Curricular orientations, experiences, and actions: Graduate students in science and mathematics fields work in urban high school classrooms

Abstract

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

Subject-Matter Experts in Urban Schools

“…These understandings extend, we believe, previous research (Christodoulou & Varelas, 2009) with a different, larger set of similar Fellows (9 Fellows were studied), which has shown that when science and mathematics experts work in urban classrooms, subject matter and learning of the subject matter were not the only dominant considerations. Rather these Fellows privileged studentcenteredness of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, without, though, critically analyzing existing practices and policies.…”

Conceptualizationof EcologyBasic Concept by the Application of Outdoor Learning - School Ground

“…Concept formation or simply as conceptualization defined as one of transfer ways of learning except to knowledge representation, analogical reasoning, generalization and embodied cognition [4]. Outdoor learning facilitated student conceptualization of basic ecology concept included to graphing species density qualitatively, generating real food chain, describing either biotic and abiotic interaction or mutual biotic interaction (symbiosis) and creating potential solution for environmental problem.…”

“…Besides, school ground is much popular and every day visited by student. [4]stated the learning process will be more effective if student was not participated in novice place for visit and related with daily living. A research by [5] suggests that learning biology in an outdoor environment has a positive cognitive impact.…”