ABSTRACT:We use identity as a multidimensional lens to explore ways in which beginning teachers saw themselves as scientists and as science teachers during and after 10-week summer apprenticeships at a science lab. Data included four interviews with each teacher, three during the apprenticeship and one after the first year of teaching. Two themes emerged that were used to organize the findings: (a) science as a practice and (b) science as a community of practice. Teachers came to appreciate certain science practices, speech acts, and tools. As scientists, they noticed and engaged in the nonlinearity, messiness, risk taking, evolution over time, and complexity of science (their own and others'), and in both levels of scientific activity, theory and data, and their interplay. Their scientist identity also came to incorporate the delicate dynamics of collaboration, autonomy, and mentoring within a community. However, for several reasons the teachers raised, such practices became elements of their science teacher identities to differing degrees. What they experienced as science teachers was a sense of conflict. At times this conflict took the form of ambivalence,

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In this study, we explore oral and written work (plays and rap songs) of students in a sixth‐grade all African‐American urban science class to reveal ways affective and social aspects are intertwined with students' cognition. We interpret students' work in terms of the meeting of various genres brought by the students and teachers to the classroom. Students bring youth genres, classroom genres that they have constructed from previous schooling, and perhaps their own science genres. Teachers bring their favored classroom and science genres. We show how students' affective reactions were an integral part of their constructed scientific knowledge. Their knowledge building emerged as a social process involving a range of transactions among students and between students and teacher, some transactions being relatively smooth and others having more friction. Along with their developing science genre, students portrayed elements of classroom genres that did not exist in the classroom genre that the teacher sought to bring to the class. Students' work offered us a glimpse of students' interpretations of gender dynamics in their classrooms. Gender also was related to the particular ways that students in that class included disagreement in their developing science genre. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 579–605, 2002

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This article addresses the problem of authentic student engagement in the science classroom by incorporating a semester long research and writing assignment that enables students to investigate scientific topics related to strong personal, career, or health interests. Students practice self-reflexivity by journaling about their experiences in the course and with the assignment as the course unfolds. The article presents student voices from the journals to inform their discussion of their own reflections about the problems and promises of this assignment and demonstrates that teacher self-reflexivity requires acknowledging both successes and failures. This article helps us understand how reflexivity can be used to improve student engagement in general education courses, particularly those in which some students feel marginalized.

In this study, we embark on an exploration and analysis of a community of learners of science in a classroom of one of the authors (Barbara Lustcr)--a group of Year 8 African American girls and boys in an urban, inner-city school. This study is a coUaborative action research project that examines closely the practice of roaching and learning science within a socio-culmral perspective that Barbara has espoused and brought to her classroom. We study the two dimensions of a community of Icamcrs--social-organisafional, and intellectual-thematic---and how each evolved and influcnceA the other. As we explore thcs~ dimensions we pay particular attention to the gender of the students, looking for similarities and differences bcrwccn boys and girls in the patterns that emerge. Our findings indicat_e that in Barbara's class the relative success of the learning community in terms of the social-organisational dimension was not accompanied by a relative success in the intellectual-thematic dimension. Barbara and her students, for the most part, succeeded in developing a community of people coming together to ask questions, offer their thinking, and respectfully sometimes build on each other's con~bufions and sometimes disagree with each 0ther. However, Barbara and her students did not quite succe~ in developing sharod undt,~andings, and we discuss the reasons for thi~ Increased attention to socio-cultural approaches to teaching and learning has led to a growing literature regarding how classrooms with diverse students can become communities of learners. As Simonson (1995) writes, a community of learners is a supportive, caring environment that provides time, struaure, and space for individuals who, in the case of a classroom, are the students and the teacher. It is a socio=cultural system mutually and actively created by teacher and students. In a community of learners all participants are active; no one has all the responsibility and none is passive. Children and teacher together are active in structuring what is explored and how, though with asymmetry of roles. This is a very different model fzom both an "adult-run" or a "children-run" classroom. As Rogoff, Matusov & White (1996) writes, "it is not a compromise or a balance of the adult=run and children-run models. Its underlying theoretical notion is that learning is a process of transformation of participation in which both adults and children conm'bute support and direction in shared endeavors" (p. 389). This model is consistent with the vision that the National Science Education Standards promote, according to which in a community of learners all members "support and respect a diversity of experience, ideas, thought, and expression" (National Research Council, 1996, p. 46).

This article addresses the problem of authentic student engagement in the science classroom by incorporating a semester long research and writing assignment that enables students to investigate scientific topics related to strong personal, career, or health interests. Students practice self-reflexivity by journaling about their experiences in the course and with the assignment as the course unfolds. The article presents student voices from the journals to inform their discussion of their own reflections about the problems and promises of this assignment and demonstrates that teacher self-reflexivity requires acknowledging both successes and failures. This article helps us understand how reflexivity can be used to improve student engagement in general education courses, particularly those in which some students feel marginalized.

We examined curricular orientations that graduate students in science and mathematics fields held as they experienced urban high‐school science and mathematics classrooms. We analyzed how these educators (called Fellows) saw themselves, students, teachers, schools, education, and the sense they made of mathematics and science education in urban, challenging settings in the light of experiences they brought with them into the project and experiences they designed and engaged in as they worked in classrooms for 1 or 2 years. We used Schubert's (Schubert (1997) Curriculum: Perspective, paradigm, and possibility. New Jersey: Prentice‐Hall, Inc.) four curricular orientations—intellectual traditionalism, social behaviorism, experientialism, and critical reconstructionism—to analyze the Fellows' journals, and to explore ways in which the positions they portrayed relative to curriculum, instruction, assessment, social justice, discipline, student involvement, teacher's role, subject‐matter nature, etc., shaped and were shaped by who they were before and during their classroom work. Our qualitative analysis revealed various relationships including: experientialists engaged in more open‐ended projects, relevant to students, with explicit connections to everyday‐life experiences; social behaviorists paid more attention to designing “good” labs and activities that taught students appropriate content, led them through various steps, and modeled good science and mathematics; and critical reconstructionists hyped up student knowledge and awareness of science issues that affect students' lives, such as asthma and HIV epidemic. Categorizing orientations and identifying relationships between experiences, actions, and orientations may help us articulate and explicate goals, priorities, and commitments that we have, or ought to have, when we work in urban classrooms. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 1–26, 2009