The impact of place-based pedagogy on teachers' professional identities, instructional decisions, and collaborations

This design study uses a design-based, formative approach to consider teachers' understanding and use of place-based pedagogical practices. The study focuses on teachers' awareness, understanding and use of place as they implemented classroom instruction and built a professional development experience for colleagues. The research spans three months as the team of six teachers (colleagues at a local district) planned, implemented, and reflected on place-based pedagogical shifts. At the heart of the research is the question of how a place-based instructional perspective impacts teaching and professional growth. Ultimately, findings suggest that this group, both collectively and individually, has come to value place as it affects meaningful understanding. Not satisfied with strictly textbook-driven instruction, this team has developed ways to expand school walls, create meaningful experiences for educational colleagues and secure community partnerships valuable to all aspects of this professional growth. These teachers believe that understandings of the importance of place will transcend course titles and school boundaries in order to actively engage learners.

“Is There Lead in My Water?”: Employing a Culturally Compelling Instructional Perspective to Teach for Change

In this paper we build a conceptual framework to argue for culturally compelling instruction that leads to teaching for change. Culturally compelling instruction calls for a substantive shift in how teachers view their students, communities, and what the perspective might mean for students’ future when they have access to alternative learning opportunities. The framework encourages teachers to take a stance and assume responsibility and ownership for their own decisions about the curriculum and instructional delivery. Most prominent is to acquire a depth of understanding of their students’ identities and needs. To represent our vision for culturally compelling instruction we use the lead poisoned water crisis in Flint, Michigan, USA as an illustrative case. Our work provides an example of how a real-world circumstance such as Flint’s may be integrated into content area subjects to frame a culturally compelling instructional practice.

Dissection of a Desktop Microworld

Despite the long history of the use of dissection in biology coursework, it has and continues to be, very controversial (Hart et al, 2008; Kinzie et al, 1993; Langley, 1991; Orlans, 1988; Nobis, 2002; Strauss, 1991; Madrazo, G, 2002). This case study evaluation was conducted in an affluent suburban middle school in the Upper Midwest as a response to the problem of finding an alternative means of instruction that would yield the same cognitive knowledge development, address the issue of science anxiety, and accommodate different learning modalities. Several alternatives were compared in 14 seventh-grade biology classrooms, including physical dissection, virtual dissection in a desktop microworld, and content instruction through an interactive CD-ROM tutorial. Although differences were observed in immediate retention, none were observed in retention after three months. Differences in science anxiety are discussed, and comparisons made of retention and anxiety among various learning styles. Implications for classroom instruction are discussed from an instructional perspective. The smell of formaldehyde was in the air as students tenaciously poked with dissection probes at the frogs pinned to their dissection trays. The familiar comments of “Gross!” “I don’t want to cut him,” and “Hey, Mrs. M, what do I do now?” punctuated the air. It was the start of the annual climax of the seventh-grade biology curriculum, dissecting a frog. The teacher, already dealing with notes from parents objecting to their sons/daughters participating and the logistics of helping 30 students simultaneously, could not help but think that there had to be an alternative way of presenting the experience to the students. This case study was born from that familiar, frustrating scene, which occurs annually throughout school systems everywhere. The teacher in the scenario above was one of three from the Biology department at a middle school in northeastern Illinois. Her team came to Christine with the problem of finding an alternative means of instructional delivery that would yield substantially the same cognitive knowledge development in the students, help address the declining frog population, address the issue of science anxiety among students at the middle school level, and accommodate the learning modalities of the students.