Including Language, Literacy and Community in Standard-Based Science Education Reform: Toward Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Curriculum

最近的课程设计项目试图让学生参与响应性或真实的科学学习体验，让学生参与关于他们感兴趣的问题的文本和基于探究的研究项目(Goldman，1997；Max，Blumenfeld，Krajcik，&Amp；Soloway，1997)。以科学项目为基础的课程的特点一般包括：(A)以现实世界问题为基础的驱动性问题；(B)调查和人工制品；(C)学生、教师和社区中其他人之间的合作；以及(D)技术工具的使用(Krajcik，Blumenfeld，Max，Bass&Amp；Fredricks，118)。事实上，这些都是高等交互计算教育中心(HI-CE)和城市学校学习技术中心(LETUS)与底特律几所公立学校合作开发的课程中包含的特点。LETUS议程的五个主要方面之一是关注社区参与，以及课程和教学、学习技术、专业发展以及政策和管理。LETUS研究人员在课程制定的头两年的经验表明，需要做更详细的工作，以解决与语言和扫盲有关的一些课程问题，这些问题对社区参与有影响，可以通过社区参与来解决。具体地说，对以项目为基础的课程的初步评估表明，在这些学校所服务的特定社区的语言和文化问题方面，课程可以得到更好的响应。事实上，在未来几个月里，由LeTUS服务的城市学校的课程教学是否成功，将取决于我们能否满足这些课程的语言、识字和文化需求。尽管我们需要在努力实现社区对儿童科学学习的了解和需求方面取得一些紧迫的进展，以便让社区参与到课程中所学到的科学中来。此外，我们需要研究课程制定的几个组成部分，以寻找课程和配套材料的交汇点；教师围绕语言和识字制定的法规；以及教师对学生日常知识和认识、存在、阅读、写作和交谈方式的使用。考虑到这些话语和文本要求，重要的是要问这样的课程和相应的课本涉及哪些语言技能--即语言、识字和技术技能，以及这些技能如何塑造学生的学习机会。简而言之，年轻人需要做些什么才能最大限度地从基于项目的科学中获益？为了支持学生的学习，我们需要在项目中嵌入什么策略？为响应文化而设计的课程如何也能在语言上响应学生的需求？我们建议进行三项相关的探索性研究--课程内容分析、社区民族学和课堂解释性研究--这将使我们能够通过解决这些问题并为未来对这些问题的调查奠定基础来推进LETUS的使命。

Recent curriculum design projects have attempted to engage students in responsive or authentic science learning experiences in which students engage in textual and inquiry-based research projects about questions of interest to them (Goldman, 1997; Marx, Blumenfeld, Krajcik, & Soloway, 1997). The features of science project-based curricula generally include (a) driving questions anchored in real-world problems; (b) investigations and artifact creathion; (c) collaboration among students, teachers, and othersin the community; and (d) use of technological tools (Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, Bass & Fredricks, (118). Indeed, these are the features included in curriculum developed by the Centers for HighlyInteractive computing in Education (hi-ce) and Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS) in collaboration with several Detroit public schools. One of the five major facets of the LeTUS agenda is a focus on community engagement, along with curriculum and pedagogy, learning technology, professional development, and policy and management. The experiences of LeTUS researchers during the firts two years of curriculum enactment suggests that more detailed work needs to be done to address a number of curricular issues related to language and literacy, issues that have implications for and that can be addressed through community engagement. Specifically, an initial assessment of the project-based curriculum indicates that the curriculum can be made more responsive in regard to language and culture concerns in the particular communities served by these schools. In fact, successful curriculum entactment in the urban schools served by LeTUS over the next several months will depend on our addressing these language, literacy, and cultural demands of the curriculum. Although we need to move forward with some urgency in our efforts toward community knows and needs in regard to childern's science learning-in order to engage the community with the science learned in curriculum. In addition, we need to examine several components of curriculum enactment to look for meeting points of the curriculum and accompanying materials; the teachers' enactments surrounding language and literacy; and the teachers' use of the students' everyday knowledge and ways of knowing, being, reading, writing and talking. Given these discursive and textual demands, it is important to ask what linguistic - that is language,literacy, and technology skills - are engaged by such curricula and their accompanying texts, and how these skills shape students' opportunities to learn. In short, what do young people need to be able to do to get the most from project-based science? What strategies do we need to embed in projects in order to support students' learning? In what ways can curricula designed to be culturally responsive also be made linguistically responsive to the needs of students? We propose to engage in three related exploratory studies - a curriculum content analysis, a community ethnology, and a classroom interpretive study - that will allow us to advance the mission of the LeTUS by addressing these questions and laying the groundwork for future investigations of these issues.