Thesis advisor: G. Michael Barnett / Many stakeholders emphasize the importance of diverse populations’ participation in the sciences, though the motivations for this vary. Some reference an economic standpoint by emphasizing the importance of either recruiting more science workers to compete in a global economy, or of individual financial success for people from historically marginalized groups. However, a growing body of researchers and educators has emphasized the importance of increasing representation from historically marginalized communities in science because their exclusion from discussions about science funding, research, and implications has resulted in widespread harm to communities. The goal of this research is to broaden science participation for the purposes of democracy and strong equity. This work expands on the Democratic Science Teaching (DST) framework, articulated by Basu & Calabrese Barton in 2010. While the original work articulated a theory by identifying goals and practices in existing science classrooms, this work explores the possibilities of using DST as a framework for teacher learning.This dissertation consists of three papers. Paper 1 details the development of an instrument to measure teaching practices aligned with democratic science teaching. The instrument could be used and built on by researchers, teacher educators, and school leaders who wish to use tools to develop democratic accountability in their systems. Paper 2 is a case study exploring how teacher beliefs and actions are activated through interaction with the DST framework. The study follows one novice physics teacher who participated in a DST-aligned professional learning fellowship for one academic year. Paper 3 is a practitioner-facing piece that functions as a starting point for teachers who are interested in developing democratic teaching practices in their own classrooms. The paper outlines the DST framework for teachers, explores how a photo-journal project supported students in making connections between their personal lives and science content, and presents other strategies used by teachers to bolster student voice, shared authority, and critical science literacy. Altogether, these papers offer understanding of teachers’ experiences as they work with the DST framework as learners, and provide tools for science teachers, teacher educators, and other education leaders to develop DST-aligned programming, and more broadly consider democratic and holistic systems of accountability for teachers. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_109780 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Gonzalez, Casandra |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). |
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