CAREER: Teacher learning through expansive sensemaking in science

该奖项全部或部分由《2021年美国救援计划法案》（公法117-2）资助。虽然在课程和教学实践方面为教师提供支持以实施下一代科学标准（NGSS）已经做出了广泛的努力，但教师的学科学习经验尚未得到充分审查。本项目考虑教师参与科学意义构建作为教师学习的机会如何支持更广阔的科学学习环境。它试图解决科学教师教育中两个持续存在的挑战：教师需要学习(1)认识、重视和整合学生认识、交流和与彼此和现象联系的各种方式；(2)承认和打破限制性叙述，这些叙述决定了学校里什么是科学，谁被视为科学家。该项目将为科学教师教育提供新的模式，使教师参与广泛的科学意义建构，寻求在教师、学生和科学之间建立更加人性化的关系。更广泛地说，该项目将产生一种新的专业学习结构和资源，以支持教师教育中更加多样化和公平的科学形式。本项目的目标是设计和研究中学科学教师的学习，以重视异质性并挑战学校中限制性的科学叙述。特别是，它将研究(1)教师在自己的科学意义上学习的即时互动，(2)这些互动如何支持教师学习社区发展实践，在追求现象的连贯和因果解释时有意义地整合异质性，(3)教师如何将他们的科学意义与学校STEM的主导叙述联系起来，(4)教师学习的这些方面如何影响他们的教学目标和计划。项目团队将在两种情况下为教师进行广泛的意义建构设计：范德比尔特大学职前中学教师的科学建模课程，以及科学教师圈子（STCs），在职教师和职前教师参与自己的科学探究，以反思学科学习。通过多个基于设计的研究周期，项目分析将考虑异质性的机会如何在教师的学科参与中出现、被采用或被关闭。这些分析将提供关于如何设计和促进教师学习社区的猜想，以帮助教师(a)适应科学的异质性，(b)发展整合不同的认识、交流和相互联系的方式和现象的实践，以及(c)挑战关于科学学习的限制性叙述。该项目建立在与当地学校中学科学教师现有关系的基础上；STCs将与教师合作伙伴共同设计，以适应当地学校和社区环境。这项合作将为科学教师的新专业学习模式开发资源，这些模式突出了科学意义构建中的异质性和权力问题。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). While there have been extensive efforts to support teachers with curricula and pedagogical practices to implement Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), teachers’ disciplinary learning experiences has been underexamined. This project considers how teachers’ engagement in scientific sensemaking as an opportunity for teachers’ learning to support more expansive science learning environments. It seeks to address two ongoing challenges in science teacher education: the need for teachers to learn (1) to recognize, value, and integrate students’ diverse ways of knowing, communicating, and relating with one another and phenomena and (2) to acknowledge and disrupt restrictive narratives that shape what counts as science in schools and who is seen as a scientist. This project will provide new models for science teacher education to engage teachers in expansive scientific sensemaking, seeking to develop more humanizing relationships between teachers, students, and science. More broadly, the project will produce a new structure for professional learning and resources for supporting more heterogeneous and equitable forms of science in teacher education. The goal of this project is to design and study for secondary science teachers’ learning to value heterogeneity and challenge restrictive narratives of science in schools. In particular, it will examine (1) the moment-to-moment interactions of teacher learning in their own scientific sensemaking, (2) how these interactions support teacher learning communities to develop practices that meaningfully integrate heterogeneity in their pursuits of coherent and causal accounts of phenomena, (3) how teachers connect their scientific sensemaking to dominant narratives of STEM in school, and (4) how these aspects of teacher learning impact their goals and plans for teaching. The project team will design for teachers’ expansive sensemaking in two settings: in a Science Modeling Course for pre-service secondary teachers at Vanderbilt University and in Science Teachers’ Circles (STCs), in which in-service and pre-service teachers engage in their own scientific inquiries to reflect on disciplinary learning. Through multiple design-based research cycles, project analyses will consider how opportunities for heterogeneity emerge, get taken up, or get shut down in teachers’ disciplinary engagement. These analyses will inform conjectures about how to design and facilitate teacher learning communities that help teachers (a) attune to heterogeneity in science, (b) develop practices for integrating diverse ways of knowing, communicating, and relating with one another and phenomena, and (c) challenge restrictive narratives about science learning. The project builds on existing relationships with secondary science teachers in local schools; the STCs will be co-designed with teacher partners to fit within the local schools and community contexts. This collaboration will develop resources for new models of professional learning for science teachers that foregrounds heterogeneity and issues of power in scientific sensemaking.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.