This article considers science teaching and learning as may be understood through the integration of indigenous artefacts into physics curriculum in Zimbabwean schools. It comments significance of and elaborates on the issues raised in Nadaraj Govender and Edson Mudzamiri's paper entitled: Incorporating indigenous artefacts in developing an…

This is a story of becoming. In this creative non-fiction essay, I share a case study of an informal science program for high school aged youth that took place over 5-weeks one summer in an urban park in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. I conducted observations, interviews, and artifact analysis to explore how youth environmental interest and identity…

Amid a broader sociopolitical milieu of division, disagreement, and uncivil debate, this study investigates instances of disagreement among students in a high school science classroom as they attempt to answer the civic question of "what should we do" about climate change, a long contentious topic in the USA. Using a theoretical…

Despite acknowledging issues of inequity within science education, practices, standards, and reform-guiding documents like the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) still fall short in actions that result in substantive and sustained progress in achieving their expressed goals and expectations. Issues of inequity in science…

In this paper, we present our study into how teaching practices in chemistry are socially stratified under the center-suburban divide in a medium-sized city, located in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. The paper mainly draws upon the Bourdieusian-inspired concepts of institutional habitus and symbolic capital to examine how institutional discourses…

Developing and integrating culturally aligned curriculum models which promote use of resources, such as indigenous artefacts, has been a challenge in science curriculum reforms. The study focused on the development of an integrated indigenous-pedagogical model for use in high school physics curriculum. The views of elders, teachers and learners in…

Studies of education practices in science centers have found variation in how conceptual learning is supported, or scaffolded, on school field trips. This paper investigates the implications of scaffolding variations for how students make sense of a game-based exhibit that was designed to trigger interest and develop knowledge of scientific…

This article presents a case study of "the aspirin unit," a curriculum unit from an advanced chemistry class in a neighborhood high school in a large US city. The extended case method is applied to analyze this curriculum within the larger US political context that criminalizes youth of color. Data sources include retrospective…

In this forum, we discuss the need for multicultural education that is supported by culturally relevant pedagogy to fashion science teaching that intimately connects science content to students' sociocultural and linguistic experiences. In Nepal, teacher education programs and teachers' pedagogical practices view students' multiple cultural and…

Informal learning organizations such as museums, zoos, aquaria, gardens, and community-based organizations are often positioned as having programming that fill a void that may exist in the lives of youth participants. Often these institutions do not recognize the assets that youth gain from their own homes and communities and bring to bear in…

Native Americans are the least represented population in science fields. In recent years, undergraduate and graduate level summer research programs that aimed to increase the number of Native Americans in science have made some progress. As new programs are designed, key characteristics that address science self-efficacy and science identity and…

In the literature on the situated and distributed nature of cognition, the coordination of spatial organization and the structure of human practices and relations is accepted as a fact. To date, science educators have yet to build on such research. Drawing on an ethnographic study of high school students during an internship in a scientific…

This article is the first to describe the discoursal construction of an adolescent community of practice (CoP) in a non-school setting. CoPs can provide optimal learning environments. The adolescent community centered around science journalism and positioned itself dichotomously in relationship to school literacy practices. The analysis focuses on…

Angela Chapman and Allan Feldman (2016) conducted a study that aimed to exam how a group of diverse urban high school students were affected by the participation in a contextually based authentic science experience. The analysis of all data led the authors to conclude that the experience of authentic science positively influenced the science…

In "It's the magic circle"! cogenerative dialogue is used to create a safe environment to address emotional conflicts in a project-based learning (PBL) science internship. Hsu is drawing on polyvagal theory (PVT) and event-oriented enquiry to show how educators can use cogens as a pedagogical tool to successfully address emotional…