Navigating role forces and the aesthetic|authentic caring dialectic: a novice urban science teacher’s developmental trajectory

Abstract

Examining role forces and resources available to new teachers is crucial to understanding how teachers use and expand cultural, social, and symbolic resources and how they engage teaching for social justice and caring in urban science education. This critical narrative inquiry explores three levels of story. First, the narratives explore my role as a district science staff developer and my efforts to leverage district resources to improve students' opportunities to learn science. Second, the narratives explore the ways in which a novice science teacher, Tina, navigated role forces and the aesthetic|authentic caring dialectic in a high poverty, urban school. A third level of narrative draws on sociological theories of human interaction to explore role forces and how they shaped Tina's developmental trajectory. I describe how Tina expanded cultural, social, and symbolic resources to enact her teaching role.

Becoming an urban science teacher: How beginning teachers negotiate contradictory school contexts

“…Urban science teachers also face many unique challenges, such as competing school priorities (Rivera Maulucci, ; Settlage, Southerland, Smith, & Ceglie, ) and a lack of resources and school‐based support for instruction (Spillane, Diamond, Walker, Halverson, & Jita, ). Additionally, urban science teachers often have multiple instructional preps in different domains of science (i.e., biology, physics, and chemistry), and must master a greater variety of teaching strategies with fewer clear curriculum guides compared to other subjects (Luft et al, ).…”

“…Research also indicates science teachers may experience a mismatch between their preparation and the urban school context. Preparation programs for science education, particularly at the secondary level, tend to emphasize content knowledge and the “technical knowledge of teaching,” without attention to practices essential to being effective educators in urban schools (Han, Madhuri, & Scull, ; Rivera Maulucci, ). Moreover, research indicates new science teachers tend to implement practices that prioritize transmission of knowledge and compliance, regardless of their experiences in teacher preparation due to school‐based instructional norms (Han et al, ; Munby et al, ; Rodriguez, ).…”

“…As described by Feiman‐Nemser () “[t]he first years of teaching are an intense and formative time in learning to teach, influencing not only whether people remain in teaching but what kind of teacher they become,” (p. 1026). Research indicates new science teachers tend to socialize into school instructional norms regardless of the values and experiences promoted in preparation (Han et al, ; Rivera Maulucci, ; Rodriguez, ).…”

Resisting the marginalization of science in an urban school: Coactivating social, cultural, material, and strategic resources

“…This study seeks to understand how equity indicators interact in the lives of teachers and students in schools and how teachers activate resources for science teaching in the classroom. In a larger study, I explored the interplay between theories and practices of teaching science for social justice in a large, K‐8, urban, public school in New York City (Rivera Maulucci, 2005; Rivera Maulucci & Calabrese Barton, 2005). The school was designated a School under Registration Review by the State (SURR School), in 1996 for low literacy and mathematics achievement, and redesigned in 1999, when it was separated into an elementary school, and a middle school for grades 5–8 (School Report Card, 2001).…”

Caring in the Context of Discipline Reform: A Framework for Researchers and Policymakers

“…Authentic caring is a “reformulation” of traditional school relations and involves “a search for connection where trusting relationships constitute the cornerstone for all learning” (Valenzuela, 1999, p. 5). Authentic caring centers students’ cultures and needs (Rivera Maulucci, 2010) and relationships (Valenzuela, 1999). In contrast, aesthetic caring emphasizes the technical dimensions of education and follows a narrow, instrumentalist logic (Noddings, 1984; Valenzuela, 1999, p. 22).…”