This book offers valuable guidance for science teacher educators looking for ways to facilitate preservice and inservice teachers’ pedagogy relative to teaching students from underrepresented and underserved populations in the science classroom. It also provides solutions that will better equip science teachers of underrepresented student populations with effective strategies that challenge the status quo, and foster classrooms environment that promotes equity and social justice for all of their science students. Multicultural Science Education illuminates historically persistent, yet unresolved issues in science teacher education from the perspectives of a remarkable group of science teacher educators and presents research that has been done to address these issues. It centers on research findings on underserved and underrepresented groups of students and presents frameworks, perspectives, and paradigms that have implications for transforming science teacher education. In addition, the chapters provide an analysis of the socio-cultural-political consequences in the ways in which science teacher education is theoretically conceptualized and operationalized in the United States. The book provides teacher educators with a framework for teaching through a lens of equity and social justice, one that may very well help teachers enhance the participation of students from traditionally underrepresented and underserved groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas and help them realize their full potential in science. Moreover, science educators will find this book useful for professional development workshops and seminars for both novice and veteran science teachers. "Multicultural Science Education: Preparing Teachers for Equity and Social Justice directly addresses the essential role that science teacher education plays for the future of an informed and STEM knowledgeable citizenry. The editors and authors review the beginnings of multicultural science education, and then highlight findings from studies on issues of equity, underrepresentation, cultural relevancy, English language learning, and social justice. The most significant part of this book is the move to the policy level—providing specific recommendations for policy development, implementation, assessment and analysis, with calls to action for all science teacher educators, and very significantly, all middle and high school science teachers and prospective teachers. By emphasizing the important role that multicultural science education has played in providing the knowledge base and understanding of exemplary science education, Multicultural Science Education: Preparing Teachers for Equity and Social Justice gives the reader a scope and depth of the field, along with examples of strategies to use with middle and high school students. These classroom instructional strategies are based on sound science and research. Readers are shown the balance between research-based data driven models articulated with successful instructional design. Science teacher educators will find this volume of great value as they work with their pre-service and in-service teachers about how to address and infuse multicultural science education within their classrooms. For educators to be truly effective in their classrooms, they must examine every component of the learning and teaching process. Multicultural Science Education: Preparing Teachers for Equity and Social Justice provides not only the intellectual and research bases underlying multicultural studies in science education, but also the pragmatic side. All teachers and teacher educators can infuse these findings and recommendations into their classrooms in a dynamic way, and ultimately provide richer learning experiences for all students." Patricia Simmons, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA "This provocative collection of chapters is a presentation in gutsiness. Ingenious in construction and sequencing, this book will influence science teacher educators by introducing them to issues of equity and social justice directly related to women and people of color. The authors unflinchingly interrogate issues of equity which need to be addressed in science education courses. "This provocative collection of chapters is a presentation in gutsiness. Ingenious in construction and sequencing, this book will influence science teacher educators by introducing them to issues of equity and social justice directly related to women and people of color. The authors unflinchingly interrogate issues of equity which need to be addressed in science education courses. It begins with setting current cultural and equity issue within a historic frame. The first chapter sets the scene by moving the reader through 400 years in which African-American’s were ‘scientifically excluded from science’. This is followed by a careful review of the Jim Crow era, an analysis of equity issues of women and ends with an examination of sociocultural consciousness and culturally responsive teaching. Two chapters comprise the second section. Each chapter examines the role of the science teacher in providing a safe place by promoting equity and social justice in the classroom. The three chapters in the third section focus on secondary science teachers. Each addresses issues of preparation that provides new teachers with understanding of equity and provokes questions of good teaching. Section four enhances and expands the first section as the authors suggest cultural barriers the impact STEM engagement by marginalized groups. The last section, composed of three chapters, interrogates policy issues that influence the science classroom." Molly Weinburgh, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, USA

This handbook gathers in one volume the major research and scholarship related to multicultural science education that has developed since the field was named and established by Atwater in 1993. Culture is defined in this handbook as an integrated pattern of shared values, beliefs, languages, worldviews, behaviors, artifacts, knowledge, and social and political relationships of a group of people in a particular place or time that the people use to understand or make meaning of their world, each other, and other groups of people and to transmit these to succeeding generations. The research studies include both different kinds of qualitative and quantitative studies. The chapters in this volume reflect differing ideas about culture and its impact on science learning and teaching in different K-14 contexts and policy issues. Research findings about groups that are underrepresented in STEM in the United States, and in other countries related to language issues and indigenous knowledge are included in this volume.

Annotation Eighteen contributors from science, research, science education, teacher preparation, multicultural education, and cultural anthropology provide multiple perspectives on the complex issues of multicultural science education. Coverage includes an historical overview of the key issues, the "discourse of invisibility" in the National Science Education Standards, expanding the sociocultural focus in science curricula, the influences of worldview and self- identity on science teaching, avoiding pitfalls in creating culturally relevant science, an alternate framework for conceptualizing science, and cultural inclusion models for African American and Native American students. For science educators. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Designed to help primary school teachers build a multicultural dimension into their teaching of science, this book provides a wide variety of practical ideas for use in both multi-ethnic and all-white classrooms. The contributors also examine the underlying rationale for a multicultural approach to science education.

"Science Learning for All: Celebrating Cultural Diversity covers three "must-know" areas of multicultural science education: Inclusive curriculum design, multicultural teaching strategies, language diversity in science teaching and learning. You'll find fresh ideas on how to meet the science learning needs of all students. You'll also discover focused teaching techniques, tips on handling language diversity, practical insights on giving students an appreciation of the contributions that all cultures make to our scientific heritage, and more." -- Back Cover

Two leading science educators provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-field analysis of current trends in the research, policy, and practice of science education. This book offers valuable insights into why gaps in science achievement among racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic groups persist, and points toward practical means of narrowing or eliminating these gaps. Lee and Buxton examine instructional practices, science–curriculum materials (including computer technology), assessment, teacher education, school organization, federal and state policies, and home-school connections. Book features: A synthesis of the emerging body of research in the field of science education and its application to practice and policy. A description of effective practices for narrowing science achievement gaps among demographic subgroups of students. A focus on the unique learning needs of English language learners. An analysis of major science education initiatives, interventions, and programs that have been successful with nonmainstream students.

A text for elementary-level science teachers who must, like teachers of other disciplines, begin to incorporate consciousness of multiculturalism in the content and strategies of their lessons. Includes background and research-based theory, discussion of assessing knowledge in the science classroom,

This open access book engages with the response-ability of science education to Indigenous ways-of-living-with-Nature. Higgins deconstructs the ways in which the structures of science education—its concepts, categories, policies, and practices—contribute to the exclusion (or problematic inclusion) of Indigenous science while also shaping its ability respond. Herein, he undertakes an unsettling homework to address the ways in which settler colonial logics linger and lurk within sedimented and stratified knowledge-practices, turning the gaze back onto science education. This homework critically inhabits culture, theory, ontology, and history as they relate to the multicultural science education debate, a central curricular location that acts as both a potential entry point and problematic gatekeeping device, in order to (re)open the space of responsiveness towards Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being.

How does language comprise the implicit or explicit curriculum of teaching and learning in multicultural science settings? Building on a growing interest in the ways in which language and literacy practices interact with science teaching and learning to facilitate or obstruct successful student outcomes, this book contributes to scholarship on the role of language in developing classroom scientific communities of practice, expands that work by highlighting the challenges faced specifically by ethnic- and linguistic-"minority" students and their teachers in joining those communities, and showcases exemplary teaching and research initiatives for helping to meet these challenges. Offering teacher practitioners and researchers in the fields of science education and multicultural education lenses through which they can critically consider the myriad of classroom settings, instructional approaches, curricular materials, and scientific topics involved in what it means to teach science while pointedly addressing concerns about equity of educational opportunity, this volume serves as a powerful resource for linking theory and practice. End-of-chapter reflection questions and engagement activities facilitate discussion round these issues and provide rich opportunities for the reader to consider the implications of each chapter for science instruction and research and to apply insights developed in a real-world science teaching and learning contexts.

Addressing underlying issues in science education and teacher training, which contribute to continued underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minority students in STEM and STEAM subjects and careers, this timely volume illustrates how a critical postmodern science pedagogy (CPSP) can be used effectively to raise awareness of diversity issues amongst preservice teachers. Using a case study design consisting of class observations, interviews, content analysis, questionnaires, and instructional interventions in preservice teacher training, the volume bridges science and multicultural education and investigates how curricular development and teacher preparation can be used to ensure that science education itself promotes diversity within STEM, and throughout education. Chapters also examine the intersections of science education and science literacy for both students and teachers and, in doing so, promote the importance of positive and accurate representation of diversity within science and research discourse. The book attempts to raise awareness regarding the need for meaningful curricular reform that creates real opportunities to address historical and scientific misinformation, while increasing diversity and inclusion in schools and society. This important text will be of interest to postgraduate students, researchers, scholars, and preservice teachers in the fields of science and mathematics education, STEM, multicultural education, teacher education, urban education, and the sociology of education.