 and their families? How can lessons learned from these teachers be used to support other teachers who are seeking new approaches to empower students and families?
Too often, family–school–community collaboration is viewed as a supplementary activity that is secondary to the main characteristics of effective schools (Mapp, 2012). However, as Freire (1998) argued, “the school cannot abstract itself from the socio-cultural and economic conditions of its students, their families, and their communities” (p. 62). The unfortunate reality is that the American public school system often seems to function contrary to this idea. The current climate of public schools in the United States operates within a framework that insists on measurable and technical principles of learning, such as standards-based instruction coupled to high-stakes assessments (Nieto, 2014; Sleeter, 2012). Raising awareness of the fundamental role that minoritized families and communities play in pathways to high-quality education requires a reevaluation of current educational policy and practices around family–school–community interactions.
With rapid and continuing cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversification in urban schools (Parker, Horowitz, Brown, Fry, & D’Vera Cohn, 2018), researchers have begun to reconsider how we prepare teachers to partner with culturally and linguistically diverse families and to respond to the evolving needs and strengths of our changing student population (e.g., Gallo, Wortham, & Bennett, 2015; Johnson, 2014; Schecter & Sherri, 2009; Zeichner, Bowman, Guillen, & Napolitan, 2016). However, studies that examine family–school–community interactions through a content area focus, such as science, continue to be limited (Hammond, 2001; Ramirez, McCollough, & Diaz, 2016; Upadhyay, 2009). Building upon a Freirean notion of dialogic education, in this qualitative multi-case study, we sought to explore what happened when four in-service secondary science teachers came together with Latinx parents/grandparents in support of their children’s science learning in the context of STC bilingual family workshops. The overarching question guiding this study was as follows: How did urban secondary science teachers conceptualize the ways in which their participation in the workshops influenced their perspectives and practices about working with their Latinx students and their families?
This study focuses on the understandings that we gained from the constant comparative analysis and interpretation of interview and participant observation data collected over the span of 3 years. Our aim was to apply Freire’s (1998, 2005, 2013) notion of dialogic education to provide a realistic portrayal of how urban science teachers can facilitate dialogic science learning interactions with their marginalized students and families while functioning within a monocultural and monolinguistic oriented school climate. The experiences of these teachers highlight valuable lessons for educators working with immigrant families to support their adolescent children’s content area learning while also contributing to the growing body of literature examining how preservice and in-service teacher education can better foster the skills needed for robust family engagement in today’s multicultural and multilingual urban schools. In the following section, we provide a brief description of the conceptual framework that guided this study, based on work by Freire (1998, 2005, 2013).
Conceptual Orientation of the Study
Freire (1998) maintained that “the education of women and men can never be purely instrumental. It must also necessarily be ethical” (p. 57). He opposed the Descartian view of scientific knowledge that sees education as a neutral activity based on perfect certainty. In the Descartian view, true scientific knowledge requires a complete absence of doubt and elimination of contingency, resulting in Freire’s often discussed banking model of education, in which the teacher’s role is transmitting unproblematized knowledge to students and the student’s role is to receive and accumulate that knowledge without questioning it. Rather, Freire (1970) recognized reality “as a process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity” (p. 81). From this perspective, true science education includes the co-construction of knowledge between teacher, students, and their communities, while also problematizing that knowledge in terms of who it serves and benefits and who it does not. As Freire (1998) stated, “If education were neutral, there could be no difference between people in their individual or social contexts, whether that be their style of politics or their value systems” (p. 101). Thus, it is impossible to enact an ethical science education unless it is joined to the knowledge, skills, and experiences that students bring from their homes and communities (Aikenhead et al., 2014; Calabrese-Barton, Tan & Greenberg, 2017).
To counterbalance a false neutrality common in Western teaching and learning, Freire (1998, 2005, 2013) emphasized certain aspects of dialogic education: humility, critical consciousness, care, and hope. For Freire, humility situates oneself in a sustained openness to learning from others, thus creating an essential condition for dialogic education. Humility enables teachers to listen to and learn from their students and communities so that knowledge is constructed in ways that are meaningful to the student. Thus, teaching cannot be separated from learning as teachers should be lifelong learners and learners should have opportunities to be teachers.
Dialogic education also cannot exist without critical consciousness, which Freire (1998, 2005, 2013) described as an ability to question the status quo rather than accepting it as given. Developing critical consciousness among teachers entails dialogic encounters with different ways of looking at knowledge and truth across diverse communities and learning contexts, considering that “reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world” (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 35). The skill of critical thinking is what allows teachers to develop a more nuanced understanding of their taken-for-granted assumptions about teaching and learning, about who creates these assumptions, and about who benefits from these assumptions within the system of education. This critical understanding can change the way teachers see themselves, their students, their communities, and their abilities as teachers to provide richer learning opportunities for all students.
Another condition for dialogic education is care, which Freire (1998, 2005, 2013) described as being receptive and respectful toward individual student needs without supposing to know what the students’ needs are. Thus, caring in the context of dialogic education is not limited to a matter feeling empathy toward students. Instead, caring is designing instructional strategies based on the expressed needs, interests, and strengths of students rather than scripted curricula. However, in the absence of hope, teachers often lack faith in their self-capabilities to make a difference in their classrooms and beyond. According to Freire (1970), “if the dialoguers expect nothing to come of their efforts, their encounter will be empty and sterile, bureaucratic and tedious” (p. 91). Hope is what keeps teachers going despite the conditions that constrain their potential to enact dialogic educational practices.
We believe that Freire’s (1998, 2005, 2013) model of dialogic education provides a valuable framework for understanding how a community-based science learning program, such as the STC workshops, could serve as a context for teacher professional learning to support teachers in their work with diverse students and families. That is, the notion of dialogic education may help inspire a new generation of educators to envision and enact a science education that disrupts the current deficit discourse governing public schools in the United States (Giroux, 2014).
Literature Review
Development of Teacher Education on Family–School–Community Relations
Low-income Latinx families continue to be positioned as unconcerned about the education of their children and as unqualified to contribute academically (Dabach, Suárez-Orozco, Hernandez, & Brooks, 2018; Gandara & Contreras, 2009; Valencia, 2015). These deficit views of Latinx families have often originated in narrow visions of family–school partnerships driven solely by the schools’ agenda (Auerbach, 2007; Wassell, Hawrylak, & Scantlebury, 2017). Rather than positioning Latinx families as being in need of intervention, more critical studies have long invited teachers to identify and build on the knowledge, assets, and practices in immigrant and marginalized communities that are also crucial in children’s academic and social well-being. For example, Moll and colleagues’ (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) work with experienced teachers invoked the notion of funds of knowledge to shift away from remediation approaches to working with parents and to demonstrate how teachers can utilize families’ experiences to build a bridge between the school and home contexts of Latinx students. Yosso’s (2005) model of community cultural wealth also made visible many accumulated family assets, such as aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial, and resistant capital, that many Latinx families bring to the school environment but that educators rarely notice or acknowledge.
These studies emphasized authentic relationship building between teachers and families, and such perspectives have slowly been integrated into preservice and in-service teacher education programs (Evans, 2013). Related research has similarly found that having deep understandings of students’ families and communities strengthens teachers’ positive views of family diversity (e.g., Johnson, 2014) and further augments mutual trust between teachers and Latinx communities (e.g., Gallo et al., 2015). However, the majority of this intervention-based research on family–school–community interactions focused on teachers’ general experiences and interactions with families; studies with a particular focus on academic content, such as science learning, continue to be scarce.
Teachers, Latinx Families, and Science
Researchers who study inclusive science education and Latinx students have advocated for the development of alternative discourses about science learning within collaborative family–school–community interactions as a way to provide accessible and meaningful science learning opportunities for Latinx students who are severely underrepresented in science and science-related careers (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). Feelings of alienation within predominantly monocultural and monolinguistic science classrooms have been prevailing experiences among Latinx students that negatively impact their participation and success in science (Flores, 2011; Yuen, Bonner, & Arregun-Anderson, 2018). Yuen et al. (2018), for example, demonstrated how building strong and positive science identities among Latinx students requires a multipronged approach in which differing resources embedded in schools, family interactions, and community spaces are amalgamated for a more dynamic and interactive science learning.
With regard to the science education and Latinx students, research on teachers’ learning experiences with Latinx families is extremely limited. In one study, Ramirez et al. (2016) worked with preservice science teachers to prepare culturally relevant science activities to be implemented in a university-based Family Science Learning Event (FSLE) that was designed for Latinx families. The families and preservice teachers engaged together in the scientific study of clay, distinguishing real clay from other sediments, finding the impact of fire and water on clay, and discussing how clay differs geographically. The direct experiences these teacher candidates had with Latinx parents in a specific science learning context changed these future teachers’ conceptions about Latinx parents’ ability to assist in their children’s science learning while providing new ideas for how to integrate families’ knowledge into their science instruction.
Similarly, Hammond’s (2001) study of elementary teachers and Mien parents and children who collaborated on gardening and house building projects offered insights into connecting community-based practices with scientific knowledge. Hammond found that participation helped the Mien students and families accommodate to American school science expectations while also helping the teachers adapt their view of science teaching “from that of transmitting Western science to that of cultural broker” (p. 987) assisting students in crossing the borders between different ways of knowing. Although not focused on Latinx families, Hammond’s study provided important context for understanding how building a cross-cultural learning community can lead to mutual adaptations of practices, both in the school and the community. Our STC workshops represent one of the few substantive, long-term research projects that focused on teachers’ orientations to and preparation for working with Latinx families in the context of science education at the secondary level.
Context for the Project Schools
The STC workshops took place in two communities with dense populations and persistent generational poverty (we will call them Stonybrook and Woodstone school districts) within two small cities in the Southeastern United States that have seen rapid increases of Latinx students, chiefly from México and Central America, over the past decade (Hamann & Harklau, 2015). Latinx emergent bilingual students account for 43% of students in Stonybrook and 25% of students in Woodstone district (Georgia Department of Education [GADOE], 2017). Ninety-two percent of the students in the Woodstone district and 57% of the students in the Stonybrook district qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch (GADOE, 2016). Despite the fact that a majority of the Latinx students in these districts speak Spanish as their home language, school policy advocates English-only instruction. Typical of many urban school districts, such policies were driven in part by poor funding for Stonybrook and Woodstone schools, resulting in limited bilingual resources and services available to non-English speakers (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017).
Setting for the STC Workshops
Frustrated by the state of affairs in Stonybrook and Woodstone schools, in 2009 we began to invite secondary science teachers, ESOL teachers, their Latinx students, and their accompanying families to participate in STC bilingual workshops as a part of a design-based research project. The latest iteration of this project, called Language-Rich Inquiry Science with English Language Learners through Biotechnology (LISELL-B), started in Fall 2014 and ended in Spring 2018. The project was a dynamic collaboration among the research team, approximately 50 teachers, their students, and their accompanying families in five urban middle schools and three urban high schools (Buxton et al., 2015). Each year, we offered five STC bilingual family workshops, with approximately 100 participants, composed of students, parents, and teachers participating in each workshop. During the STC workshops, participants rotated through three different sessions.
In Science investigation sessions, students engaged in bilingual language-rich science investigations with their families and their teachers. The group was provided with bilingual science activity materials available both in English and Spanish. Small and whole group discussions were conducted eliciting families’ ideas and experiences about the science concepts. In Science careers sessions, participants visited science labs and discussed careers and studies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-related fields with university faculty and college students. In Family conversation sessions, teachers, students, families, and researchers engaged in bilingual conversations on a broad range of topics including academic success, postsecondary education, and the immigrant experience. Each workshop concluded with a community lunch to further support relationship building and informal conversation.
Research Design
Research Question
Building upon the Freirean notion of dialogic education, the purpose of this multi-case study (Merriam, 2009) was to explore what happened when secondary science teachers came together with Latinx parents/grandparents for their children’s science learning in the context of STC bilingual family workshops. The overarching question guiding this study was as follows: How did urban secondary science teachers conceptualize the ways in which their participation in the STC workshops influenced their perspectives and practices about working with Latinx students and their families?
Participants
In this multi-case study, we focused on a subset of the teacher participants who experienced the STC workshops and were able to give a rich account of their experience (Merriam, 2009). We recruited four teachers, each of whom had extensive experience in working with Latinx students and their families in the workshops (see Table 1). We purposefully selected these teachers from a large number of teachers who attended workshops because these four teachers had at least 3 years of consistent attendance at the workshops in a regular fashion and agreed to participate in the present study.
Summary of Participants.
Source. Data are derived from aGADOE (2017) and bGADOE (2016).
Note. ESOL = English for speakers of other languages; GADOE = Georgia Department of Education.
Data Collection
To generate a profound understanding of how teachers’ participation affected their perspectives and practices about working with Latinx students and their families, we relied on multiple sources of data (Merriam, 2009): four focus-group teacher interviews collected during the annual LISELL-B teacher professional development sessions, 16 hr of participation observation with field notes from the STC workshops, and eight individual teacher interviews.
The first author conducted two individual semi-structured interviews with each teacher participant during Summer 2017. We developed an interview guide for both of the individual interviews based on Patton’s (2002) matrix of interview questions. The first individual interview provided contextual information about the teachers that supported an understanding of their experiences in the STC workshops in relation to their own social, cultural, and historical locations. The second individual interview focused particularly on teachers’ experiences in the STC workshops, their learning across the years, and how their participation informed their practices in working with their Latinx students and families. Interviews lasted between 1½ and 2 hr and were transcribed verbatim.
The teacher focus-group interviews were facilitated by the second and third authors and other members of the research team during the annual LISELL-B Summer Professional Learning Institutes in 2015 and 2016. The purpose of the focus-group interviews was to generate information relating to experiences in the LISELL-B project more broadly, including some questions about the family engagement component of the project. Again, a semi-structured interview protocol was followed while encouraging participants to comment on each other’s experiences and viewpoints. Field notes from participant observations that the first author conducted in the STC workshops during the 2014-2015 and 2016-2017 academic years were used to develop a better understanding of what the teachers experienced during the STC workshops. The content of the extended field notes included physical descriptions of the settings, learning activities, and interactions of the four focal teachers with students, families, and the facilitators.
Analytical Approach
For this multi-case study, we incorporated Charmaz’s (2014) constant comparative method (CCM), using a data-driven inductive strategy with several coding strategies. The types of coding included initial coding, focused coding, and theoretical coding. We used the Qualitative Data Analysis Software (QDAS) program, ATLAS.ti 8.0, to navigate the analysis process. As a first step, we performed initial coding, labeling segments of data by incident (coding events) using the open code component of ATLAS.ti 8.0 program. While coding, we made an effort to preserve the actions, using the gerund form as much as possible so that our initial codes better captured the data (see Table 2).
An Example of Incident by Incident Coding.
As the next step, we used focused coding to refine our initial codes. Charmaz (2014) called this process “coding initial codes” to synthesize and analyze the coded segments of data. We merged our overlapping codes into single codes to generate exhaustive and mutually exclusive codes. Next, we grouped our focused codes to develop categories related to the studied phenomenon. For this purpose, we used the code groups component of ATLAS.ti to organize all related codes into a code group that we deemed as a category. Ten categories were generated as a result of this process. Appendix A provides an example of analysis for the category of pro-action using the network component of the program. Following the focused coding process, we performed theoretical coding to connect the categories to generate themes regarding the studied phenomenon. The ATLAS.ti program does not have a component to show the link between categories. We used prefixes in a way that the name of each category began with a prefix indicating the corresponding theme. Using the same prefix for the interrelated categories allowed the ATLAS.ti program to sort these categories together as a group based on the prefixes. In this way, we were able to consolidate 10 categories into four themes (see Table 3). During this analytic process, we constantly returned to our data with new questions and ideas until recurring themes emerged.
Connection Between Themes, Categories, and Codes.
Note. ESOL = English for speakers of other languages; STCW = step to college workshop; LISELL = Language-rich inquiry science with English language learners.
Finally, we examined how our analytic categories and themes were relevant to our research question and how they aligned with Freire’s (1998, 2005, 2013) notion of dialogic education. We isolated categories that explicitly provided insights into teachers’ changing orientations toward essential ingredients of dialogic education—humility, critical consciousness, care, and hope, as related to the teachers’ work with their Latinx students and families (see Figure 1 for visual representation of research findings).
Visual representation of findings.
We employed triangulation and member checking techniques to enhance trustworthiness of our research findings (Merriam, 2009). We constantly compared and cross-checked the data that were collected through individual and focus-group interviews and participant observations to develop better understanding of and provide multiple sources of evidence of how teachers’ participation in the program influenced their perspectives and practices. In addition, we incorporated the strategy of member checking by sharing our findings with our research participants and asking them to comment on our interpretations of them. All four participants approved our findings except one participant who pointed out our mistake regarding the location where she started teaching.
Findings
In this first portion of the findings section, we present details from two of the four case study teachers to provide additional context for our categorical description of teacher learning in the STC workshops. In the second portion of the findings section, we present a cross-case analysis of the four teachers’ evolving pedagogical perspectives and practices in light of Freire’s (1998, 2005, 2013) principles of dialogic education.
Donald
Donald’s background
Donald defined himself as “living a military life” traveling around to different states in the country and living a few years in Japan during his childhood. His early experience of living in another country seemed to give Donald an interest in learning about other cultures and how this might influence his approach to culturally diverse students.
Teaching in Creek Middle School for 10 years, Donald enjoyed working with Latinx emergent bilingual students. However, linguistic and cultural difference remained the most challenging factor he had to face in his science classroom. Donald had Latinx students in the previous schools where he taught, but it was the first time for him teaching Latinx students whom he perceived to speak fluent conversational English but who seemed to struggle with reading and writing ability, which he felt made it hard for them to make sense of academic science. Donald had no formal preparation for working with emergent bilingual students and families. He typically had little personal communication with most of his Latinx students’ parents as they spoke Spanish and little English, and he spoke little Spanish, making teacher–parent communication a challenge.
What Donald learned from the STC workshops
The STC workshops were a space for Donald to conceptualize science teaching in new ways: I’m a white male, middle class, whatever it is . . . so it’s rare, that experience [of] not being the predominant one. So, I think that, more than anything, is what I get out of the workshops, is that being on the other side of the table. It gives you a different sense of just what the entire environment is. It gives you a feeling that we don’t all see everything the same way. We don’t always experience everything the same way. (Individual interview, August 13, 2017)
In the STC workshops, Donald observed students working on projects with their families as they were allowed to approach science investigations in different ways. He observed the families situating themselves as users of scientific language while they engaged with and helped each other complete science tasks. Donald was glad that his consistent participation in the STC workshops acted as a constant reminder to critique his own teaching practices as mostly representing a dominant cultural paradigm typical of science in the classroom.
The STC workshops also became an arena for Donald to learn about his Latinx students and families, as the families were rarely seen in Creek Middle School. Even though most of the conversations occurred in Spanish, seeing parents’ excitement to learn with their kids was an eye-opening experience for Donald. For example, During the Bottle Car Derby Activity Donald worked with a family at a table as they were designing racecars using everyday recycled materials. The aim of the activity was to design the fastest possible racecar by experimenting with different weights and wheel sizes. While Donald was making holes in the center of bottle caps that would be used as the wheels of the bottle racecar, a father was filling the bottle with beans and rice, planning its weight to run it down the ramp fastest. (Field note from the STC workshop, February 25, 2017)
Reflecting on this experience, Donald commented the following: I like watching the students taking the leading role. It wasn’t that parents were sitting back and waiting for their kids to do it but they were actually getting in there and working together—a couple of fathers in there that wanted to have the winning cars. So, it was just fun to watch the interaction between the students and the parents. That, to me, is the most revealing and rewarding part of it that we provided some kind of an environment for them to interact on an academic level. (Individual interview, June 6, 2017)
Donald was encouraged by his heightened awareness of the Latinx parents’ potential to help their children in scientific investigations contrary to his previous pessimism over parents’ abilities to help their children because of their limited English language proficiency, educational background, and financial challenges. Questioning his own perspectives, Donald became aware that families could be lifelong advocates for their children in their engagement with science, given sufficient support and opportunity. He also started to perceive benefits from working with families outside of the school environment as those Latinx students engaged more meaningfully in his classroom, both in terms of their behavior and their motivation.
Donald’s changing practices
Reflecting on the advantages he now saw in working with families, Donald began planning and preparing home science kits that students could use over the weekend to experiment with their families. His aim was to periodically design small science activities with a set of instructions that could create more family interactions around science as a follow-up activity for the science investigations he taught to the students in his classroom. Donald also influenced the Creek Middle School community to change the structure of their “Latino Nights” to engage students, parents, and siblings together in hands-on science investigations in place of the previous programs that mostly just informed parents about learning activities available for their children. For example, Donald utilized the STC Making Slushies science investigation and had students and parents make their own slushies using rock salt and Hawaiian punch to explore the effect of salt on the freezing temperature of water. As Donald related it, I think it worked very well and our administration saw that, and they brought that up in one of the overall school meetings that we had at the end of the year. He’d walked in, and the kids were making slushies and saw that there were a lot of people involved and having a good time, and so he made a point of bringing that up. (Individual interview, August 13, 2017)
As the family program had a pretty good turnout, Creek Middle School decided to keep the new format of the Latinx night that Donald restructured. Donald also noted a marked improvement in his ability to give students more autonomy when carrying out science experiments in his classroom. Observing his students’ efforts working together while he intervened less was a difficult experience for Donald, partly because he was accustomed to providing students with direct instruction on how to carry out science experiments. Observing the project researchers facilitating the science investigations with families in the STC workshops provided Donald with an alternative model for how to give students more control in his classroom.
Jennifer
Jennifer’s background
Jennifer, a mother of two children, was born and raised in a small town a 1-hr drive from the Stonybrook School District where she now resided and taught. She grew up in a European American, middle-class, two-parent household with extended family nearby. Jennifer’s strong sense of family-oriented life was also centered around the Southern Baptist church. She regularly attended church activities, taking her children to Sunday schools and mid-week events and serving the community by teaching at vacation Bible schools during summers. She believed that her deep involvement with the church shaped her identity, making her more sensitive to the needs of the students she taught. Despite teaching at Fall High School her whole career, Jennifer still knew little about the lives of her Latinx students and had received no formal teacher preparation to work with emergent bilingual students and families. As the student demographics at Fall High had changed dramatically in the past few years with a large influx of Latinx students, Jennifer felt frustrated that the school administration was doing little to support teachers in meeting the evolving needs of students.
What Jennifer learned from the STC workshops
Reflecting on her experiences in the STC workshops, Jennifer claimed that the workshops contributed to her own professional growth in a number of ways. For example, she found that Latinx parents had strong interest in their children’s science learning that Jennifer had not previously grasped due to her limited interactions with Latinx families. Jennifer observed that her Latinx students had strong family dynamics, which were rooted in a foundation of unity, that mirrored her own. She observed that the Latinx students were highly engaged in science activities when they got to make collective decisions, and that they were interested in exploring and utilizing their parents’ knowledge about the science concepts they were studying. As she described it, I kind of already knew a little bit but not from a true, emotional connection. It’s not just head knowledge; it’s personal now. Someone can tell you something all day long, but until you experience it, it’s not the same. They can tell you “That’s cold” but until you touch and you see, it’s not cold. That was huge because, from my personal background, I didn’t have a lot of that interaction with people different from me. (Individual interview, June 16, 2017)
As Jennifer articulated, it was an eye-opening experience for her to see how her students could use their multicultural and multilingual identities drawing from school science and their everyday science experiences, when given the opportunity. She observed that it was beneficial for students to use multiple ways to express how they made meaning in the context of solving problems, such as drawing pictures or using their everyday language to document their observations during the science investigations in collaboration with their family members.
Another crucial personal dimension emerged as Jennifer reflected on her experiences in one of the STC workshops that was conducted as a part of an annual statewide Latinx Science Festival in the state capital: Jennifer was taking a tour across the science demonstrations along with her son and one of her students, and that student’s mother. They stopped in front of one science booth where Jennifer’s son and her student were interacting with the college students and burning an old penny with 95 percent copper versus a new penny that is mostly zinc with only 2.5 percent copper. They used a torch to explore reactions of these two different materials to heat. Jennifer and the mother stood back and smiled at each other as they watched their children engaged with the science activity. The mother held a smart phone and recorded every moment of the experiment that her daughter and Jennifer’s son conducted. Then she leaned toward Jennifer and showed her the video. (Field note from the STC workshop, March 18, 2017)
According to Jennifer, language was not a barrier in that particular moment when she was able to communicate with another mother by making eye contact and watching their children conduct the science experiment. Jennifer reflected that Latinx parents are part of their children’s science learning, and the language barriers created by English-only schooling would not change that reality. However, Jennifer remained concerned that language still plays a crucial role in preventing parents from forming a full partnership around their children’s science learning and broader school participation. This included Jennifer’s frustration with her own lack of language skills in Spanish, which might otherwise allow her to better guide parents to work with their children. Nonetheless, Jennifer seemed to learn the value of communicating with her students’ families in ways that extended beyond parent–teacher conferences or phone calls to resolve problematic situations. Indeed, Jennifer noticed positive changes in her classroom dynamics that she attributed to her participation in the STC workshops. Like Donald, Jennifer observed that her Latinx students who attended the workshops started to come to her classroom with a more positive attitude, with greater interest and with more confidence in their abilities to conduct science experiments. Jennifer utilized the students’ science experiences from the workshops by providing opportunities for them to share with their peers during classroom discussions.
Jennifer’s changing practices
According to Jennifer, she developed a greater sense of responsibility for attending to the needs of her Latinx students since the inception of the STC workshops. Learning about her students’ strong family ties and observing parents’ strong interest in their children’s science learning and college preparation, Jennifer indicated that she started to hold higher expectations for her Latinx students to achieve more in science: Working with the kids just becomes more valuable. And like I had this one child, and he’s very smart, but he was lazy. And his parents showed up to the family workshops a few times with his siblings, and he didn’t get away with being lazy anymore in my class, there was no way. When he’d try to sit back and not do his work, I’d look at him and say, “I know where your value system is” and I wouldn’t have to say much and he’d get back to doing it. (Individual interview, August 18, 2017)
According to Jennifer, she also gained new insights from the STC workshops that led to changes in her broader teaching practices, such as providing more time for peer discussions and addressing problem-solving skills that she noticed were critical components of science learning. “Watching the LISELL staff do it and implement it and watching how different it could be than what I was taught, that’s what changed my lesson plans” (Focus-group interview, June 9, 2016). As she articulated, readings and lectures might be valuable in some ways, but having facilitators modeling for the teachers was the most important element that supported her enactment of new practices.
Bringing it All Together
After considering the individual cases of Donald and Jennifer, we now wish to illustrate cross-case patterns across the four focus teachers in light of Freire’s (1998, 2005, 2013) principles of dialogic education. Looking across the cases of these four secondary science teachers, we found characteristics that made each teacher’s practices unique, as well as similarities in the teachers’ developing understandings of their work with Latinx emergent bilingual students and families. Similarities and differences among the cases were scrutinized with respect to categories of (a) recognition of student resources outside of the classroom, (b) adaptation of the STC practices in working with Latinx emergent bilingual students and families, and (c) proactive teaching practices that focal teachers developed to extend their work with Latinx families in the context of science education (see Figure 1).
Recognition
We have seen evidence that all four teachers developed a critical consciousness and broadened view of science education and their own responsibility to do more in their work with Latinx students and families as they recognized: (a) subsequent benefits of working with the community in terms of student behavior and motivation for learning in the classroom; (b) parents as co-learners of science after observing parents as active participants who engaged in science inquiry activities with their children in the program; (c) themselves as learners of multiple ways to engage students in science, as they reexamined their prior teaching styles in contrast to the science inquiry model they observed and engaged with during the STC workshops.
According to Freire (2013), teachers can develop a critical consciousness about their teaching practices only when they have direct involvement with contexts and experiences that challenge conventional wisdom about education. Such an awareness must lead to questioning education as a neutral activity that is based on reliable foundations and perfect certainty and challenge whether this type of education, focused on standardized curricula and standardized performances, can support serious dialogue about the true goals of education. Freire argued that teachers can only reflect upon their long-held assumptions about what actions constitute meaningful teaching and learning when they involve themselves in consciousness-raising dialogues in diverse communities and learning contexts.
The value of working with the community
Through participation in the STC workshops with Latinx emergent bilingual students and families, the focal teachers began to question their views of teaching that had previously focused on the student within the boundaries of classroom, ignoring the importance of making connections with their families and communities. For example, Donald recognized that “You focus [only] on the student, you ignore the influences the family has or in a lot of ways the support that the family could give” (Individual interview, August 13, 2017). Jennifer realized the need for “understanding their [students’] family dynamics, which helps a lot [in] how to best be with them in the educational setting” (Individual interview, June 16, 2017). Julie stated that “the workshops really taught me to go beyond what I think of a student and what I think of a family” (Focus-group interview, June 4, 2015). Allyson changed her thinking on the role of teachers “to build community with our students and their families to be a safe space for a student to come to when they’re troubled or need guidance” (Focus-group interview, June 9, 2016). The teachers understood that “it takes building a relationship with those kids and families on an individual basis to give them [students] the confidence to make learning attempts in the classroom” (Julie, Individual interview, June 12, 2017). Teachers came to see working with families as key to improving their work with individual students. As they started to work more effectively with students who attended the program, the focal teachers recognized that students’ science learning is always part of broader social relations and arrangements, including their families and communities.
Parents are learners with their children
Another way the teachers demonstrated critical consciousness was through their recognition of Latinx parents’ potential for involvement in their children’s school science learning and in the broader school community. Before their involvement in this project, all four teachers had doubts about Latinx parents’ abilities to help their children with school science because of what they perceived to be the parents’ limited educational backgrounds, language difficulties, and financial challenges. Although Donald, Julie, and Allyson continued to articulate concerns about parental limitations by the end of the project, they all recognized the possibilities for parents’ involvement in their middle-aged and high school–aged children’s learning, given sufficient opportunities and resources.
For example, Donald was intrigued by “watching students work with their younger siblings or with their parents trying to figure out and solve the science problems. It makes me think about [how] we should have [more] available for them” (Individual interview, June 6, 2017). For Julie, “LISELL-B helps me understand that it’s my job to make sure that parents are comfortable to interact with their child academically or I need to give them the resources” (Focus-group interview, June 4, 2015). Each focal teacher reported the value of providing an environment for students and family members to interact on an academic level in their schools. Observing the parents joyfully practice science inquiry activities with their children in the STC workshops was a catalyst in their thinking about their abilities as teachers to establish a more supportive approach for parents to be lifelong learners of science with their children.
Teachers are learners of multiple ways to engage science
Another change in critical consciousness came in the form of teachers examining their own teaching practices by comparing them with what they observed during the science investigation sessions in the STC workshops. The four teachers began to question their own views of science instruction and how they had been failing to include cultural values and experiences in their classrooms. However, the process of working together through dialogic-based science inquiries seemed to broaden the teachers’ view of science teaching and learning and connections to students’ and families’ language and cultural practices. For example, Donald realized that “We don’t all see everything the same way. We don’t always experience everything the same way” (Individual interview, August 13, 2017). Allyson was impressed that in the STC workshops the facilitators “gave them [students and families] time to dialogue, gave them time to reflect so that they can hopefully have more truer science learning that will be long standing” (Individual interview, August 26, 2017). Jennifer observed “a huge spark in a lot of students. The drawing and then writing it and describing their drawing using their vocabulary cards [written in English and Spanish with an illustration] seem to help a lot” (Focus-group interview, June 4, 2015).
This critical consciousness offered focal teachers new views of science teaching, situating students at the center of their teaching practices. Learning from and with students and families seem to widen teachers’ views of possibilities for making instructional decisions in their science classrooms. As Freire (2013) indicated, critical consciousness leads to action, and in the following sections we present how teachers’ recognition of new possibilities in their work with their Latinx students and families turned into caring practices or/and proactive actions.
Adaptation
We view teachers’ openness to new instructional strategies they saw modeled in the STC workshops as a demonstration of their humility and their adaptation of these strategies that they observed in the program as a testimony of their caring for their Latinx students. Freire’s caring principle of dialogic education became visible in the four focal teachers’ practices as they put aside the view of science as an isolated system of knowledge that is free of cultural values. Creating spaces for debriefing sessions, providing increased student agency and freedom when implementing labs, and connecting school science with students’ real-life science experiences are evidence of the focal teachers’ caring for their Latinx students and families. According to Freire (2005), caring is not about “coddling” (p. 25), reducing teaching to a therapy process. Caring in education entails teaching practices based on the assets and learning needs students bring to the classroom. In this sense, caring is about designing learning environments based on the context in which learning takes place, and students’ articulations of their needs and interests, rather than standardized instruction.
Donald’s adaptation of STC workshops’ science inquiry format in his school’s Latinx night eventually influencing the school community, Jennifer’s heightened expectations for her Latinx students as she pushed them harder in the classroom, Allyson’s efforts to help her Latinx students use their multicultural and multicultural resources, and Julie’s strong ties with Latinx parents including her voluntary participation in conversations between Latinx parents and other teachers, are each examples of teachers’ adapting practices from the STC workshops to care for their students and families in their schools in new ways. We argue that these teachers’ willingness to listen to and learn from their students, families, and the facilitators in the STC workshops represents an instantiation of Freire’s humility principle of dialogic education. Without that humility, focal teachers would not have learned and adapted these practices to their work with their students and families.
Pro-Action
Although Donald, Jennifer, Julie, and Allyson embodied some practices that they observed in the STC workshops, they differed in terms of proactive practices that they developed to extend their work with families in the context of science education. These differences may be due, in part, by divergences in the contexts of their individual schools. For example, Donald and Julie were most encouraged by their heightened awareness of the possibilities for creating a dialogue-based science learning community by including their students’ families in their children’s science learning. Donald personally began sending take-home science kits for students to practice science inquiries with their family members. Julie was working with families around dinner discussion questions and science word games for family members to learn science concepts with their children. These two teachers also received support from their school administration for their enactment of these proactive practices and were able to influence their school communities in this regard.
Even though Julie and Donald had conflicts in their schools due to pressure regarding state-mandated standardized assessments and lack of time for family engagement, they were able to align dialogic family engagement practices with the relevant science standards in ways that made these practices acceptable in their school contexts. We view Julie’s and Donald’s pursuits of proactive practices with their students’ families as demonstrations of hope in their abilities as teachers to make a difference for their Latinx students. Hope, Freire (1998) wrote, is an essential asset in human beings in that we can intervene in the world to the extent we believe that change is possible. It was hope that mobilized these two teachers, despite a range of pressures that they could not control. They were hopeful about the roles they could play in their students’ pursuit of science education and science-related career pathways and their role in supporting parents to become active participants in those pathways.
In contrast, Jennifer and Allyson received little school administrative support for their work with Latinx families. Allyson was not appreciated for her proactive adaptations, such as teaching science and English through gardening, as these approaches were seen as being outside of her school’s focus on improving assessment results. After receiving a poor end of year evaluation from the school administration Allyson quit her job and found a teaching position in a different school with more like-minded school leadership. She remained hopeful in her capacity to make a difference with her students, seeking out new community-based science learning programs after the STC workshops ended. Jennifer was the least optimistic of the four focal teachers in terms of the potential she saw for continued work with Latinx parents at the school level. She came to believe that her individual engagement with the families of her students was the most that she would be able to accomplish. In addition to the lack of resources to overcome what she saw as the language barrier, the lack of time, and the lack of administrative support, she felt that the grade level she taught (11th and 12th grade) was an additional obstacle to parental engagement. Thus, Jennifer felt little optimism in her potential to implement and sustain work with her students’ families through community-based science programs or schoolwide family science events.
Discussion and Conclusion
Although Donald, Jennifer, Julie, and Allyson functioned differently in terms of proactive practices to sustain their work with Latinx families in their corresponding urban schools, there is clear evidence that all four teachers developed the following: (a) broader views of science education and responsibility for their work with Latinx students; (b) critical consciousness about parents’ potential to help their children with school science regardless of their linguistic, educational, and financial standing; and (c) recognition of their potential as teachers to support parents to be lifelong learners with their children. In turn, each teacher adopted more caring practices related to what they experienced and saw modeled in the STC workshops. It is interesting to note that these four European American teachers had certain similarities in their backgrounds. They all grew up in middle-class families, had previously known little about the lives of their Latinx students and families, and had insufficient pedagogical preparation in working with immigrant students and families. However, they had each engaged in prior cultural immersion or community service experiences before their participation in the STC workshops and they each participated in the STC workshops on a regular basis, which provided them with fertile ground to cultivate their vision and enactment of more culturally relevant science teaching. Thus, the STC workshops may have had a more transformative effect for these four teachers than on some other participants who had not been exposed to such a range of diverse experiences beforehand and who did not regularly attend the STC workshops.
Still, the experiences of these four focal teachers have some specific implications for preservice and in-service teacher professional development programs that prepare teachers to interact with urban immigrant families from a diverse range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, regardless of teaching context, grade level, or subject areas. This study strengthens claims in recent literature that teachers who have in-depth understanding of the communities in which they teach have a greater potential to create opportunities for learning science that is integrated with the cultural knowledge of students and families (e.g., Chinn, 2015; Hammond, 2001; Ramirez et al., 2016).
Although recruiting and retaining teachers who themselves share immigrant experiences with their students is another important component for building more critical and dialogic educational spaces, our findings showed that teachers who do not personally share that background with their students can still learn to support immigrant students and families in powerful, caring, and hopeful ways. However, when family–school–community relations are superficially mediated, such as in many typical family engagement activities in secondary schools, they often produce negative effects on the teachers, including reinforcement of stereotypes about urban immigrant families and communities common in anti-immigrant policies (e.g., The White House Office of the Press Secretary, 2017) and mass media (e.g., Dixon & Williams, 2015). We suggest that preservice and in-service professional development programs should give teachers in-depth exposure to content-based cultural immersion programs that can cultivate a broader vision of teaching linked to students’ lives and communities.
This study also showed that the power of learning through dialogic education was enhanced by our content area focus, as science inquiry practices served to connect family members who have often been excluded from active participation in school academic contexts. In typical family-oriented after-school programs, such as Latinx science nights or curriculum nights, parents are usually positioned as passive actors who watch their children engage in learning activities or who simply listen to school agendas. We reaffirmed Hammond’s (2001), Upadhyay’s (2009), and Flecha and Soler’s (2013) findings that a working together process can create common ground among teachers, students, parents, and other members of the community. This is especially crucial in newly established communities for newer immigrants like that of Stonybrook and Woodstone school districts where the unwelcoming sentiment perceived by immigrant families (Hamann & Harklau, 2015) might negatively influence their socialization into the school and broader community. The parents who came to the STC learning spaces began to understand the school culture and academic expectations that were placed upon their children. We suggest that urban schools construct evening or weekend family programs that require active involvement of students, family members, and teachers who can work together as co-learners and engage in interactions and dialogues around specific subject areas to enable each party to gain new insights academically and socially.
Finally, this study contributes to more nuanced understandings that the possibility of transformation in teachers’ orientations and practices with culturally and linguistically diverse students and families is influenced by powerful discourses beyond the teachers’ own actions, such as those of educational accountability systems and individual school administrators. Our analysis of urban teachers’ experiences in the STC workshops pointed out frustrations but also changes in their actions that are only possible when teachers are provided with sustained support and guidance. While teachers in the STC project, like most urban teachers, were under constant pressure from high-stakes testing and accountability that controlled how they used their time and space, they felt a pressing need for ongoing professional learning opportunities, so as not to lose awareness of these important ideas. Such professional development programs should be meaningful for teachers by connecting academic content to knowledge about students and families.
This multi-case study has obvious limitations. We did not focus on students coming from non-Hispanic backgrounds. We cannot, therefore, discuss the teachers’ experiences and practices regarding their work with student population other than Latinx. Another limitation of this study is that we did not interview teachers at the very start of their participation in the STC workshops. Thus, we relied on their accounts of how their perspectives changed over the course of 3 years as they worked with their Latinx students and families in the program. Future research could build on the present study to explore what (and how) changes in the focal teachers’ perceptions and practices were sustained and maintained over a period of time after the project ended to assess the sustainability of the impact of their attendance at the STC workshops. Our work also suggests the importance of conducting more research with teachers of color and bilingual teachers, with new teachers as well as experienced teachers, and with teachers across the grade levels and subject areas. Each of these variations in teaching context influences how teachers engage with families, yet each will also benefit from more holistic approaches to K-12 education that legitimize the critical role of family and community engagement to promote student success.
Our STC workshops challenged the notion that urban schools are places of businesses where students are filled with information and deficiencies are fixed but with no intention of understanding who the students are or where they come from (Nieto, 2013). In this article we have advocated for the wisdom of learning and teaching as embedded in social relationships, built upon students’ interests, and grounded in students’ lives and communities. Our findings suggest the critical role of learning interactions occurring not just between teachers and students, but among students, teachers, parents, and other members of the community to unite the school, community resources, and curricula.
The experiences of teachers in this study demonstrated that Freire’s (1998, 2005, 2013) principles of dialogic education—humility, critical consciousness, care, and hope—are helpful for imagining alternative contexts for preservice and in-service teacher education. The dialogic learning interactions in the STC workshops opened a space for new meaning making, new discourse, and a growing critical consciousness for teachers who engaged in science inquiries with their students and families. This critical consciousness, then, evolved into caring practices as teachers adapted ideas from the workshops into their own work with students and families. Without humility, the teachers would not be open to learning from their students and families and building their work upon what energized their students and parents in the program. Without hope in their capabilities as teachers they would not have developed ways to extend their work with Latinx families in their own schools and classrooms.
As Nieto (2013) said, it is easy for teachers to lose hope in their capabilities to work in the best interest of their students and families as their agency is continually narrowed by increasing demands for testing and accountability. Yet it is essential for teachers to remain hopeful in the face of these challenges. The words of Freire (2007) articulated this powerfully: The educator’s biggest problem is not to discuss whether education can or cannot accomplish, but to discuss where it can, how it can, with whom it can, when it can; it is to recognize the limits his or her practice imposes. (Freire, 2007, p. 64)
Learning to persevere together within these contradictions, though burdensome, is an indispensable asset for teachers, students, and families.
Supplemental Material
Appendix_-_multicase_6-30-19_ – Supplemental material for “Being on the Other Side of the Table”: A Qualitative Study of a Community-Based Science Learning Program With Latinx Families
Supplemental material, Appendix_-_multicase_6-30-19_ for “Being on the Other Side of the Table”: A Qualitative Study of a Community-Based Science Learning Program With Latinx Families by Mehtap Kirmaci, Cory A. Buxton and Martha Allexsaht-Snider in Urban Education
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 work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1316398.
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