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到反应性的或真实的科学学习体验中，在这种体验中，学生参与到关于他们感兴趣的问题的文本和基于探究的研究项目中（Goldman, 1997; Marx, Blumenfeld, Krajcik, & Soloway, 1997）。以科学项目为基础的课程的特点通常包括：(a)以现实问题为基础的驱动问题；(b)调查和文物创作；(c)学生、教师和社区其他人之间的合作；(d)技术工具的使用（Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, Bass & Fredricks, 118）。事实上，这些都是由教育中高度互动计算中心（hi-ce）和城市学校学习技术中心（LeTUS）与几所底特律公立学校合作开发的课程所包含的特点。LeTUS议程的五个主要方面之一是关注社区参与，以及课程和教学法、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来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，并且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进行的初步评估表明，课程可以对这些学校所服务的特定社区的语言和文化问题作出更积极的反应。事实上，在接下来的几个月里，LeTUS所服务的城市学校的课程成功实施将取决于我们对课程的语言，识字和文化需求的解决。虽然我们需要在努力实现儿童科学学习方面的社区知识和需求方面采取一些紧迫的行动，以便让社区参与到课程中学到的科学中来。此外，我们需要检查课程制定的几个组成部分，以寻找课程和随附材料的交汇点；教师围绕语言和读写能力的表演；以及教师对学生日常知识和认识、存在、阅读、写作和说话方式的运用。考虑到这些话语和文本的要求，重要的是要问，这些课程及其附带的文本涉及哪些语言技能，即语言、读写能力和技术技能，以及这些技能如何塑造学生的学习机会。简而言之，年轻人需要具备哪些能力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？怎样才能使课程在文化上对学生的需要有反应，在语言上也对学生的需要有反应？我们建议进行三个相关的探索性研究——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来推进LeTUS的使命，并为未来对这些问题的调查奠定基础。

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.