Science Education Campaign for Research, Equity & Teaching: A Working Conference

这次会议的目的是组织关于科学教育公平的学术工作，并扩大以公平为重点的科学教育学者队伍。公平已经成为许多科学教育学者关注的焦点，但科学教育应该惠及所有学生的理念应该是所有高质量教学的基础。学者们已经记录了扩大从事科学工作的个人多样性的政策和战略。反过来，实践者将这些进步融入到科学课堂实践中。在不降低期望值的情况下，可以提供更好的科学学习机会。然而，许多重要的项目只有当地参与者和少数外人知道。大会将把这些零散的资料集中收集起来。制定关于以公平为中心的科学教育的共识文件将提供一个共同的知识体系。拥有这些共同的参照物将有助于巩固和协调研究活动。这些文件也将对从事专业发展、政策制定和教学改革的科学教育利益攸关方具有价值。该项目的第二个目的是计划在会议结束后继续开展这些努力。由于当前的社会和教育动态，在持续开展的以公平为中心的科学教育运动中，必须对后续的和同步的风险采取战略性和有计划的态度。人口和体制的变化使得有必要关注科学教育中的不平等。在科学职业的代表性、理工科大学生的代表性、参加高级科学课程的中学学生人数，以及在衡量科学成就的K-12学生成绩方面，种族和民族的差异一直存在，这令人担忧。这样的模式往往被归结为对人类潜力的欠缺思考。对缺陷的解释与课堂教师有偏见的期望、中学内部不适当的课程跟踪做法、大学导师和大学教职员工的不均衡关注和支持以及整个学术和企业STEM环境中充满敌意的工作环境有关。相比之下，引入关于边缘化人群的资产思维可能会与关于谁能在科学上成功，谁不能在科学上取得成功的偏见相矛盾。这个项目正在创建一个多方面的指导倡议，以帮助学者在他们选择的专业内最大限度地发挥影响并维持自己的地位。在参与者中，有相当多不同的职业轨迹和经验深度。这种多样性正在创造一个强大的学者网络，这些学者来自与科学教育相邻的领域：组织变革、学校咨询、教师领导力、技术教育和城市学校教育。会议提供支持机制，通过组织基础设施增加学者的人力资本，以促进专业社区的持续增长。这次会议之后的活动将继续支持这个社区，将公平作为其核心，而不是科学教育学术的一个辅助特征。探索研究PRK-12计划(DRK-12)旨在通过研究和开发新的创新和方法，显著提高Pre-K-12学生和教师在科学、技术、工程和数学方面的学习和教学。DRK-12计划中的项目建立在STEM教育的基础研究以及为项目提供理论和经验证明的先前研究和开发工作的基础上。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The purposes of this conference are to organize scholarly work about equity in science education and to broaden the set of scholars in science education who have equity as a focus. Equity has become a niche focus for many science education scholars, but the idea that science education should reach all students should be fundamental to all high quality teaching and learning. Scholars have documented policies and strategies that expand the diversity of individuals engaging in science. In turn, practitioners have incorporated these advances into science classroom practice. Better science learning opportunities can occur without diminishing expectations. However, many important projects are only known to local participants and a few outsiders. The conference will gather these scattered materials into a centralized collection. Producing consensus documents about equity-centered science education will provide a common body of knowledge. Having these shared referents will help to consolidate and coordinate research activity. Such documents will also have value for science education stakeholders engaged in professional development, policy enactments, and instructional reforms. The second purpose of this project is to plan for sustaining these efforts beyond the time of the conference. Because of current societal and educational dynamics, it is important to be strategic and planful about subsequent and synchronized ventures within an ongoing campaign for equity centered science education.Demographical and institutional shifts make it necessary to attend to inequities within science education. Disparities by race and ethnicity are troublingly persistent in terms of representation in science careers, of college students majoring in science and engineering, by secondary school enrollments in advanced science courses, and in K-12 student outcomes on measures of science achievement. Such patterns are often reduced to deficit thinking about human potential. Deficit explanations are related to biased expectations by classroom teachers, inappropriate course tracking practices within secondary schools, uneven attention and support by college advisors and university faculty, and hostile work environments throughout academic and corporate STEM settings. In contrast, introducing asset mindsets about marginalized populations has the potential to contradict biased views about who can and cannot be successful in science. This project is creating a multifaceted mentoring initiative to assist scholars with maximizing impacts and sustaining themselves within their chosen professions. Among participants, there is considerable variety of career trajectories and depth of experiences. This diversity is creating a robust network of scholars from fields adjacent to science education: organizational change, school counseling, teacher leadership, technology education, and urban schooling. The conference is providing support mechanisms to increase scholars’ human capital through an organizational infrastructure to foster the professional community’s continued growth. Activities subsequent to this conference are continuing to support this community, maintaining equity at its core rather than an auxiliary feature of scholarship in science education. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics by preK-12 students and teachers, through the research and development of new innovations and approaches. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for the projects.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.