Session A9: Invited Session: Teaching Physics and Other STEM Subjects in an Urban Environment

Away from the ivory tower: Real challenges teaching high school physics in an urban environment

For more than 20 years, I have been a physicist and a science educator, primarily at the college level. My research is on understanding and improving the learning of science, from elementary school science through quantum physics. Since 1999 I have been Professor in the School of Education and the Department of Physics and Program Director of Science Education at City College of New York. In that time I have had the privilege of working with hundreds of K-12 students, with over a thousand science teachers in and around New York City, and with even more college science students who are graduates of the city school system. To improve my ability to work with all these groups, I spent my sabbatical as a full time high school physics teacher in a public high school in New York City. For me, it was where the rubber meets the road. In this presentation, I will share experiences as an instructor and researcher from the perspectives of college physics instructor, science teacher educator, and high school teacher. With few exceptions, teachers are taught physics one way, are taught to teach it another, are put in a system where neither approach works, and have their students assessed in a way that promotes instructional strategies at odds with how students learn. I will share both challenges I encountered and what I learned about what works in this environment.   

Universities Reaching Outwards: Science Education Partnerships with Urban School Systems

The goals of this talk are to: (1) describe how universities, physics departments, and individual faculty can partner with urban school systems to benefit K-16 students, teacher education programs, and university instructors, (2) summarize research on effective university-school system education partnerships, and (3) offer advice and share lessons learned so that university partners can avoid common pitfalls and maximize the potential for collaborative success. Possible areas of university-school collaboration include resident teachers, curricular review, early teaching experiences, demo sharing sessions, ongoing professional development, on- and off-campus science outreach, RET programs, science education resource centers, and others. University-school educational partnerships offer numerous benefits but can be challenging to implement and maintain. Research shows that most successful partnerships possess the following characteristics: mutual self-interest, participant commitment, mutual trust and respect, shared decision-making, information sharing, and ongoing evaluation. K-16 course and curriculum redesign is a specific issue that has its own unique set of contextual factors that impact the project's chance at success, including available materials, administrative support, formative assessments, pilot-testing and instructor feedback, and ongoing professional development. I have learned a number of lessons in own science education collaborations with the Baltimore City Public School System, which is an urban school system with 200 schools, 84,000 students, and 10,700 teachers and administrators. These lessons pertain to: communication, administrative power, and the structure of the school system; relevant contextual factors in the university and K-12 schools; and good old-fashioned common sense.\footnote{Common sense is encouraged, but not required, to attend the invited talk.} Specific advice on K-16 science education partnerships will be provided to help universities increase student and instructor satisfaction with their physics and teacher education programs, maintain a positive and mutually beneficial relationship with local schools, and improve science education at all levels of instruction.   

Meeting Urban Science Students Where They Are: Perspectives from Two Physics Teachers and Four Schools

The phrase `urban education' tends to be used in ways that suggest we see urban education (and urban students) as a monolithic construct. Often, `urban' indexes children of color, with low levels of academic readiness from low socio-economic status communities in crowded, under-resourced classrooms taught by poorly prepared and/or poorly motivated teachers. While teachers and students in urban schools do face challenges that those in more suburban or rural areas may not, we argue that the differences across urban school contexts, even within the same city, outweigh the similarities. Furthermore, these differences have profound implications for the kind of work urban science teachers must do and the support they need from the science and science education research communities. In this talk, two high school physics teachers with experience in four radically different urban teaching contexts discuss the differences across schools that shape their teaching practice and their students' learning. Against this backdrop, we'll address the most common `misconceptions' about inquiry science teaching in urban schools that we've encountered among scientists, science education researchers and teacher educators. The presentation will conclude with our synthesis of how scientists and science education researchers can best support urban science teachers and students.   

Engineering Education in K-12 Schools

Engineers rely on physicists as well as other scientists and mathematicians to explain the world in which we live. Engineers take this knowledge of the world and use it to create the world that never was. The teaching of physics and other sciences as well as mathematics is critical to maintaining our national workforce. Science and mathematics education are inherently different, however, from engineering education. Engineering educators seek to enable students to develop the habits of mind critical for innovation. Through understanding of the engineering design process and how it differs from the scientific method, students can apply problem and project based learning to solve the challenges facing society today. In this talk, I will discuss the elements critical to a solid K-12 engineering education that integrates science and mathematics to solve challenges throughout the world.   

Preparing teachers for ambitious \textit{and} culturally responsive science teaching

Communities, schools and classrooms across North America are becoming more ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse, particularly in urban areas. Against this backdrop, underrepresentation of certain groups in science continues. Much attention has been devoted to multicultural education and the preparation of teachers for student diversity. In science education, much research has focused on classrooms as cultural spaces and the need for teachers to value and build upon students' everyday science knowledge and ways of sense-making. However it remains unclear how best to prepare science teachers for this kind of culturally responsive teaching. In attempting to envision how to prepare science teachers with cross-cultural competency, we can draw from a parallel line of research on preparing teachers for \textit{ambitious science instruction}. In ambitious science instruction, students solve authentic problems and generate evidence and models to develop explanations of scientific phenomenon, an approach that necessitates great attention to students' thinking and sense-making, thus making it applicable to cultural relevance aims. In addition, this line of research on teacher preparation has developed specific tools and engages teachers in cycles of reflection and rehearsal as they develop instructional skills. While not addressing cross-cultural teaching specifically, this research provides insights into specific ways through which to prepare teachers for culturally responsive practices. In my presentation, I will report on efforts to join these two areas of research, that is, to combine ideas about multicultural science teacher preparation with what has been learned about how to develop ambitious science instruction. This research suggests a new model for urban science teacher preparation---one that focuses on developing specific teaching practices that elicit and build on student thinking, and doing so through cycles of individual and collective planning, rehearsal, review, and reflection. In this way, a defined set of science-specific, ambitious \textit{and} culturally responsive instructional practices can be articulated and taught during science teacher preparation.