That limited view is all too pervasive in schools, say UW researchers who are working to broaden children's conceptions of science. In partnership with a high-diversity, multilingual elementary school in the Seattle area, the researchers have designed new curricula intended to link children's everyday knowledge to authentic scientific disciplines.

 

Their goal is to make science accessible, make it relevant, and make it matter by bringing the outside world, in all its cultural complexity, inside the classroom. "Taking a broader view of science, removing it from its Western confines, can improve science outcomes for groups of historically underrepresented students in science," says Philip Bell, an associate professor of Learning Sciences who directs the ethnographic and design-based research of the Everyday Science and Technology Group at the LIFE (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) Center.

The UW team's partner school lies in a heavily industrial area with high rates of allergies and asthma. Recognizing that connection, the researchers took a traditional, commercially available fifth-grade science kit and reworked it to focus on health and microbiology topics. What role might microbes and microscopic particles play in the pervasive allergy and asthma problems?

"We knew that there were a lot of these pressing health issues that were never discussed in science classrooms. We thought that was astounding," says Carrie Tzou, an assistant professor on the UW Bothell campus who teaches elementary and secondary science methods classes. "For us, the question was 'How do you make science personally consequential to children and have them see science as part of their everyday decision-making?'"

To get classroom discussions rolling, teachers asked students in the redesigned "Micros & Me" unit to document health practices in their homes and communities — practices that would give teachers insight into children's rich cultural practices and serve as talking points in the classroom.

Armed with digital cameras and observation notebooks, the fifth-graders set off into their individual worlds, bringing back galleries of health-related images: EpiPens, asthma inhalers, "pollutants" such as a cigarette butt or trash in the street.

The photos gave some insight into students' outside practices, but also begged a question: Why weren't the children's unique cultural practices showing up in the documentation? "We knew from ethnographic studies we'd done that there was a huge diversity of practices around health — but they weren't reflected in the photos," says Tzou. "We think the children interpreted the assignment as a 'standard' school science activity, and didn't see their home practices as appropriate to bring to school."

Those confined views of science were even more entrenched than researchers had originally thought. "It takes a lot of work to expand that very narrow definition of what's OK to talk about in science class and what it means to do science," says Tzou.

It was only when teachers began to explain the idea of "cultural practice," offering and modeling examples of their own health practices — drinking orange juice to prevent colds, eating chicken soup to get well — that the fifth graders began making deeper connections between home learning and school learning. One teacher asked her fifth-graders to think hard about what they and their families already knew about health, outside the classroom. "Some of you have different kinds of doctors than others of you," she said. "Some of you take medicine at home that I could only find if I went down to Chinatown."

With prompting, her students were soon talking about the health benefits of yoga and coconut, using Ginseng to clear the face, doing a dance to cure sickness, sticking a coin on the back with ointment for good health, or the healing properties of Filipino ground meat soup. Said one boy: "My dad says that drinking tea gives you more blood."

The teacher took that wealth of cultural practice, bridged the children's everyday terms with scientific terms, and, with the students, examined the science underlying the everyday phenomenon and practices. "This teacher said she had never thought about culture being a part of science before," says Tzou.

Each lesson in the redesigned unit brought science to bear on everyday practices. One project focused on hand-washing and microbes. Every day at school, students lined up before lunch to get a squirt of anti-bacterial hand sanitizer. Was this really the best way to clean hands? The fifth-graders in "Micro & Me" conducted a controlled experiment comparing soap-and-water hand-washing with sanitizer use, taking swabs and growing cultures in Petri dishes.

They found soap and water at least as effective as the sanitizer. Then visiting oceanographers told them that sanitizers flushing down sinks and leaking into Puget Sound were killing "good" bacteria. "That really got to the kids," says Tzou. "We saw this change in practice, with more students going to the sink."

At the end of the units, students in "Micro & Me" used their new knowledge to prepare a public service announcement on a health issue to take back to their communities. Hand-washing was the first choice for many. They had run the tests, com- pared the results, come to scientific conclusions on something very real to them, something that mattered, something they could share.

For too long, say the UW researchers, classroom science has had little to do with how actual science is practiced. The school version is neat, precise, focusing on one "right" answer and one "right" process to get there. When students bring their outside knowledge into the classroom, those ideas may be looked at as something to "fix" or "replace" with "real" science. That does injustice to science, a field that uses complex forms of investigation and discovery to manage and work through uncertainty. Bell says it also does an injustice to discovery, and to children, "who have sophisticated ways of understanding the world that may look different than what counts in as traditional science in the classroom."

Using authentic scientific tools and methods and connecting their lives with what happened in the classroom helped the students begin to feel like "experts," like part of a scientific community, says Tzou. "We want to make sure every child has the opportunity to explore scientific pathways for themselves — and that they don't get cut off at the beginning because of their culture or their language."

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Bell, P., Bricker, L.A., Reeve, S., Zimmerman, H.T. and Tzou, C.
(in press). Discovering and supporting successful learning pathways of children in and out of school: How everyday expertise develops across places and pursuits. To appear in B. Bevan, P. Bell & R. Stevens (eds.), LOST Learning: Learning about Out-of-School Time Learning Opportunities. New York, NY: Springer.

Tzou, C., Scalone, G., & Bell, P. (2010). The role of environmental narratives and social positioning in how place gets constructed for and by youth: Implications for environmental science education for social justice. Equity and Excellence in Education, 43(5), 105-119.

Reeve, S. & Bell, P. (2009). Children's self-documentation and understanding of the concepts 'healthy' and 'unhealthy.' International Journal of Science Education, 31(14), 1953-1974.