This ethnographic study examined how rural, lower track, underrepresented students made sense of their place in school and what role school science played in their cultural reproduction. The objectives of the study were to identify key components of science classroom discourse, analyze means of negotiating these components, and explicate participants' beliefs and roles in defining microcultural identities specific to rural, underrepresented school contexts. Eight students and their teacher participated in this study, which drew heavily upon teacher and student revoicing of common events. Results showed that the quality of science instruction was subverted through a process of negotiation between students and teachers in the context of low expectations and the school culture. Implications for research and practice are discussed. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 574–598, 2001

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This exploratory project considers the use of wonder as a pedagogical tool with preservice elementary teachers (PSETs). An ongoing vexation facing science teacher educators is helping future elementary teachers overcome anxiety and negative associations with science due to their own school science experiences, while simultaneously encouraging innovative and ambitious teaching practice. Utilizing wonder as a pedagogical tool for emotional and aesthetic engagement with science holds promise as an entry point to connect future teachers with meaningful science content and practice. The link between wonder and science is well‐articulated by successful scientists throughout history, and yet is rarely employed explicitly within elementary or teacher education science learning contexts. Forging a pedagogy of wonder demands connection to the emotive embodiment of science as a uniquely human process that nurtures our intense need to know. This qualitative case study is an effort to better understand if utilizing pedagogy intentionally focused on wonder could impact PSETs’ perceptions of science and scientific thinking. This paper describes the key findings that emerged while utilizing pedagogy steeped in wonder with PSETs, and the degree to which engaging with wonder impacted their perceptions of science and their future science teaching. This research supports the critical role that wonder could play in changing PSETs’ relationship with science and assisting them in the development of the pedagogical courage necessary to envision possibilities beyond their past experiences.

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The goal of this critical ethnographic study was to investigate the difficult terrain between theoretical visions of transformation and actual transformative classroom practice. The study articulates how a critical science framework (Fusco and Calabrese-Barton, 2001) facilitated student development of critical stances, how students responded to these critical approaches, and closely documents the difficult process involved when working with transformative issues in the classroom.The study was carried out in a Health Science classroom in the southwestern borderland of the United States. Participants included a beginning teacher, who was committed to a critical science framework and 24 (9 th -12 th grade) students enrolled in the Health Science course. Over the two-year duration of the study, multiple sets of data were collected including but not limited to student interviews, focus groups, classroom observations, and sample student work. The main findings indicate that critical science approaches to content and pedagogy helped students envision that transformative possibilities do exist and deepened their understanding for how science content could benefit their future lives. Most importantly, students articulated how these approaches have helped them better understand their own points of Downloaded by [University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries] at 20:24 25 December 2014 Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 100100 view and these new understandings will serve as the basis for their current and future actions. Implications for the utilization of critical science pedagogy and impacts on students are also discussed.

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