Abstract
This is an ethnographic study of a newly created math, science, and technology elementary magnet school in a rural community fiercely committed to cultural preservation while facing unprecedented economic instability brought on by massive loss of manufacturing jobs. Our goal was to understand global- and community-level contexts that influenced the school’s science curriculum, the ways the school promoted itself to the community, and the implicit meanings of science held by school staff, parents and community members. Main sources of data were the county’s newspaper articles from 2003 to 2006, the school’s, town’s, and business leaders’ promotional materials, and interviews with school staff, parents, and community members. A key finding was the school’s dual promotion of science education and character education. We make sense of this “science with character” curriculum by unpacking the school and community’s entanglements with historical (cultural preservation), political (conservative politics, concerns for youth depravity), and economic (globalization) networks. We describe the ways those entanglements enabled certain reproductive meanings of school science (as add-on, suspect, and elitist) and other novel meanings of science (empathetic, nurturing, place-based). This study highlights the school as a site of struggle, entangled in multiple networks of practice that influence in positive, negative, and unpredictable ways, the enacted science curriculum.
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Notes
All names (of the school, town, county, and people) used in this paper are pseudonyms.
The teacher survey results showed that every teacher at Horizon taught science at least 2 days per week and, in some cases, every day of the week, a finding that we can validate with our extensive visits to the school. Horizon’s efforts to prioritize science in the elementary curriculum represent a strong opposition to science’s marginalized place at other elementary schools in the region. Our knowledge about local elementary schools is based on our collective experience working in the local schools: as an elementary teacher (Tschida), principal (Tschida), librarian (Kimmel), facilitator of professional development (Carlone), and as teacher educators in a school-based Professional Development School teacher education program (Carlone and Tschida). See also Jones et al. 2003.
Only eight of the 37 total photos of students doing science showed science being done within the normal school day, as part of the normal curriculum.
While kit-based programs may not necessarily represent “innovative” instruction to science education reformers, Horizon’s use of kits does represent a significant contestation in this local school district. The principal worried extensively about the decision to adopt kits, wondering what “parents would say when kids from other schools walked off the buses with bright, shiny new science books and their students, from the science magnet school, didn’t have textbooks” (Fieldnotes, 3/7/05).
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Carlone, H.B., Kimmel, S. & Tschida, C. A rural math, science, and technology elementary school tangled up in global networks of practice. Cult Stud of Sci Educ 5, 447–476 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-009-9233-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-009-9233-2