Intersection-
Science curricula nationwide have moved to include, and even focus on, the environmental issues we are causing both because they are full of complex scientific truths, but also because they are problems that our children will inherit, and they need solutions. Despite being a science teacher teaching a science course, I cannot focus solely on science, because science is part of our world, it is not separate from the world.
“With traditional research, the knowledge we gain is one-dimensional and has less complexity, leaving us less equipped to solve the pressing social issues around us. In other words, when we look at the world one issue at a time—identifying climate change vulnerabilities based solely on race, or building safety nets based on disability status alone—entire communities fall through the cracks,” Jackson says. “An intersectional lens provides a more complete and honest picture of the multiple factors that shape people’s everyday lives. It can be difficult and sometimes messy, but whether you’re a scientist or an activist, thinking about various forms of oppression in a simultaneous, integrated manner will likely help you arrive at a better and more equitable answer to the problem at hand.” 2
Recognizing our own intersectionality is important, but it is also important to recognize that the topics we study also exist inside a complex network of intersecting spaces. A discussion of climate change that does not include mention of politics, racism, or capitalism is incomplete and dishonest.
Decompartmentalizing-
Discussing the intersectionality of the topics we cover makes these topics more approachable for students, but it also helps combat the tendency that high school students have to think each subject they learn is separate and distinct from the other subjects they learn. “Students often do not see the relevance of prior material because they compartmentalize knowledge by course, semester, professor, or discipline and so they don’t even think to bring that knowledge to bear. This compartmentalization leads students to organize knowledge in a way that is very different from yours and can impede its use.”3 This tendency toward compartmentalization makes it harder for them to transfer knowledge and skills learned in one subject into another. Sometimes that looks like their math teacher and I both having to teach them how to graph, because while it is the exact same skill, because the skill is being used in different subjects, many students do not recognize it as the same. Sometimes instead it is content knowledge, for example a topic often taught in eighth grade includes that the continental plates move because of the convection currents of the mantle, and most students struggle to connect that to the convection currents in the air that we discuss in ninth grade. I have no research to back this up, but I have noticed that the more intentional I am in the classroom about recognizing the intersectionality of topics, and sometimes even talking through different aspects of my own intersectionality if and when it applies, the easier it is for my students to see that their academic knowledge and skills can be similar–learned in one course and yet transferable to another.
Teaching students in a way that encourages them to decompartmentalize their learning is really important. It helps them to be more flexible thinkers and enables them to be successful with complex tasks that require multiple skill and knowledge sets. More importantly, since they are only in school for a short time and with each teacher for an even shorter time, if they struggle to access their knowledge outside of individual academic classes, we are not setting them up for long term success outside of high school. If we rarely (or never) ask them to practice putting all of the pieces together, they will not have the ability to do so when it is needed. “Students must develop not only the component skills and knowledge necessary to perform complex tasks, they must also practice combining and integrating them to develop greater fluency and automaticity. Finally, students must learn when and how to apply the skills and knowledge they learn.”4
Storytelling-
In addition to asking students questions that make them examine the different spheres that our topics reside in, one of the ways that I teach is by telling stories. It sounds silly, and it is not an approach to education that I learned about in my teacher prep program, but I just do not know any other way to stand in a room with twenty people who are trying to make meaning of some information I have shared with them, without telling them a story that puts the information into a real world context. I did not even realize this was a thing that I did frequently enough for it to stand out, but many MANY of my former students have commented on it, so it must be something that I did a lot without realizing it. Now that I am aware however, I am intentional about the stories that I tell. The general theme from my former students is that they remember my stories and through those stories, they remember my content, so I will continue, both to tell stories and to be intentional with the stories that I tell. Science often contains topics that are difficult for students to conceptualize because while they can see the effects of many things, they literally cannot see an atom, they cannot see carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, they cannot see the mantle moving underground, etc. so it often feels for them like they’re believing me because I am the teacher, but only because I am the teacher. And, if I want them to be able to do more than just believe me, but to integrate the new information with what they already know, I have to help them, and one of the easiest ways I know how to do that is to tell a story.
“Stories can be used to explain and illustrate abstract ideas or concepts in a way that makes them accessible and attainable. Stories bring facts to life, make the abstract concrete and, through meaning making, walk the listener through the mind of the scientist or mathematician (Ellis, 2005) to understand the value and application of such concepts. Wells (1986) argued that storytelling is a fundamental means of meaning making.” 5
Inquiry-
Another approach I use in the classroom is inquiry. While it is a long-time buzzword, it is also really the basis of science. We want to know what will happen if. We want to know why this. We want to know how that. This curiosity is first- one of my favorite things to see in my students. Curious students are engaged, they are learning, they are motivated, and they remember. This curiosity also leads students who may be hesitant about science to recognize that science is a lot more about how you think than it is about what you can memorize. I have a handful of students every year who anticipate that high school science will be memorizing the Periodic Table or learning all the scientific names for all the animals. It is of course neither, and generally they are relieved to find out that I have not memorized the Periodic Table (it’s arranged in a reference table so nobody ever needs to!) nor do I know all the scientific names of all the animals (I have Google for that!)
I love to get my students thinking. If I can show them something that makes them pause and that they cannot immediately figure out, I consider it a good lesson. If I can get them to try to figure out possible reasons why this or consequences of that on their own, even if their explanations aren’t perfectly accurate, I consider it a great lesson. Inquiry, like many buzzwords, has almost as many explanations as it there are people who use the word, but this explanation resonates with me:
“Inquiry-based science adopts an investigative approach to teaching and learning where students are provided with opportunities to investigate a problem, search for possible solutions, make observations, ask questions, test out ideas, and think creatively and use their intuition. In this sense, inquiry-based science involves students doing science where they have opportunities to explore possible solutions, develop explanations for the phenomena under investigation, elaborate on concepts and processes, and evaluate or assess their understandings in the light of available evidence. This approach to teaching relies on teachers recognizing the importance of presenting problems to students that will challenge their current conceptual understandings so they are forced to reconcile anomalous thinking and construct new understandings.” 6
Group Work-
Group work is often joked about. The teacher does not want to teach so they have students teach themselves, one person does all the work, and everyone else learns nothing. This is certainly possible, but I aim for a slightly better approach. I often have students work in groups. Sometimes it is for a few minutes in class just to be exposed to others' ideas or to provide an intermediate or revision step between coming up with one’s idea and sharing it with the entire class. Sometimes students will work in groups for a longer time, to produce a project or to learn a specific content that not everyone is learning about. There is also a very real practical aspect to group work in a science classroom; I often do not have enough equipment, supplies, or even space to have each student work individually on any sort of hands-on activity, so I put them into groups to allow everyone to access the activity without having to buy a class set of what is often expensive materials or spill out into the hall.
One of my favorite group projects involves students being grouped together to learn about and become the class experts on a topic, each group having a different topic. Each group is given both text and video-based resources to use, so that reading skills–which vary greatly among my students–are not a barrier to their ability to learn and understand their source material. They prepare, they help each other understand the source material, and they polish their reasons and arguments within their group, because they are the students who know their topic the best. Then they debate with each other. I run two rounds of debate, which allows me to pick the students from each group who are more comfortable speaking to go first, and provide a model for their partners to follow, it also means that there is always an audience, so I have students give feedback to their partners that day, because it always takes me a couple days to give feedback to every participant. This exercise is graded, but is effectively practice for the final project of that unit, which has my students being interviewed one-on-one by upperclassmen about their topic. They prepare for certain questions, the interviewers are allowed to ask related follow up questions and they take notes which they give to me, I also make certain to interview every single student, and then I read over all the notes about each students’ answers to grade them. This uses a group approach to learning and to refining their ideas and arguments, but also requires individual understanding of their material and individual participation, which is why it is one of my favorite group projects, and I am going to try to adapt this particular project’s framework to one of the topics in my new curriculum.
Anti-racism in the science classroom:
Anti-racism is a recent buzzword, but is also incredibly important, as a human certainly, but especially as an educator. In short, anti-racism is working towards dismantling racist power structures, and while we cannot take on the entire structure and organization of our national government within our classrooms, teachers can work on whatever falls within their sphere, from their own classroom policies to examining the effect of racism on pieces of their content. The NSTA (National Science Teaching Association) suggests the following two actions, among others, to create an anti-racist science classroom:
- Create a culture of discourse on social justice. As science teachers, we have a responsibility to practice the nature of science in our classrooms, which includes arguing from evidence on societal issues that directly impact our BIPOC students. Our students must feel heard and validated while participating in the science and engineering practices innovated by the Framework.
- Cultivate learning experiences that embrace each of your students. Actively seek phenomena that speak to the cultures, communities, and lived identities of our students. We must advocate for increased diversity in our curriculum and instruction and amplify the voices of Black and indigenous scientists’ contributions to STEM.7
As we explore environmental problems in the world, we will explore the ways in which people of color are exposed to more pollutants in their communities. This comes from the placement of waste treatment facilities, toxic waste disposal sites, and industrial and chemical plants; they are all more likely to be found in and around places with a higher percentage of POC residents and low income residents.
“Environmental racism refers to the unequal access to a clean environment and basic environmental resources based on race. Communities of color are disproportionately victimized by environmental hazards and are far more likely to live in areas with heavy pollution. People of color are more likely to die of environmental causes, and more than half of the people who live close to hazardous waste are people of color.” 8
This links right into the second item on the NSTA’s list, seeking examples that link to my students’ communities. In looking at New Haven’s history, we are looking at their community. A lot of what we will look at is negative. We will look at the old red lined map of New Haven from the thirties, and compare it to current maps showcasing a variety of neighborhood by neighborhood data. We will see that many of the neighborhoods graded red and yellow then, are still the neighborhoods in town with the least tree cover, they are the neighborhoods with the highest incidence of COVID outbreaks in 2020, they are the neighborhoods with the lowest percentage of home ownership. We will also look at the harbor with all the oil tanks on it and why they are there. We will look at Murphy Roach Recycling and how they keep expanding.
This cannot be all we look at though, instead I need to show the activists in their city who are working to make positive changes in their communities. Doreen Abubakar who turned the Mudhole into the Learning Corridor, a place where people can learn outdoor skills and hobbies–among other things. Domingo Medina who started a composting company in town because he knew many people wanted to compost but could not. Alex Rodriguez who works for Save our Sound and tried to do outreach to local people to get them to help locally. And others, who are doing their part to make our city greener, safer, and healthier.
Action:
There are a number of local organizations that accept volunteer help. I’d love to connect with one for some ecology work, which would be especially useful to my students as many of them struggle to get the ten hours of community service that our school (and I believe NHPS) require of every student every year. Another activity I’d like to do with my students is what we often call “citizen science” or “community science.” While they are different, both involve people doing active research, whether it’s counting individuals of a plant or animal species in a given area or calculating the brightness of the sky (or certain stars) to determine air pollution levels, or anything in between. The difference between citizen science and community science has to do with who is in charge of the task, citizen science tends to have an actual researcher in charge of organizing the tracking tasks and the data while community science is usually based in a local group, though the actual tasks tend to be pretty similar. Any and all of these would be great for students to get involved with – both because the environmental problems we study tend to feel really overwhelming and taking action helps with that, and also because it’s really great for high school students to see that “science” isn’t just people in white coats in a lab, in fact it’s often people knee deep in muck outside somewhere.
One idea I have specifically for students is grading water quality. I’d like to have my students examine the invertebrate species that live in the nearby river (the Mill River) to determine how sensitive they are to pollution. There are keys put out by the EPA that allow students to relatively quickly identify the different species of invertebrates that live in each area, and they include whether the animal is considered “very sensitive,” “sensitive,” “tolerant,” or “very tolerant.” Based on the percentage of each category we find, we can assign the water a grade. If the water has only tolerant and very tolerant animals living in it with no or very few sensitive individuals, it is likely polluted. There is a unit in my new curriculum that deals with water. The new curriculum is not fully written, including the water unit, so I cannot say exactly what that will entail, but if it fits at all, I will have my students do this. If it does not, I will look into other citizen or community science opportunities that will allow my students to do “real” science while also liking what they are doing to what they are learning in the classroom.
Both of these options, grading the water quality and participating in citizen or community science opportunities locally fit in with my school’s motto: “Think critically, Be responsible, Get involved.” Getting involved can look like a variety of things from political to social to environmental efforts, and certainly being part of local scientific research to help improve the environment would fit the bill. In addition, there are benefits for the students to getting involved in citizen science.
“For student participants, the immersive experience of citizen science makes learning fun and offers a clear integration of science understanding with real-world application. Working together, citizen scientists and professional researchers help create a community of more knowledgeable and better-informed community members who can respond quickly and effectively to issues that arise in our rapidly-changing world.” 9
Helping my students see that they can get involved in science, whether as a career or just as a weekend activity once in a while, opens doors for them. No longer is “science” something one needs advanced degrees to participate in, no longer is it something that is esoteric and shrouded in complex words, no longer is it something confined to a lab, it is open to all of us and can be really fun to participate in.
Additional instructional strategies/materials:
- Videos
- Readings
- Notes
- Organizers - for notes, writing, and discussions
