Forum: toward culturally responsive discourses in science ...

Cult Scie Edu (2007) 2:105–117 DOI 10.1007/s11422-006-9046-5 FORUM

Forum: toward culturally responsive discourses in science education George Noblit Æ Sungwon Hwang Æ Gale Seiler Æ Rowhea Elmesky

Received: 19 December 2006 / Accepted: 19 December 2006 / Published online: 1 March 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

A long way from hands-on pedagogy George This is a dangerous article. It is dangerous because it shows how little education has actually thought through its efforts to have pedagogies that address difference. Rather White dominance has meant that difference has to be dealt with in ways palatable to Whites. This is a critique that can be applied to multicultural education, and in fact led to the articulation of a critical, less compromised multicultural education. A pedagogy of movement itself has led to teachers being fired. Recently we have been working on oral histories of school desegregation and in one of them there is the following account. ...I brought in Junior Walker. This is this great guy, Junior Walker, who was a jazz guy. I had this record player in the room. In those days, it was a record player. I used to play Junior Walker all the time. I’d play something jazzy when the kids were coming into class. To make them feel a little free and body movement and all that. They all loved it. Man, they just bugged, you know, everyone is jazzing up, you know? And I said, ‘‘Okay, now I got to do a little G. Noblit (&) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Hwang Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea e-mail: [email protected] G. Seiler McGill University, Montreal, Canada e-mail: [email protected] R. Elmesky Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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Julius Caesar. Let’s do it, let’s get it on with Caesar.’’ We’d dance a little bit, you know, with Julius Caesar.... ...So I went home and wrote a letter of resignation. (Barbara Lorie, a White high school teacher in the late 1960s and early 1970s.) I’ve taken some dramatic license here. Barbara Lorie was pushed out of teaching not just for the above, although it did get her sent to the superintendent, who asked her to get back to Julius Caesar. She was pushed out for a fuller pedagogy she was creating to address a newly desegregated school and especially its students. Yet the point stands. She found movement and music was a way to bring the students to more classical studies, and this could not be tolerated. I also know of an African American school principal who was fired from his post heading an arts-enhanced elementary school because he thought his 80% Black student body deserved to learn African American art, music, and dance. The rural southern school board saw this as too much emphasis on race, and this was just a few years ago. Barbara Lorie and the principal I’ve left unnamed know how dangerous a truly culturally responsive pedagogy would be. I am all for the good fight. So I want to know how you view the danger of your approach. Gale Yes, Junior Walker and the All-stars. The late 60s. I remember the name of that group. The story you tell of Barbara Lorie’s efforts to use music to make the students feel ‘‘free’’ and ‘‘jazzed up’’ is what we could describe as resonating with aspects of their cultural identities and generating positive emotional energy, and I am reminded of a mathematics teacher at a high school in Baltimore, where I am now involved. Each morning as I walk past his door, music streams out and fills the hall while the students are at their lockers and making their way into his classroom. They never know what they will get each day. Some days it is jazz, or R & B, or soul music from the 60s, or world rhythms from Africa. No matter. The students enter his room dancing and bopping. He’s been doing it for a couple of years and he hasn’t been fired yet. And he has garnered respect for his ability to effectively teach geometry to this largely African American student population who struggle with mathematics. Can we take this as a small sign of hope? Your story also reminds me of the Freedom School summer program I have run during the past two summers at this same high school. Each day the Baltimore Freedom School begins with Harambee. The name is from a Kiswahili word meaning ‘‘let’s pull together’’ and it is a time for the entire Freedom School community to come together in celebration, both individually and communally. Harambee is an upbeat, energetic, expressive interaction using music, call and response, and movement that provides an opportunity for participants to display and share aspects of their cultural identities in a setting where they are valued. It is loud and often sweaty, and many students and parents have told us that Harambee is the primary reason that the teens attend this voluntary summer program. When asked what they liked least about Freedom School, one attendee’s response was, ‘‘When I’m late for Harambee.’’ As another put it, ‘‘It’s crunk. I’m gonna miss it.’’ I can’t help but wonder what would happen if regular school began with Harambee.

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Rowhea I have similarly witnessed the power of movement expressiveness. The students that I worked with in Philadelphia exhibited such joyful emotions and were deeply engaged when they were able to enact movement expressive practices in the university research field. The differences in attitude were very evident while the youth researchers were producing their movie on Sound in the City. They were intent on incorporating dance, music, rap and other rhythmic ways of being in representing their conceptual understandings and factual knowledge of sound. It was a breakthrough for me to realize the dynamic role these practices could play in helping students feel connected to and competent in science areas, and that is what drives Gale and me to try to represent the power of these practices in a paper such as this one. George I take your argument in this paper to be exactly correct. In efforts that are supposed to address issues of cultural difference, we redefine the difference in terms of White understanding and resistance to a full citizenship for students who are not White. This I see as what happened with ‘‘hands-on’’ learning, a phrase I run into in schools all the time. The referent is veiled to be sure. ‘‘These kids need a hands-on approach’’ speaks of race and cultural misunderstanding. Your study sets the record straight. If one looks closely at kids, then styles of movement are deeply cultural productions. Hands-on learning doesn’t even get close to this, and in fact is not culturally responsive at all by comparison. Maybe it is better understood as a strategy of Whiteness. Gale And the arguments against these practices are strong and camouflaged by claims such as ‘‘We have to prepare them for the real world.’’ To use your words, this argument is a ‘‘strategy of Whiteness.’’ As Rowhea and I talk and write about our work, we often hear these arguments from administrators, teachers, and researchers alike. What they don’t say is that it is a certain vision of a White world that we are ostensibly preparing them for. But this White cultural norm is a myth and realizing that is an important step contributed by the idea of hybridization and creolization. By recognizing the fluidity of culture, its lack of coherence and porous boundaries that Sewell has described, we can perhaps dissipate the fear often associated with the idea that culture is changing. Finding beauty and excitement in new cultural forms can replace the need to defend mythical, stable cultural forms. And this is nowhere more needed than in science education. Rowhea Both of you raise important questions regarding the purpose of science education in schools. Why is there such a tight interrelationship between race and associated cultural practices and the ‘‘appropriate’’ modes of participation in scientific communities? In science classes with high numbers of marginalized children, does real concern with helping students build deep understandings exist, or is science teaching

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and learning just another way to box children into acting ‘‘correctly’’ as they read, fill out worksheets, and take written forms of assessment under the mask of claims to cover the state and local science education standards? Gale Against the backdrop of No Child Left Behind and high-stakes standardized testing, it might appear out of place and out of touch to raise questions about connecting science with students’ cultural dispositions and about paying attention to movement and cultural practices in science classrooms. As George notes, this is not palatable to most Whites. However, it is precisely because of this backdrop that we must investigate these questions, particularly in schools that continue the ‘‘miseducation’’ of African American youth. The dropout rate in Baltimore is 50% for African American students, and estimated to be 70% for African American males. Our work has convinced us that it is possible and necessary to both address science standards and construct classrooms that resonate with students’ interests and cultural dispositions. We agree that the culturally resonant classrooms we are advocating will sound, look, feel, and maybe even smell different from classrooms that privilege White, mainstream norms; and they will go far beyond hands-on activities as a means of engaging students. SungWon I find that this paper addresses issues relevant not only to African American students in urban schools, but also the mainstream, because it shows what happens and what we can do if we attempt to teach students with respect to the worlds they experience and feel about. The globalization of capitalist markets today is increasing the heterogeneity we find in schools and other fields of education. For example, I have seen for the last ten years many Korean students go abroad to study, work, or live in other countries and at the same time many foreigners come to Korea to live here with their children. Therefore, dealing with heterogeneity and the building of solidarity in difference have become unavoidable tasks of science educators who are responsible for ethical aspects of science education more than ever.

Solidarity within science communities SungWon When we understand the role of school science to be the encouragement of hybridity and heterogeneity rather than normalization into some specific culture, an important issue arises. This can be articulated as a question of: ‘‘How do students come to enact culturally familiar resources in ways that are new to not only themselves but also others, in the course of participating in culturally unfamiliar activities?’’ I agree with the authors’ approaches, which I summarize as: first, emotionality and solidarity as central to the emergence of creolized science and hybridized identities, and second, the need to take dialectic perspectives of the relationships between identity, emotion, and learning. However, I also come to recognize some ways to go further with

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the proposed ideas because in my reading I found myself asking about units of collective for analyzing emotions, solidarity and the emergence of new practice presented in this paper. Rowhea There is a national call for science curriculum and teaching approaches to assist children in developing scientific literacy or the ability ‘‘to use scientific principles and processes in making personal decisions and to participate in discussions of scientific issues that affect society’’ (National Research Council, 1996, p. ix). Within such a definition, scientific literacy seems to be situated at the individual level. However, Gale and I have exerted a great deal of effort to demonstrate that it is important to consider the ways in which scientific literacy is interconnected with the experiences students have within collectives, both inside and outside of schools. The nature of science often intersects in detrimental ways with the expression of cultural dispositions, thus making solidarity, affiliation or fit with a science community difficult to develop. In this study, we are focusing upon the solidarity individuals may develop with a science community rather than the bonds that specific individuals may experience, build and/or reinforce with each other. At the same time, we realize that these two forms of solidarity are interconnected since in all cases, individuals are, to some extent, representatives of the collectives they participate within. Thus a White science teacher like Jen, as she interacts with her African American male student Shakeem, represents not only the culture of science but also a culture (of Whiteness) that doesn’t particularly value beats or rhythm during class time. With the link between the individual and collectives, it becomes impossible to consider that a failed interaction with Jen would not also lead Shakeem’s generation of negative feelings with the community that Jen represents––science. Gale That brings up the question of what group is the target community or, in the language of identity, what collective are we talking about identifying with? The difficulty for the students at City High is that any collective that they already identify with is generally one not associated with learning or with science. Collectives such as urban teens, residents of West Philadelphia neighborhoods, competent rappers, or proficient dancers are generally not valued in school. But it seems an unlikely stretch to think that students in most high schools can identify with an authentic community of scientists. Rather it seems that in most successful science classrooms a hybridized or creolized community emerges––one that both students and teacher contribute to and can identify with. We might call this a community of science do-ers or learners rather than a community of science or scientists at large. Most high school students do not do authentic science, but they do school science, and in most schools this is a mixture of school norms, community norms, and a particular approach to science employed by the teacher. Thus, a form of school science and the identification of participants with it emerges to a greater or lesser degree in many schools, and this occurs with the most ease in schools where the student and community norms are closer to White, mainstream school norms. Successful science classrooms and teachers have found ways for students to experience positive emotional energy and

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to identify with an emergent community. So, in some ways, we are really not suggesting anything new. We are suggesting that this same thing can happen in science classrooms with African American learners, if there are opportunities and spaces for their cultural dispositions to be engaged. The creolized form of science and the hybridized community will differ from an authentic community of scientists, but it already does in most high schools across the country. In predominantly Black schools it will look different from a collective of science do-ers in a predominantly White high school, or Latino high school, or mixed high school, and it should. SungWon I recognize that both of you are acknowledging the dialectic relation of individual and collective in that you are conceptualizing individuals as concrete realizations of possibilities at collective levels. Concerning the unit of analysis, let me enunciate my point theoretically. One of the important stances informed by dialectic approaches to emotionality (e.g., cultural-historical activity theory) is that we only do justice to analyses of interactions and associated emotions insofar as we see them as aspects of object-oriented societal human activity (e.g., Roth, 2006). In this framework, feelings of membership or shared emotional moods are contingent upon the development of collective objects toward which a societally motivated activity orients, because community members are responsible for the realization of the motive in and through every individual act grounded on a division of labor. Once I come along this line of thinking, I recognize your students were constitutive parts of the research activity and therefore I become interested in solidarity that students and researchers (teachers) would have developed with respect to one another over the historical trajectories of the research community. For example, I suppose that for there to appear an act like the ‘‘wave dance,’’ there must exist a collective sense that leads the presenters (students) to find the enactment of movement expressiveness a good resource for achieving collective motive. Rowhea Yes, there was already an established yet perhaps unconscious valuation of movement expression within the research group that had evolved with time. This ‘‘collective sense’’ you refer to, SungWon, arose as our group of researchers built social and symbolic capital with each other. While the youth researchers often knew each other from school or the neighborhood, I began as an outsider in the group. On many occasions I misinterpreted many of their practices to communicate disinterest and/or an unwillingness to participate in the project. Similarly, they misinterpreted my practices as well. However, by spending time together doing collective activities, we developed understandings of ways to gain and give respect to each other and ways to align our multiple and sometimes differing goals. As the students designed techniques for teaching physical science concepts in their movie, they were creating a set of structures that welcomed their movement, dance, and rap as resources to understand science content and teach it to others. By allowing and encouraging the student researchers’ decisions to use music, dance, rap, and poetry to make sense of science activities and to create their representations of their understandings, perhaps the research context structures also afforded a shift of

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practices leading to the development of creolized science forms and the hybridization of identities. To fully embrace and utilize scientific processes and principles, it is essential that students feel a sense of belonging and fit within school science that is both unconsciously and consciously recognized. If we are truly concerned with scientific literacy, we need to consider the ways in which youth can perceive themselves as being capable of participating in school science––and this is directly linked to actually engaging successfully in that culture. SungWon I agree, I think the vignette of video ethnography and the act of making a sinusoidal dance in the class not only show solidarity between student researchers but also notify the emergence of the other who understands the dance as part of science. Developing hybridized identity is then seen to develop hybridized understandings of the other who would be co-present at their performance and empathize with them as the audience of their narratives. Rowhea I would like to talk more about how those involved in the interaction become the ‘‘audience of narratives.’’ It seems that those co-involved in the performance are becoming part of one another’s narratives. SungWon That is an interesting point. From my perspective, the process exactly refers to the dialectic relation between subject and object, that is, a mechanism by which actors in the course of acting for/with the other also find themselves changing (e.g., Freire, 2003). Among the many issues arising from the subject|object dialectics, I would like to draw our attention especially to an ontological framework that takes in the simultaneously individual and collective nature of being, because it will help us address intersubjective dimensions of emotionality. In a recent autoethnographic study on ‘‘boundary crossing’’ that I conducted with Michael Roth (2007), we articulated the phenomenological notion of flesh|body in which the material aspect of the human body (Ko¨rper in German) constitutes a dialectic unit with the sensible flesh (i.e., Leib in German). The notion of flesh is related to the sense of owning a body differentiated from another (i.e., flesh as my own body) and thus perceiving a foreign subjectivity (Ricœur, 1992). At the same time, the flesh is a body among bodies because the experience of otherness already presupposes plurality only by which my own body is intelligible. Jean-Luc Nancy says being is being singular plural (2000). In the flesh|body we are simultaneously the same and other and solidarity constitutes a passage through which we can understand the other. Gale & Rowhea Can you clarify how the concept of flesh|body relates to our paper?

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SungWon Talking about a hybridized identity would make sense because researchers are concerned about students and teachers who find their flesh|bodies in the unfamiliar worlds and suffer discomfort or sense of estrangement. The phenomenon of solidarity presented in this paper is closely related to the ontological principle that being is in such a mode that my being constitutes the condition for the other in the way the other does for my being. It is the philosophy of ‘‘being-with’’ that comes with preontological responsibility for the other (Levinas, 1998). I think this paper concretely exemplifies a historically new form of science education (research) that was collectively achieved by researcher and researched. Because this new form of praxis would not have been familiar at initial moments of research, this paper leads me to attend to sufferings students and teachers might have experienced through their flesh|bodies and opportunities those experiences opened for understanding one another rather than cases that already show good configurations of actions. More so, I think about changes on the part of researcher because the emergence of the hybridized identity on the part of students (and teachers) would not make sense without the other who can understand and respect their changes—identity involves ethical dimensions at its heart (Roth, 2007). Gale I think that the sufferings that you note can also be understood as symbolic violence of the type we see when cultural ways conflict rather than flow in synchrony. And you are right that these new forms of praxis generally did not happen instantly between adult and student researchers in the fields or instances in which we have seen them emerge. Adults reared in mainstream norms, such as most teachers and researchers, often experience confusion, dissonance, and take the contrasts and conflicts personally. As a researcher, Rowhea describes feelings such as these especially during the first summer when she had recently arrived from a university in Florida and was set to work with teens from inner city Philadelphia. Likewise for students who experience being shut down. The sense of ‘‘being-with’’ that SungWon speaks of also reminds me of communalism, which we explore in another paper (Seiler & Elmesky, 2007). In some ways, solidarity and communalism represent a contrast, but in other ways, they are on a continuum. Being responsible for another most often involves a personal connection and a reliance on bonds formed in previous interactions that were successful and generated positive emotional energy. Thus, acting in ways that demonstrate that I ‘‘gotchur back’’ most often emerges from a personal history with someone. This is what we saw develop between certain students with histories between them in the science classrooms at City High, among the student researchers in the summers, and sometimes between student researchers and a researcher working with them. This history is seen in a comfort in being-with each other through which opportunities to create cultural resonances and bring their dispositions into science were advanced. From this level, we can think about moving out to the macro level, where these personally forged connections might propel students to identify with a larger collective and experience solidarity with (unknown) participants in science. Of course, the creation of emotionally charged symbols, many of which are creolized, is key to this.

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Rowhea ‘‘Being-with’’ also sounds similar to Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of ‘‘sense of the game’’ in which individuals unconsciously develop aspects of their ways of being to experience a better fit with another’s ways of being. It seems that in schools and in science classrooms, we expect that it is the responsibility of the students to do all of the changing. However, theoretically, ‘‘being-with’’ in a science classroom should not mean that students must leave who they are to become someone else so as to be recognized/accepted as worthy of the science community. Rather, one would expect that there should always be change and the shifting of practices with both teacher and students as they become more like one another. For instance, as students acquire more canonical ways of speaking, the teacher may acquire discursive practices emulating students’ slang or favorite expressions. I observed Carambo, a successful science teacher at an urban school––City High––in Philadelphia, often ask students to explain a particular concept (for example, the difference between covalent and ionic bonds). He would write down verbatim their responses on the board so the rest of the students could read and record their notes. Alongside that explanation/definition, he would further elaborate––or simply write a more canonical manner of expressing the same thought. In that way, students had access to both ways of talk. In being-with one another, both teacher and students have access to a valuation of multiple discourses, and mutually develop hybrid identities and a new creolized science community.

Challenge to science teacher preparation George Carambo suggests a second dangerous aspect of your study: what is the cultural knowledge (and depth thereof) being called upon here? Can a science teacher develop this knowledge? A culturally resonant classroom seems to require a teacher with some impressive knowledge of student cultures. Given diversity in cultures in a single school (I work with an urban school with 27 languages spoken by parents), teachers would need to have not only the desire to know but also an understanding of how one comes to know other cultures in ways that respect those cultures. Rowhea You raise an important issue. Yes, many prospective and practicing teachers with the desire to learn about other cultures are concerned about how to learn. I suggest that the best manner in which to develop authentic understandings is by spending time with and listening to students in multiple spaces and times. In conceptualizing culture as not being constrained to one particular field, but rather carried and enacted across porous boundaries, a teacher would be able to learn about their students’ ways of being, not only during science instructional time, but also before class as they socialize, while walking the hallways, in the lunchroom, while attending a school basketball game, sharing a bus ride, or being in their community. In these multiple fields, thinly coherent patterns may emerge as certain practices appear important

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and valued. In addition, watching others interact (that is, those who already understand one another) can illuminate to a teacher what works and doesn’t work. Furthermore, particularly in neighborhood schools where the students enrolled live within similar conditions (e.g., extended family networks; poverty), it is expected that similar cultural practices may be prevalent even among those who might differ in ethnicity, race, or language. Of course, there are always contradictions of these patterns; however, my point is that teachers don’t have to feel overwhelmed by the thought of trying to learn about their students. Even the development of a small degree of understanding along with the concerted effort to continue to learn will be useful. Students recognize and appreciate authentic efforts to understand and respect who they are. George So, teachers may need to see themselves as students of their students—even if this is forever doomed to be partial. The understanding of culture then would need to be woven into curriculum and instruction, melding movement with physics, for example. Working with arts-based school reform I have learned the power of using the integrated arts both to learn and as a form of assessment, and have also learned that doing this well takes a lot of experience to master. Finally, as Carambo shows, the teacher also has to have a strategy for addressing the dominant society, and this is politically dangerous—to return us to Barbara Lorie. But this is one possible take on what may be required. My question to you then is: what kinds of teaching, if not teachers, seem necessary here? And how are we going to create more of it for them? Gale The role of science teachers and, therefore, of science teacher education is central in creating classrooms where this type of culturally adaptive pedagogy is enacted. It is striking to recognize that we are now experiencing a generation of teachers in our schools nearly all of whom are post-Brown. Only 4% of science teachers in grades 9– 12 are African American (Weiss, Banilower, McMahon, & Smith, 2001) and even these few science teachers have generally been schooled in settings that value White, mainstream norms. Narratives and descriptions of Black schools prior to the Brown decision paint a picture of a very different pedagogy than that employed even in predominantly African American schools today. A study published in 1973 by the Southern Regional Council and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial already noted this problem when it said that desegregation ‘‘shifted to blacks the burden of adjustment to a new white authority structure’’ (p. ix). In working with prospective African American science teachers in Baltimore, I have found that they often feel discomfort with the idea of mixing their Black identities with their science teacher identities and may hesitate to use their cultural dispositions in teaching. As teacher educators, perhaps we can find ways to promote the hybridization of science teacher identities, and in that we may create opportunities for creolized science to emerge in their classrooms as well.

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Rowhea So how do we encourage the development of more teachers like Carambo and Jen within the conditions Gale describes? In my work with prospective teachers, they seem to find the video clips in which African American students are learning science and representing their understandings of science concepts in ‘‘nontraditional’’ manners to be quite compelling. They have given excited responses to watching Ivory and Shakeem rap about sound and marveled at the spontaneity and ingenuity of the wave dance performance. I believe it is very important to begin by giving future teachers examples of how creolized science can look in the ‘‘real world.’’ I find that simply lecturing theoretically about how different students should be allowed to bring in aspects of their identities and cultural practices into the science classroom to be ineffective in sparking prospective teachers’ interest in thinking ‘‘out of the box.’’ The notion of blending cultural practices into the science curriculum tends to be, in my view, a far removed and an unattractive concept to individuals who have experienced traditional science instruction. Thus, it is quite ineffective to simple tell pre-service teachers that their future classrooms should look and sound differently from those they have attended in the past and that they may look and sound differently from the classrooms of the veteran teachers in their future schools. Instead, showing actual examples in the form of video clips and holding subsequent conversations can be much more powerful. Moreover, actually experiencing this type of teaching through field placements in classrooms being taught by teachers like Jen and Carambo may leave long lasting emotional imprints catalyzing the hybridization of the new teachers’ identities that may propel these practices into their classrooms as they move into teaching. SungWon The question George raises reminds me of an important issue to which I would like to call the attention of science (teacher) educators. I think the approach of valuing cultural dispositions of students and hybridization of science teacher identities conceives an idea that empathy is central to understanding the other. Socio-cultural psychology proposes that emotions are inseparable from cognition and thus constitute a central part of knowing and learning. Given that understanding the other’s thought always involves understanding its emotional volitional basis (e.g., Vygotsky, 1986), the capacity of empathizing with the Other would be essential to science teachers’ knowing and learning with their students. That is, to deal with diversity, ‘‘playing on the emotional register’’ could very well turn out to be one of the crucial moments for making real change. More importantly, recent neuroscientific research reveals that feelings of emotion presuppose consciousness that objectifies the bodily state (emotion) other than itself (e.g., Damasio, 2005). Therefore, so that a person can empathize with the other, she needs to take a third person perspective of her emotions in some ways. This indicates that empathy would be mediated by collective activities rather than attributed to the properties of individual or collective. For example, in the case of Jen, the act of empathizing with students and the associated hybridization of her identity arose from concrete praxis of engaging in collective activity (e.g., video analysis session). Empathy mediated by collective activity

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constitutes a prerequisite of solidarity that science teachers can show with respect to their students and thereby constitutes a rese for empathy again. Acknowledgments The research described in this paper is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. REC-0107022. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in the paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

References Bourdieu, P. (1990). Homo academics. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Damasio, A. R. (2005). Decartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Penguin Books. (First published in 1994) Freire, P. (2003). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos. Trans.). New York: Continuum. Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than being or beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh PA: Duquesne University Press. (First published in 1974) Nancy, J. -L. (2000). Being singular plural (R.D. Richardson & A.E. O’Byrne, Trans.). Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. (First published in 1996) National Research Council. (1996). National science education standards. Washington DC: National Academy Press. Ricœur, P. (1992). Oneself as another (K. Blamey Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (First published in 1990) Roth, W. -M. (2006). Mathematical modeling ‘in the wild’: A case of hot cognition. In: R. Lesh, J. J. Kaput, E. Hamilton, & J. Zawojewski (Eds.), Users of mathematics: Foundations for the future. (pp. 77–98). Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Roth, W. -M. (2007). (in press). Identity in scientific literacy: Emotional-volitional and ethico-moral dimensions. In W. -M. Roth, & K. Tobin (Eds.), Science, learning, and identity. Rotterdam: Sense publishers. Seiler, G., & Elmesky, R. (2007). (in press). The role of communal practices in the generation of capital and emotional energy among urban African American students in science classrooms. Teachers College Record. Southern Regional Council and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial. (1973). The student pushout: Victim of continued resistance to desegregation. Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and language (A. Kozulin, Trans.). Cambridge MA: MIT press. (First published in 1934) Weiss, I., Banilower, E., McMahon, K., & Smith, P. S. (2001). Report of the 2000 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education. Retrieved on July 21, 2006, from http://2000survey.horizonresearch.com/reports/status/complete.pdf. George Noblit is the Joseph R. Neikirk Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Education and Chair of Culture, Curriculum and Change in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He teaches courses in sociology and anthropology of education, urban education and qualitative research methods. He serves on the advisory board for UNC’s University Program in Cultural Studies as well. He is currently completing 10 years of research on arts-based school reform and is co-authoring Creating and Sustaining Arts-Based School Reform to be published by Erlbaum. He is also completing five years of research collecting oral histories of school desegregation. Remembering School Desegregation is in draft form. He is co-editor of The Urban Review, published by Springer. SungWon Hwang is a research professor at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. She finished her PhD at Seoul National University in 2002 and conducted her postdoctoral research at the University of Victoria. Her research projects are focused on the dialectical, phenomenological approaches to human practice, learning, and identity in science activities, recently in the situation of crossing the boundaries of culture and language. She is a co-author of the book, Participation, Learning, and Identity: Dialectical perspectives (Lehmanns, 2005) with Wolff-Michael Roth, Yew Jin Lee, and Maria Ines M. Goulart. Rowhea Elmesky is an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis where she continues a program of research on the teaching and learning of science in urban schools. Rowhea has her

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undergraduate degree in elementary education and graduate degrees in science education from Florida State University. Her main contributions to the science education field have been developing macro, meso, and micro level understandings regarding the ways in which resources and schema from social fields outside of the classroom shape what occurs within and the identification of students’ cultural capital. Gale Seiler teaches science education as well as multicultural education courses in her position as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Before obtaining her PhD, she was a high school science teacher for sixteen years, teaching culturally diverse students in a variety of settings from Baltimore to South America. Her current research is school-based and employs theories from cultural sociology, Black psychology, and cultural studies to explore the teaching and learning of science among urban, African American high school students. She is also involved in collaborative research with participants in local schools and is interested in the development of new teachers who are able to work with students and parents from communities that are marginalized and oppressed. In 2005, Gale founded the Baltimore Freedom School, a summer program that is part of a national Children’s Defense Fund initiative to empower African American youth.

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