Fostering deep learning, identity, and agency: Minoritized students learning biology in personal and community-relevant contexts

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Currently, equity remains an elusive goal in science education. Many minority groups continue to be underrepresented in science careers, limiting their opportunities to pursue potential science trajectories and diminishing benefits to society from diverse perspectives. Science learning environments, however, often do not build on or recognize the lives of students resulting in persistent marginalization. This, in turn, can lead minoritized youth to identify negatively with science and decreases their interest and success in science. Drawing on current research about increasing interest in and relevance of science for students, this project will explore how to promote positive identity development and science understandings aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. The project team will develop and study a learning environment that engages middle school students in addressing health-related problems in their own community. The team will collaborate with seventh grade students, their teachers, and community members to develop community-based science instruction. Students will draw on research within their own communities and use powerful technology tools to explore and explain the underlying biological and environmental causes of these problems. Using these resources, students will also create solutions for their communities. The project will contribute theoretical insights, a set of principles to inform future instructional design, professional development for teachers and will report their findings in journals, conferences, and a project website.Using a participatory design approach, this project aims to deepen the understanding of how to support minoritized youth in three interlinked aspects critical for success in school science and beyond: authoring science-linked identities, negotiating science epistemologies, and learning life science core ideas and practices. Through two consecutive implementation studies, the project team will investigate how a set of design principles related to these aspects shapes students’ science-linked identities and understandings of science practices and core disciplinary ideas. They will work in middle school biology classrooms and collaborate with administrators, teachers, students, and community members to design meaningful and consequential instruction for minoritized youth. In particular, they hope to better understand how to support science learning while inviting and integrating multiple epistemologies and student-salient identities. The outcomes will contribute theoretical insights about how interactions between epistemic agency and community-based consequential learning support identity work as well as science understandings; educative instructional materials that can be adapted to other communities and contexts; professional materials that can be used to support enactment of community-based learning environments; and adaptations of materials that can be used in teacher preparation programs. In addition to the materials, dissemination will include research and practitioner publications and presentations, professional development workshops for middle school teachers, and a project website that will make the materials and resources freely available to others.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.