<p>For more than five decades, education scholars and activists have argued for a culturally relevant and nurturing education that reflects students' diverse experiences in K-12 classrooms. Yet, with the most recent national reform on science standards, the call to engage all learners pushed for advancing STEM in the United States, and many science education scholars have problematized such rhetoric. Unfortunately, the inclusionary blanket term like “engaging all learners” and the efforts that lead behind it do not consider the sociocultural realities that young children bring into the classrooms and the negotiation in learning school science. In this three-paper dissertation, I explore how middle school science teachers recognize the sociocultural realities students come with and cultivate a culturally nurturing education in response to the increase of racial, economic, and linguistic diversity within their integrated STEM classrooms. In particular, the aim of this dissertation to understand how middle school science teachers align school science, specifically in teaching integrated science and engineering, to the sociocultural realities of students by centering on the sensemaking of teacher’s lived experience and experiential knowledge. The first study draws on a narrative inquiry case study approach to understand how a middle school science teacher cultivated a culturally sustaining STEM classroom. The research question that guided this study was: How does Mrs. Johnson make meaning of her experiences in making science and engineering learning more culturally relevant and sustaining for her diverse middle school students? Findings from this study illuminates a complex narrative such as the intentionality of making multiple epistemologies explicit in learning science and engineering and the required racial reflexive work for cultivating a culturally sustaining and student-focused STEM classrooms. The findings also highlight challenges Mrs. Johnson faced as she integrates students’ lived experiences and alternative ways of knowing and doing into science and STEM teaching. The second study uses a single-case study approach to understand specific teaching practices that truncated the cultivation of a culturally sustaining education by exploring the opportunities that allowed internalized and interpersonal oppression to perpetuate with the same teacher, Mrs. Johnson. The research questions that guided this study are as follow: In what ways does teaching the GMO and Loon Nesting Platform STEM units foreground individual and interpersonal oppression to manifest? What teaching practices allow these moments of oppression to be pervasive? Findings from this study suggest that oppression becomes pervasive when teaching integrated science and engineering without considering how STEM learning could be irrelevant to students’ lived experiences and the role of power in teaching science. Based on these findings, I developed a year-long virtual professional development program that emphasized teaching integrated science and engineering with a focus on culturally nurturing and asset-based pedagogies. The final study draws on teachers’ funds of knowledge and identity to explore the sensemaking of a rural science teacher as he participates in the professional development program and how the sensemaking of his lived experiences informed his use of asset-based pedagogies. The research question that guided this study was: How do Mr. Jordan’s funds of knowledge and identity inform their use of asset-based pedagogies in reform-based, rural science classrooms? Findings from this study highlights Mr. Jordan’ funds of knowledge and identity informing his use of culturally responsive and relevant pedagogies. Implications of the third study proposes generational cultural wealth as a theoretical framework as one way teachers can begin aligning school science to students’ sociocultural realities. The final chapter of this dissertation presents a synthesis across the three studies and a summary of the implications for teaching.  </p>

Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) are educational institutions owned by Native American tribes intended to address the failure of the education system to support Indigenous students. Significant research has been done on the value of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) and on TCUs, but little has been done to examine whether and how TCUs implement CSP. This study aims to fill that gap by examining teaching at Chief Dull Knife College (CDKC), a tribal college on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. Interviews were conducted with eight white faculty members and four Cheyenne administrators at CDKC. Analysis of the interviews revealed that the instructors saw building personal connections with students as the foundation of teaching at CDKC and that they engaged in attempts at individual adaptation and structural change to support such teaching. The Cheyenne administrators found these efforts valuable, but suggested that more needed to be done to foster a connection between the white faculty members and the Cheyenne community and culture. Ultimately, this study reveals that instructors at CDKC are attempting to implement CSP, but that there are still gaps in that implementation. The interviews suggest that further structural changes are needed at CDKC to better support CSP and ensure that students are receiving the support they need to succeed.

This master’s thesis investigates poetic text writing through a teaching project conducted on a secondary school class in Sweden. Inspired by ekphrastic poetry, the teaching project consisted of poetry and literature reading. The students visited a sculpture related to the literature, upon which they wrote poetic texts about the sculpture. The main purpose of the study is to describe how teaching in the Swedish subject can make use of Swedish language teaching by developing students’ poetic texts that touches on topics such as living conditions and identity. Drawing from thematic narrative analysis, most notably Bamberg’s positioning model, the analysis investigates the narratives constructed in the students’ poetic texts as well as identity aspects negotiated through the narratives. The students’ identities were further discovered through participant observation and semi-structured interviews to deepen the understanding of the meeting between art, identity and learning.The general perception drawn from the interviewees’ answers is that the Swedish subject rarely includes knowledge of nor writing of poetic texts. However, the study emphasises that poetry could have an integral part of the education in the Swedish subject in secondary education.The results show that the students’ poetic texts tend to relate to the sculpture and the physical environment, as well as the social context of the environment. Furthermore, the identities of the students were shown to have a high relevance in the writing process. The teaching project was based on principles of culturally sustaining pedagogy and aimed at contributing to the sociocultural support of the school. As the students’ language and cultural backgrounds proved to be significant in the writing process, it became evident that multilingualism was a natural part of the student’s everyday school life.

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This exploratory case study research was conducted with a view to exploring how teachers teaching emergent bilingual students in ESL programs can enact the principles of culturally sustaining systematic functional linguistics (CS SFL), such as critical centering, historicizing, curricularizing, teaching and learning cycle (TLC), and semantic waving in their classrooms. Two middle school teachers participated in the study and used CS SFL principles to teach their emergent bilingual students. I gathered data for the study through non-participatory observations, semi-structured interviews, informal talks with the teachers, usually right after their classes, and artifacts from teachers and students. The thematic analysis of the data demonstrated that teachers could recognize their students' ways of knowing and being by (a) translanguaging between English and Spanish seamlessly in their classrooms; (b) centering their students' lifeways, prior knowledge, and lived experiences by making them the parts of their curricula; (c) using TLC for creating dialogic interactions between teachers and students and among students; (d) positioning their students through strength perspectives; and (e) using multimodal and multi-semiotic means of communication so that their students can understand their content area knowledge and express their ideas even if their English language is emerging. The teachers faced tensions about whether to reject or perpetuate the monolingual and monocultural ideologies expressed through English language requirements that emergent bilingual students should meet in order to succeed academically. Similarly, they reported that they had challenges in preparing students for high-stakes testing and offering their support for the students sent to in-school suspension (ISS).

No description available.