| Contributors: |
Mathis, Clausell (author); Southerland, Sherry A., 1962- (professor directing dissertation); Capstick, Simon, 1958- (university representative); Jaber, Lama (committee member); Turner, Jeannine E. (committee member); Florida State University (degree granting institution); College of Education (degree granting college); School of Teacher Education (degree granting department) |
| Description: |
My motivation for developing this project started with the question: What is the intersection of students’ culture with physics ideas? I ask this because for decades scholars have explored the impact that the intersection of school and culture has on instruction in schools (Bryan & Atwater, 2002; Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Milner, 2011; Scherff & Spector, 2011). Indeed, a variety of researchers have found that students have a higher level of engagement, performance, and identification when the instructor uses students’ cultural resources for instruction (Au & Jordan, 1981; Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Scherff & Spector, 2011). There have been developments in pedagogical theories and approaches to teaching science from a culturally informed perspective (Banks, 1993; Carreon, 2007; Ladson-Billings, 1992). Pedagogical approaches that are culture-based are designed to give students from different cultural backgrounds very distinct classroom experiences than those traditionally seen. These experiences are designed to use students’ cultural resources as a reference to enhance the content, curriculum, and teaching approaches that structure students’ formal education to create meaningful academic experiences. However, while the development of the culture-based pedagogical approaches have been described in many disciplines, researchers have struggled to implement such pedagogies in science (Boutte, Kelly-Jackson, & Johnson, 2010; Johnson, 2011). One of the primary tensions involved in this effort is the difficulty in merging the canonical knowledge to be learned with students’ cultures. There have been many approaches to bridge the two. For example, (1) identifying students’ cultural resources though funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992; Morrison, Robbins, & Rose, 2008; Teo & Khoh, 2015), and (2) problematizing a relevant issue within the context of students’ culture (Morales‐Doyle, 2017) have become well-recognized standards in this approach to . |
