Young African American children's representations of self, science, and school: Making sense of difference

LEARNING

Michael Ford and Maria Varelas, Section Coeditors

Young African AmericanChildren’s Representations ofSelf, Science, and School:Making Sense of Difference

MARIA VARELASDepartment of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago,IL 60607-7133, USA

JUSTINE M. KANEDivision of Teacher Education, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA

CAITLIN DONAHUE WYLIEDepartment of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge,Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK

Received 2 July 2010; revised 3 January 2011; accepted 14 January 2011

DOI 10.1002/sce.20447Published online 17 March 2011 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

ABSTRACT: We focused on young, low-income, African American children in first- tothird-grade classrooms where they experienced varied forms of interactive, participatory,

This article was published online on 17 March 2011. Subsequently, it was determined that the title ofthe Seiler 2011 reference was incorrect, and the article was corrected on 31 May 2011.

A version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the National Association for Researchin Science Teaching, Philadelphia, PA, March 21–24, 2010.

Correspondence to: Maria Varelas; e-mail: [email protected] grant sponsor: University of Illinois at Chicago Great Cities Institute (to Maria Varelas).Contract grant sponsor: Polk Bros. Foundation.The data presented, statements made, and views expressed in this article are solely the responsibilities

of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UIC’s Great Cities Institute or the Polk Bros.Foundation.

C© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

CHILDREN’S REPRESENTATIONS OF SELF, SCIENCE, AND SCHOOL 825

and dialogic pedagogy in the context of yearlong, integrated science-literacy instruction.Using conversations that started around children’s own science journals, which were animportant part of teaching and learning science in their classrooms, we studied 25 children’sideological becoming relative to the practices of science and schooling and the interplaybetween their selves and others. We found that “doing school” was a dominant narrativeintertwined with “doing science.” Following behavioral codes and constructing smartnessas a large amount of knowledge seemed to be an important part of their school world,antithetical in some ways to the active, inquisitive, questioning, flexible view of science andscience learning that their classroom instruction aimed for. Nevertheless, children had alsoconstructed valuable scientific practices and sophisticated conceptions that involved scienceas capital (social, cultural, or affective) for scientists and/or for themselves as scientists. Howchildren made sense of their experiences in and out of school and interpreted their teacher’sand peers’ words and actions, and how they saw themselves as competent, were echoed inthe varied ideological becoming in their science worlds. C© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci

Ed 95:824 – 851, 2011

INTRODUCTION

Over approximately the past decade, there has been a limited but increasing number ofstudies that focus on science learning in urban classrooms where students of color, manyof whom live in poverty, are educated. These studies challenge the rhetoric of deficit viewsassociated with students of color and foreground dimensions of teaching and learningthat need to be attended to if students of color are to be empowered to grow in variousspheres—cognitive, social, and affective. Such dimensions include identity construction,hybridity, power relationships, diversity of scientific sense making, contextualization, andaccess to Discourse, participation, and membership in a learning community (for a reviewof studies that address these dimensions, see Varelas, Kane, Tucker-Raymond, & Pappas,in press). With this article, we seek to contribute to this growing body of research byshedding light on young African American children’s ways of seeing themselves relativeto science and school when they experience classroom science in the midst of their peersand with teachers who aimed at enacting interactive, participatory, and dialogic pedagogy.Using conversations that started around the children’s own science journals, which werean important part of teaching and learning science for that year in the three classroomswe focused on, we studied the variety of perspectives that children had constructed in theseclassrooms about themselves vis-a-vis science and schooling, their sense of doing science,and how their conceptions had been influenced by experiences with others.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Children of Color: Science Education and Schooling

As Bryan and Atwater (2002) warn us, children of color are often portrayedin science education in ways that emphasize or echo deficit views. In science, and othersubjects too, students of color have been identified as lacking knowledge, preparation, andachievement. At the macro level, reports flag the low number of students of color (andespecially African Americans) who achieve proficiency in science throughout K-12 grades(Vanneman, Hamilton, Baldwin Anderson, & Rahman, 2009) and pursue science degreesin college and/or follow science-related careers (National Science Board, 2010). Moreover,reports associate African Americans’ underrepresentation in STEM (science, technology,engineering, and mathematics) college degrees and science-related careers with low levelsof persistence despite African American students’ similar or higher interest in science andscience careers relative to that of White students (Anderson & Kim, 2006).

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However, at the micro level, science education researchers working in urban classroomshave found that when we expand the repertoire of tools and outcomes associated withlearning, we can see more of the strengths and successes that students of color can experiencein classrooms and pinpoint “culprits” responsible for the deficit-oriented findings at themacro level. For example, students of color can appropriate with ease epistemic dimensionsof science but are challenged by discursive practices (Brown, 2006; Brown, Reveles, &Kelly, 2005). Thus, bridging between everyday and science Discourses can boost studentengagement in, and learning of, science (Barton, Tan, & Rivet, 2008; Varelas, Becker,Luster, & Wenzel, 2002; Warren, Ballenger, Ogonowski, Rosebery, & Hudicourt-Barnes,2001). Moreover, separating conceptual from linguistic components may enable studentsto develop strong scientific understandings (Brown & Ryoo, 2008). Beyond developingscientific knowledge, when relationships between students and teachers/schools are builton trust, respect, and caring, students, who used to position themselves as resisting scienceand schooling, participate in science in new ways (Roth et al., 2004; Seiler, 2001; Tobin,2000). These, and other studies, that have mostly targeted older elementary and secondarystudents not only nuance and challenge a prevalent rhetoric about underachieving Blackstudents in U.S. urban classrooms but also call for further research on how students ofcolor make sense of cognitive, social, affective, and behavioral practices associated withschooling and science, and how they use them to construct representations of their selvesrelative to science. In this study, we focus on younger children who have been understudieddespite an increasing emphasis on the need to engage children in science from a very youngage if challenges in later grades are to be addressed (Carnegie Corporation of New Yorkand Institute for Advanced Study, 2009).

Furthermore, microlevel studies have shown that power dynamics within a learning com-munity play an important role in classroom experiences and learning. Power takes variousforms—discursive, ideological, symbolic, and material—and needs to be redistributed andrebalanced if students of color are both to have opportunities to learn science and actuallylearn science (Patchen & Cox-Petersen, 2008). Only then access and participation in sci-ence becomes a reality for children. However, it is not enough for teachers to create spaceswhere students can exercise their agency; students also need to see themselves as membersof a community, a science learning community, where they construct knowledge together(Kane, 2009; Olitsky, 2007). How students perceive their classrooms, experiences, learning,and science as a body of knowledge and as a practice shapes, and is shaped by, how theythink about and experience science. However, we know very little about the particular waysin which young children understand and interpret the sociocultural practices of science andschool vis-a-vis who they see themselves being and becoming.

Learning science in school implies being in the midst of at least two social worlds, thatof science and that of school. In the school world, behavioral norms and regulations areoften emphasized. These norms and regulations are integrally intertwined with issues ofdiscipline and disciplinary sanctions for which research reveals racial disparities. Studentsof color in general, and African American students specifically, are disproportionally pun-ished (Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010). Children of color are suspended and expelleddisproportionately (Harvard University Civil Rights Project, 2000), and boys, and espe-cially boys of color, are disciplined the most; boys are cited for disciplinary diversions10 times more than girls (Gurian & Stevens, 2005). These disparities may be due to manycomplex factors, but it is clear that the discipline gap is closely related to the extensivelydiscussed achievement gap between students of color and White students (Gregory et al.,2010). Moreover, according to Gregory and her colleagues, the discipline gap necessitatesthinking and exploration beyond a dichotomous justification of such a gap based on eitherindividual student characteristics or systemic factors.

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Teachers in urban schools face a high level of disciplinary problems. For those whosupport and for those who object to the zero tolerance policy (Ayers, Dohrn, & Ayers,2001), the way to reduce the likelihood of having to enforce it is prevention of situationsthat would evoke it by focusing on good behavior and helping troubled students avoidpotentially volatile situations (Reyes, 2006). Escalating behavioral problems can be sooverwhelming for teachers (new and seasoned alike but to various degrees) that they areadvised to address them right from the start. As Reyes reminds us,

there is no debate that schools need to be places that preserve, maintain, and create climatesconducive to learning for all students, and disciplinary systems must facilitate progresstowards these goals. The question that creates controversy is how to create disciplinarysystems supportive of these ends. . . . [F]indings of the Children Left Behind project illus-trat[e] that many school leaders believe that preventive disciplinary systems are best suitedto achieve the goal of creating school climates conducive to learning. (p. 107)

Such systems require ongoing attention to behavioral dimensions of social activity, encour-aging students to be respectful, polite, well mannered, and courteous to teacher and peersin the classroom, and to comply with classroom and school behavioral norms.

Furthermore, intertwined with disciplining and behavior management is the notion ofauthority that, as Pace and Hemmings (2007) claim,

is a fundamental, problematic, and poorly understood component of classroom life” (p. 4).Their research, which reviewed social theories, educational ideologies, and empirical stud-ies, shows us that “classroom authority is, above all else, a social construction that is built,taken apart, and rebuilt by teachers and students (p. 21)

and that “larger social and cultural forces have had an enormous effect on classroomrelations” (p. 22) for students of color. Thus, who the students see as the authority inthe classroom and in what ways, what counts as authority and how it is gained, howauthority is maintained or challenged, and how students construct spaces to be in the schoolworld amidst peers and adults need to be considered when we attempt to understand themultifaceted sense of the science world that students construct while in the school world.

Identity Construction: Experience, Ideological Becoming, and Capital

Learning in and out of the classroom entails more than constructing knowledge ofa subject matter. We adopt Lave and Wenger’s (1991) view that learning also involvesthe construction of identities and that “one way to think of learning is as the historicalproduction, transformation, and change of persons” (pp. 51–52). An individual’s identityis co-constructed by the person herself or himself and by the other people with whom sheor he interacts in the context of organized social activity, which, for students, is found bothinside and outside classrooms/schools. Holland and her colleagues (Holland, Lachicotte,Skinner, & Cain, 1998) help us see classrooms as figured worlds, systems of social activitygoverned by particular norms and patterns of interaction, participation, values, actions,beliefs, and assumptions. These worlds are populated by actors and their acts and by socialforces that influence how the actors act. As Wenger (1998) points out,

Because learning transforms who we are and what we can do, it is an experience ofidentity . . . We accumulate skills and information, not in the abstract as ends in themselves,but in the service of an identity. It is in that formation of an identity that learning canbecome a source of meaningfulness and of personal and social energy. (p. 215)

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Actors use their prior experiences to perceive situations in these worlds and make de-cisions to act that are related to meanings and expectations they have formed about theseworlds. Sociologically speaking, people use framing (Goffman, 1974) to develop struc-tures within which to hold meanings of what they have been experiencing (Trevino, 2003).As Gerhardt (2003) highlights about Goffman, the father of “framing” as a sociologicalconstruct,

Experience is socially constructed in a way different from phenomenological thought . . . He[Goffman] explained how experience of the world emulates forms that convey the “realness”of the world. Their reality . . . lies in their compatibility with conventions for narrativelyconstructing real-life experiences. That these forms are cast as credible frameworks ofpresentation makes activities meaningful to both the actors as well as their audiences.(p. 154)

In this way, the self constantly interacts with the social domain. The self is not a staticentity, but a dynamic social process, that shapes and is shaped by the social encounter, atransformative process of being.

People come to see and position themselves as certain kinds of people interacting withothers, with artifacts, and with subject matter in certain ways because of who they seethemselves being at that moment—what Sfard and Prusak (2005) call actual (asserted)identities. But their actual identities are also shaped by their designated (assigned) identitiesthat capture their expectations of what they may become, what they perceive as bindingbetween themselves and others within a particular sociocultural practice. As people co-construct their positioning in the social practices in which they participate, they constructviews about their and others’ competence in terms of this practice’s particular characteristics(Greeno, 2006; Gresalfi, Martin, Hand, & Greeno, 2008) and the framing of their ownexperiences. Thus, identity is lived experience based on collective history, produced throughinteractions where a person is heard and seen in particular ways and hears and sees othersin particular ways. Identity lies in the intersection of the individual and social spheres.

This perspective fits with a Bakhtinian view of learning and living that describes learningas a dialogical process where a whole self is formed and reformed, and points of view,ideologies in the Bakhtinian sense, are constructed and reconstructed. Bakhtin’s concept ofideological becoming is useful: “The ideological becoming of a human being . . . is a processof selectively assimilating words of others” (1981, p. 341). As people interact with others,materials, ideas, practices, and tools, they make sense of a particular activity in their ownways which carry features of the ways others have constructed this activity. In classrooms,as children talk, write, draw, act out, read, are read to, and do science, they develop or revisetheir points of view about science, themselves, and school. This ideological becoming doesnot happen “in the soul, in the inner world . . . but in the world, in sound, in gesture,in the combination of masses, lines, colors, living bodies” (Bakhtin/Medvedev, 1978,p. 8). Moreover, this ideological becoming is consistent with Bakhtin’s idea of refractingdiscourse—a person’s ideas, meanings, and words refract the intentions of others.

Furthermore, capital, and its nature and source, is a critical construct to consider whenexamining people’s conceptions of social worlds. Capital is inherited from the past andcontinuously created in the context of social activity. Positions that people take and holdin a social world are defined by the distribution of capital that mediates the relation-ships among people, which, in turn, are shaped by various material and/or symbolic ex-changes. Two forms of capital that Bourdieu (1986) specified are particularly relevant forclassrooms and ways that students and teacher live together—cultural and social capital.Cultural capital can exist in three states: embodied (dispositions of body and mind, what

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people know and can do), objectified (material objects, cultural goods), and institutionalized(objectified capital that enjoys institutional recognition, “a certificate of cultural compe-tence” (p. 248)). Social capital is related to the resources available to a network of peopleand to their place in that network. As Dika and Singh (2002) point out, social capital isconceptualized in two different ways, “in terms of norms and in terms of access to insti-tutional resources” (p. 33). Any social world has its own game rules, some more explicitthan others. Perceiving these rules and following them allows someone to become part ofthat world. Thus, social capital can be a tool for advancing a person’s life chances, which isColeman’s (1988) approach to social capital. In contrast, Bourdieu focused on how accessto institutional resources is given to the dominant class, thus becoming a tool for social re-production of some people but not others. Both cultural capital and social capital are relatedto symbolic capital, the type of capital that people have because of their status, prestige, andreputation in a social world. All forms of capital define a person’s power, place, and pointsof view within a particular social world and are regulated and distributed based on complexdynamics (forces) among members and nonmembers of that world. Thus, the constructof capital is very relevant when we study children’s ways of constructing the relationshipbetween themselves and the science world as they experience it within the world of school.

RESEARCH GOALS

In this study, we sought to capture and understand how young African American studentsframe themselves relative to science and scientists and how others’ framing of them becomespart of their ideological becoming. We focused on how African American students makesense of the social world of science and the social world of school, the formal structurewithin which they experience science. Through participation in everyday practices ofschooling, a student, as Levinson and Holland (1996) point out, “produces cultural forms”but is also “culturally produced” (p. 14, italics in original). We wanted to study this culturalproduction of African American students who attended urban schools in economicallystruggling neighborhoods, but who have also had opportunities to engage with practices ofscience that promote dialogical engagement with, examination of, and sharing of a varietyof scientific ideas.

Currently, more and more educators focus on providing opportunities to students, includ-ing (or more exclusively focusing on) students of color, so that students experience sciencein meaningful, engaging, and active ways that reflect important dimensions of scientificpractice (such as collecting and analyzing data, developing explanations, communicatingunderstandings, questioning ideas, and so on and so forth) and, thus, develop the knowl-edge needed for a successful educational and life path. However, along with knowledgeconstruction, we also need to be concerned with identity construction (Wenger, 1998) andunderstand the possibly diverse ways in which students make sense of themselves andscience when they experience such opportunities. The need for such an approach is greaterfor African American students, since research has shown that their sense of self as AfricanAmerican students in relation to a particular discipline (i.e., science or mathematics) islinked to their achievement (Chavous et al., 2003). In addition, it is African Americanstudents who are framed in the United States as the most underperforming students amongall racial and ethnic groups and this underperformance has often positioned them as infe-rior to Whites and other racial groups without problematizing institutional, cultural, andsocial hurdles that they face in school (Martin, 2007; Perry, Steele, & Hilliard, 2003).Such positioning shapes how they come to think of schooling, learning, and succeeding inrelation to the various subjects that they are taught while in school. Thus, with this studywe aim to uncover ways in which African American students construct representations of

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themselves vis-a-vis scientific practice and scientists early in their schooling experience,and to expose what becomes salient for these young students, when they experience for ayear dimensions of science that are promoted by the National Science Education Standards(National Research Council, 1996).

METHOD

Participants and Settings

The children in this study were in three classrooms that were part of a larger project aimingat integrating science and literacy in early elementary grades and working with teachersto enhance or develop curricular, instructional, and assessment practices that nurture suchintegration. The first- and second-grade classrooms (20 and 27 children, respectively) wereat the same westside school of a large urban school district and the third-grade classroom(22 students) was at a different school on the south side of the district. Both schools were ineconomically struggling neighborhoods and both with almost all African American students(except a total of five students). The first-grade teacher was a Latina with 6 years of teachingexperience and all in that westside school. Her colleague, the second-grade teacher, was aWhite female with all 6 years of teaching experience in that school. Finally, the third-gradeteacher was an African American female with 16 years of teaching experience and 5 yearsat the southside school. All three teachers were working on applying for National Boardfor Professional Teaching Standards certification during the year of the study. The second-grade teacher stopped in late spring of that school year because of family issues. The othertwo teachers completed their applications and were subsequently granted National Boardcertification.

The teachers and the first two coauthors started working in the summer prior to the studyto develop instruction for the following school year that would offer students opportunitiesto study science in engaging and enabling ways. The westside school where the first- andsecond-grade classrooms were had adopted the curriculum recommended by the schooldistrict, which contains four units per year per grade, three from the FOSS (Full OptionScience System) curriculum and one from STC (Science and Technology Concepts). Thesouthside school where the third-grade classroom was had been using the textbook seriesDiscovery Works that contains five units in third grade. All three teachers were teachingscience approximately twice a week. As part of the integrated science-literacy efforts,the teachers engaged their young students in various activities, such as listening to anddiscussing read-alouds of children’s literature information books related to the sciencetopics explored in a particular unit, doing hands-on explorations that included observations,experiments, and building structures, writing and drawing in their journals, contributingto making a class concept map, acting out science ideas and phenomena, and sharing theresults of a home project. Details on some of these instructional and assessment approacheshave been presented in other publications (Pappas, Varelas, Gill, Ortiz, & Keblawe-Shamah,2009; Varelas, et al., 2007, 2008, 2010; Varelas & Pappas, 2006; Varelas, Pappas, & Rife,2006; Varelas, Pappas, Kokkino, & Ortiz, 2008).

Based on the consents that we were able to collect and the time available for conversationswith the children, the data of this study came from the following children (all names arepseudonyms):

First-grade classroom: Marcella, Adeline, Clayton, Antoine, Karam (girls: 2, boys: 3,total: 5)

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Second-grade classroom: Roshauna, Savanna, Pricilla, Jaleesa, Annette, Ramell, Jasper,Marlon (girls: 5, boys: 3, total: 8)

Third-grade classroom: Althea, Tanya, Reanna, Maleah, Chanise, Destinee, Toshelle,Kyree, Raymond, Ellis, Keyon, Aron (girls: 7, boys: 5, total: 12)

Data Sources and Analysis

For this study, we focused on conversations that the second author (Kane) had with these25 children around pages in their science journals. Journaling was an ongoing activity forthe children’s classrooms during that school year, and children were encouraged to bothwrite and draw in their journals that were composed of pages that had two distinct parts: ablank top half to draw and a lined bottom half so children could write. The conversationswere conducted individually during the last month of school and lasted on the averageapproximately 20 minutes. Kane started the conversations by asking students to select afew pages from their journals and as they talk about them to share how they see themselvesas scientists and science students.

We intentionally constructed an open-ended conversation because we wanted to find outwhat children would say about themselves and science without being forced to considerparticular dimensions of scientific practice. Although the purpose of our research was toreveal and understand the ways in which these young African American children constructedtheir selves relative to science and scientists, during the conversations, we did not constantlyforce the connection between themselves and science/scientists. At times, children justtalked about science and scientists and Kane did not interrupt them to ask whether thiswas the way in which they thought about themselves as scientists. At other times, childrentalked about themselves and being in their classrooms and Kane did not interrupt themto ask how the ideas they were sharing were related to science and scientists. We believethat conceptions of identity are not compartmentalized and, thus, if we had constantlydirected children toward the relationship of themselves with science/scientists, we mayhave missed important insights the children may have wanted to share with us aboutthemselves. Moreover, directing young children to consider a specific idea may lead tosilence, or “don’t know” answers, as their young age may not enable them to consider aspecific idea within a broader realm of considerations. Of course, this does not mean thatwe had not designed and used during the interview, when appropriate, questions that wouldfocus these young children toward sharing their conceptions of the relationship betweenthemselves and science/scientists. Such questions that were used during the interviews,when they fit the flow of the conversation, included

• What do you like in science class? Why?• Who do you like to work with in science class and why?• What do you like about science? Why?• What kind of science student do you think you are? What makes you think of that?

What kind of student are you in other subjects?• How does this journal page show that you are a scientist?• Are you like a scientist? How would you describe yourself as a scientist?

By offering children an opportunity to talk about themselves and science in the contextof a “product” (their science journal) that had been an ongoing element of their schoolscience experience, we aimed to understand children’s representations of self, science, and

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school in relation to each other without constantly imposing on them this relationship. Inthis way, we strengthened the construct validity of our study as argued above.

To analyze the data, we used an approach consistent with constructivist grounded theory(Charmaz, 2006) that seeks to capture the voices and meanings of the research participants,the 25 children in our case, but also recognizes that meaning is co-constructed betweenresearcher and participants in the data collection stage. First, we listened to and summarizedeach conversation and examined the writing and the drawing of that student’s journal. Eachjournal and conversation summary was then revisited and answers to the following set ofquestions were composed for every child:

• How do children see themselves vis-a-vis the scientific practice and knowledge?• What do children see as their strengths? As their weaknesses? As challenges in

general?• What is school for children? How do they see themselves as students?• How are “others” a part of them? How do they think about “otherness?”• How does the authority of school intermingle with the authority of science and the

authority of self in the children’s minds?• What is the children’s sense of belonging in school, in the classroom, in science?• How much do they internalize voices of others?• How is “difference” and “sameness” part of children’s representations of self, science,

and school?

These questions had significant overlap; however, each of them helped us “slice” thedata in different ways so that we could develop richer interpretations. Furthermore, tobetter understand the children’s conceptions about themselves and science, we examinedfield notes from classroom observations of science lessons throughout the year and fromconversations with the teachers, in order to situate these conceptions within the particularclassrooms in which the children studied science during that year. Both of these analyticalsteps strengthened the interpretive validity of our study.

FINDINGS

The young African American children in our study, who had experienced just one or afew years of schooling in their neighborhoods that struggle with poverty and challengesthat usually come with it, had developed complex and multifaceted relationships withscience, intermingling various conceptions of self, of school, and of science. What thechildren told us about scientists, and about themselves being scientists, shows how theywere “meaning,” in other words, how they were making sense of the experiences they hadhad. Their meanings were marked by multiple voices, their own and others’, and multiplecontexts. These meanings were the means for, and ends of, their appropriation of variousworlds—the world of their schools/classrooms, the world outside their schools, and theworld of science. This appropriation was marked by difference at two levels—differenceamong children and difference among worlds.

“Doing School” Fused With “Doing Science”

As we communicate, we do not simply express the selves we already have, but we alsoform selves to express (Harris, 1987). During the conversations we had with the children,they were expressing and forming images of scientists, and themselves as scientists. Theseimages, on the one hand, included essential elements and dimensions of scientific practice,

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but on the other hand, were fused with managerial and behavioral norms of schoolingpractices, which the children had experienced sometime in school (not necessarily in theirclassroom in that year), or had constructed by listening to others; what the children sharedwith us were historically situated utterances (Volosinov, 1986).

About half of the 25 children (13) brought up ideas about science and scientists thatechoed ways promoted in schools to increase “good” behavior and to strengthen studentcompliance to teacher agendas and directions. These children included one first grader(Marcella), five second graders (Jasper, Ramell, Pricilla, Jaleesa, Annette), and seventhird graders (Althea, Tanya, Reanna, Kyree, Chanise, Destinee, Toshelle). The rest of thechildren (12) did not share any such ideas as they were talking about science and scientists.Of the 12 students, two (second graders Roshauna and Marlon) did not say much duringthe conversations; thus 10 students focused only on norms of doing science—four firstgraders (Adeline, Clayton, Antoine, Karam), one second grader (Savanna, if we put asideRoshauna and Marlon), and five third graders (Maleah, Raymond, Ellis, Keyon, Aron).

The children (mostly girls), who brought up “good” school behaviors when asked toimagine scientists, science, and themselves as scientists, referenced a variety of schoolnorms. Marcella saw herself as a good scientist because “You gotta listen to the teacher.You gotta listen and you mind the teacher.” Ramell was a scientist because he was wellbehaved and did good things and helped others. His classmates Pricilla and Jaleesa alsoreferenced behavior. Pricilla saw herself as a scientist by being “nice,” and

When I work, I try to keep my mind on science instead of keeping my mind on playing,talking, talking about stuff that it ain’t schoolwork or homework. And also nice becausesometimes kids misbehave, talking back to the teacher and call her names.

Chanise was like a scientist when she was respectful and nice to teachers, and Reannawhen she paid attention. For Jaleesa who saw herself as “kinda good” in science, “you’resupposed to always study on stuff . . . and you always supposed to get good grades . . . andbe good to the teacher and then say nice things about her” (see the Appendix for a key ofsymbols used in excerpts of student talk). In the third-grade classroom, Althea believedshe was a good scientist but knew she had to talk less in class. Kyree was “very quiet inthe classroom and I go in here and I don’t get in trouble and I work all the time.” Toshellelistened and did not get in trouble by doing her work and raising her hand. Tanya echoedsimilar ideas: “scientists can teach kids a valuable lesson like not to hit people and not topush nobody, not to talk when the teacher is talking.” For these children, representations ofthemselves vis-a-vis science included references to behaving well, a core element of howthey had experienced and conceptualized “doing school.”

Along with these behavioral aspects of “doing school,” several of the children alsocommunicated important features of doing science. They did not seem to have constructed,though, the difference between “doing science” and “doing school.” Rather, they seemedto intertwine “doing science” with “doing school,” both dimensions present in their livesin and out of the classroom. In addition to suggesting that scientists need to be nice, payattention, and listen to the teacher, the children also highlighted important disciplinarypractices of “doing science.” Jasper shared that scientists build machines and find out aboutdinosaurs. For Ramell, “scientists make cool inventions,” and Pricilla highlighted that

you do good experiments on science . . . like scientists // they can go out and exploreeverything, and can explore the wild. They can go into the forest and try and find animalsand everything. They can discover animals that sometimes people don’t even know about.

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Similarly for Jaleesa, scientists make stuff and cool things and find out something new, orlike Kyree shared, “a scientist // they have to find out things that they don’t even know aboutand they don’t even know what happens.” Moreover, Reanna pointed out that scientists sharethe information they have. Thus, building equipment, experimenting, possessing specializedknowledge, making things, and discovering knowledge are dimensions of scientific practicethat, for half of the children, were intertwined with behaving well, which consisted of avariety of behaviors expected in school.

Some of these dimensions of scientific activity (along with different ones) were alsoraised by children (mostly boys) who only brought up dimensions of doing science, as theytalked about science, scientists, and themselves as scientists, without intertwining themwith behavioral aspects of “doing school.” For Clayton and his classmate Antoine, buildingwas a salient feature of scientists. Clayton was a scientist “when we build with blocksand have to tell about it.” Antoine was a scientist when he built things but also when he“observe[s], write[s], grow[s], like growing plants.” But for Antoine “scientists test [things]out,” which was something he wanted to do, but had not yet done. Roshauna thought thatscientists make books. For Savanna, scientists know a lot and a scientist is “a person whomakes stuff.” Similarly for Keyon, as a scientist he “would make things other people can’t”but also scientists study all the time. His classmate, Raymond, had a large set of elementsof the scientific practice to share:

I think a scientist draw stuff so they can represent their work, like you do, like you drawing,like building stuff. Like a scientist find dinosaur bones, they fix it like that, put dinosaurbones together . . . A scientist is a person who does stuff // who do stuff to get the informationabout a fossil, anything, to get the information about the dinosaur, what color was it. Theylike to find friction and motion and connect things, like snakes and other animals . . . Theyare smart, clever, modest, and good at technology . . . Scientists // they figure out // likecrack codes. Not like locker codes, but dinosaur codes, animal codes.

In the same class, Ellis articulated that scientists get information from books and share itwith others, but Aron saw himself as a scientist by doing experiments in class and “knowinga lot about science,” some of which he had learned from watching TV, such as the DiscoveryChannel.

These data do not support any strong differences in terms of what “doing science”meant for the two groups—the children who fused it with “doing school” and the childrenwho did not. This is welcomed news, we believe. However, what these data also indicateis that several children make sense of the regulatory practices used to manage behaviorin classrooms and schools as part of the practices of the subjects they study in theirclassrooms. Some may argue that attending to such regulatory behavioral practices may beespecially beneficial to children of color as they navigate school systems that may have astrong emphasis on behavioral regulation along with, or instead of, disciplinary learning.However, as science educators, we need to be troubled with the potential impact of infusionof conceptions of “doing school” into conceptions of “doing science.” Emphasis on andattention to regulatory behavioral norms communicate to children that what matters is being“good” as judged by others, being good in terms of how they behave, not being good interms of how they think, solve problems, ask questions, make sense of ideas, and comeup with new ones. A pedagogy of control may lead to compliance that is so contrary tothe stance of science as inquiry, as exploration, as “thinking out of the box” that educatorsmay celebrate and strive for. Such pedagogy controls and limits ideas discussed, questionsraised, the criticalness of the discussions that occur, and who gets to participate in classroomdiscourse. It echoes a “pedagogy of the oppressed” (Freire, 1970/1990) that is antithetical

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to the efforts of the classroom teachers in this study and their attempts to foster thinking,questioning, exploration, and meaning making.

Moreover, emphasis on good behavior in classrooms of students of color and especiallyAfrican American students is often targeted toward boys who are believed to be moreaggressive and rambunctious. Teachers think disruptive behavior is a sign of unproductivebehaviors to come and they attempt to stop it before it goes further. However, our datashow that girls, more than boys, had internalized such emphasis on behaving. Mostlygirls brought in “doing school” norms when talking about doing science, whereas mostlyboys kept “doing school” norms separate from doing science. This finding should also bealarming to science educators in light of the extensive research on women/girls and theiraccess to, engagement with, and representation and future in scientific practice.

We also need to understand the varying percentages of students who fused “doingscience” and “doing school” norms in the different classrooms. The third graders had alreadyexperienced three different classrooms, whereas the first graders had only experienced thatparticular classroom and possibly a kindergarten classroom (which is usually quite differentfrom the rest of the elementary school classes in terms of the “strictness” or insistence onfollowing school norms). All three teachers during the year of the study were attemptingto enact dialogically oriented instruction and help children see themselves as scientistsusing tools, practices, and habits of mind that are important in scientific practice. Maybethis is one of the reasons why relatively more first graders (although small numbers) putforward a view of scientists and themselves as scientists that did not include managerial andcontrolling schooling practices. However, the three classrooms in our study were also quitedifferent. The first-grade classroom was a place of negotiation between student needs fortalking, interacting, moving around, and doing things in their own ways on the one hand, andmore conventional and canonical ways of behaving at school, on the other. In contrast, thesecond-grade classroom had a strong emphasis on appropriate school behavior consistentwith norms of no talking without being called on, limited movement, and compliance toteacher’s directions. Finally, the third-grade classroom seemed to fall in between the twoother classroom cultures, somewhere between less negotiation and more teacher tendencytoward control than in the first-grade classroom, but less imposed and strictly followedcontrol than in the second-grade classroom. Thus, in their ideological becoming, the childrenrefracted dominant voices in their classrooms, voices that encouraged or discouraged theirintertwining between “doing school” and doing science.

Examining further the talk of the children who, while sharing their conceptions ofdoing science, did not bring up “clear-cut” norms of behavior management associatedwith “doing school,” we found that some of these children referenced ideas that are verymuch encouraged in schools but are also epistemological, sociological, and ethical ideasassociated with many aspects of human life, including scientific practice. As first graderKaram was talking about scientists, he pointed out that

you can be important by focusing on things you need to make then you get it right, butsometimes you don’t get it right . . . scientists keep on going and going until they get itright . . . [what helps them get it right] is that sometimes they try and sometimes they don’ttry.

For Karam, if scientists focus, by which he meant that they “listen and get clear what theythink,” they can get it right. One of his favorite activities, which he had captured in hisjournal, was submerging in water a cup that had a napkin stuffed at the bottom “becausethe water in the cup makes it seem like you’re being bad, but you’re not, you’re just tryingto see the cup in there and see how it’s gonna get wet.” Throughout the conversation

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with Karam, the need for being right (a marker of both school and science genres) wasconsistently expressed, but it surfaced along with the notion of trying and being persistent,and sometimes succeeding and sometimes not (elements of the science genre that Karam’steacher was enacting in her classroom). Karam also communicated that he was aware of anassumption that adults make about children—every time adults/teachers see children doingsomething that they are not supposed to do in school (e.g., that involves water) then theythink that children just want to be “bad” because they engage in inappropriate activitieslike playing with water. But he clarified that his (and his class’s) goal was figuring thingsout and was not fooling around. Karam liked the cleverness involved in this; he was ableto do something he liked as a child (play with water) in a setting where he was not allowedto do so (school), but the task was not really what it looked like (child play), it was sciencethat made it a legitimate activity.

Moreover, Karam emphasized staying focused; when “they focus, scientists get it right.”In his classroom, Karam was given a plethora of opportunities to think, do, and sharescience, but at the same time he was repeatedly told to focus since most of the time, he waswandering around, and while sitting on the rug, wiggling, looking around the classroom,and stretching his body. He seemed to know why he needed to focus and he projected thisonto scientists. When we are focused, we listen, probably to the teacher’s or somebody’sdirections (somebody who knows more than we do), and become clearer in our thinking.Karam was piecing together what he was told and expected to do in school and an inquiry-oriented science stance of repeated trying, expected failure, and exploration. Ideologicalbecoming is shaped by the fusion of different voices in a child’s environment. It reflects theneeds, aspirations, and ways of making sense of oneself and the communities and practicesin which one has been participating.

Similarly to Karam, second grader Savanna brought up being right and linked it with herown and others’ perseverance in thinking about ideas. Talking about herself as a scientist,Savanna shared: “Sometimes I can’t figure it out and sometimes I think about it and then Iget the right answer. Sometimes I don’t know it and sometimes people get the answers andsometimes I think about it.” And third grader Raymond brought up how he thought aboutbeing right or wrong as he was doing science. He shared:

it might be wrong and you might have to do it over. If you get it wrong and you // you needto get the thing in your head and keep it there, you need to really think about it before youget to write anything down.

Raymond also brought up that scientists are modest, a quality that teachers emphasize inclassrooms as they try to give spaces to all their students to grow, develop, and feel goodabout themselves, and a quality that scientists may or may not have. Raymond himselfexhibited this quality consistently in the classroom. During our conversation, he knew hewas “talented” and “great” and that his teacher thought that way about him, but he also likedworking with “other kids because . . . you [may] need help and somebody’s there for you.”Moreover, he understood the discomfort that some of his classmates felt when they did notsucceed (“It doesn’t feel good to other people that doesn’t get good grades in science”) andthat is why he liked helping them do well in science using his particular talent: “I write apicture to give them an understanding what to do. I give them an understanding so theywon’t fail.” In the classroom, Raymond was a helping hand to others, never boisterous of hisknowledge and competency. Similarly to Raymond’s idea that scientists are modest, firstgrader Adeline shared that “a scientist is somebody who be honest.” Honesty and modestyare qualities encouraged in schools that are not unique markers of the practice of scienceand of scientists.

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Children’s Conceptions of Smartness and Effort

Our data revealed that “smartness” was part of children’s ideological becoming relativeto science and scientists. One third of the children across the three classrooms (Antoine,Clayton, Savanna, Pricilla, Jaleesa, Jasper, Althea, Raymond, Toshelle) specifically men-tioned being “smart” as they were talking about science, scientists, and themselves.Although the standard dictionary definition of smart is “quick or prompt in action; clever,witty, or readily effective, as a speaker; having or showing quick intelligence or ready mentalcapability,” these children had constructed “smartness” as a large amount of knowledge. Infact, third grader Raymond articulated the difference he had conceptualized between cleverand smart. Raymond shared, “Different things about clever and smart is that clever meansthat you gotta think of a way. And smart is different from clever because you gotta knowstuff.”

All of the children who brought up smartness as an attribute of scientists saw themselvesas smart and some of them thought their teachers considered them smart. Only Jasper didnot see himself as smart—

I’m not that smart, cuz I // I don’t know. Anything I get wrong I go like this [hits himselfon head] cuz I’m stupid . . . cuz I’m not a smart boy, cuz I don’t know how to spell somewords, I know how to color but I don’t know how to draw that good, and I’m not a goodscientist!

But then he added that he could have a “brainstorm” and get smarter. What Jasper perceivedas lack of knowledge shaped his conception of being “stupid” and “not a good scientist.”

However, two of the students who brought up smartness in relation to seeing themselvesas scientists offered more nuanced understandings of smartness beyond just a straightassociation with only a large amount of knowledge. While first grader Antoine was sharingthat he wanted to be an engineer when he would grow up, he noted that to be an engineer“you need to be smart [and being smart means] to be active, to be funny, to learn, to learnengineer stuff in school, in engineer school.” Although Antoine associated smartness with“stuff [he would learn] in engineer school,” he also linked smartness with being “active”and “funny,” words that may imply working things out and being witty which are meaningsmore closely associated with cleverness. Furthermore, third grader Althea, talking aboutsmartness, brought up not only the amount of knowledge required but also that “scientistsprobably think of everything, what they do, anytime, any place.” She rushed though toelaborate that, “some scientists do that, other scientists don’t really think about whatthey do.” Thinking (or not) things out was interwoven with smartness in Althea’s way ofconstructing herself in relation to science and scientists. Thinking goes beyond just havingknowledge; it implies reflecting upon this knowledge and the actions associated with it.Althea’s nuanced understanding of smartness seems related to her classroom experiences.Althea’s teacher had been repeatedly encouraging her students to think especially beforeor after they do something or they share something (associated both with behaviors in theclassroom and with science ideas and practices), and at several times she had reprimandedsome students (including Althea) for not thinking things through. Althea had blended thesense she had constructed of these experiences with her views of scientists and herselfrelative to scientists. Althea knew that she and some of her classmates did think thingsthrough sometimes but not always. To position herself as smart and in proximity to scientists,she needed to qualify her original statement about thinking and smartness of scientists.

Despite these nuances, all the children in the three classrooms who brought up smartnesshad associated science with a high level of knowledge—an undisputable feature of scientific

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practice but also of any other practice. Linking smartness with a large amount of knowledgemay be another form of fusion between doing science and doing school. Frequently teachersin schools, and especially in urban schools where students face life conditions that mayencourage them to make choices that may not be strongly correlated with academic success,tell their students that they should be smart and make smart choices so they can avoid goingdown the wrong path. At the same time, in many urban schools that educate students ofcolor living in economically depressed, low-income conditions, information and knowledgeseem to be overemphasized over thinking, problem solving, relating, questioning, and doingthis with ease and flexibility (Anyon, 1980; Freire, 1970/1990). As the two emphases, onsmartness and on knowledge, coexist in classrooms, children may fuse them together tothe extent we found in this study. Moreover, several other children (Adeline, Reanna, Ellis,Aron), who did not bring up smartness associated with science and scientists, did bring upthe high degree of knowledge that scientists possess. Thus, for about half of the children,“a lot of information” was a salient part of their representations of science and scientistsand themselves in relation to science.

Moreover, effort is often related with developing a large amount of knowledge. Althoughless than the students whose views of themselves relative to science incorporated smartness,a few students (Adeline, Savanna, Kyree, Raymond, Chanise, and Ellis) brought up effortas they were constructing themselves relative to science and scientists. All of them but one(Raymond) expressed that working hard and putting in a strong effort was part of doingscience. Their focus on the high level of required effort for doing science underscored thehigh intellectual demand that doing science necessitated in the children’s minds. Moreover,the children associated science with hard work as they spoke about themselves as scientists,not scientists in general. It was they who had to work hard to be scientists. Maybe itis not coincidental that they did not bring up how hard science was, and how mucheffort it required, when they were talking about “other” scientists. Maybe, as they wereenculturated in their classrooms where their teachers kept emphasizing putting their besteffort forward, working hard on what they had to do, and being persistent, they wereconstructing themselves as this kind of people. Only Kyree linked hard work with bothhimself as scientist and with scientists in general. Children portrayed ideas about themselvesas scientists that incorporated salient messages that their teachers were offering them.

Building and Making as Part of Science Selves

Children’s ideological becoming relative to science included building and making too.For about one third of the children, building and making were salient ideas independentof whether they built or made things in their science class that year. In the first-gradeclassroom, children had made towers in the Solids and Liquids unit, but in the other twoclassrooms, there were no building activities. First grader Clayton shared that he was like ascientist “when we build with blocks and have to tell about it.” But, his classmate Antoinedifferentiated between an engineer and a scientist; he was “kinda like a scientist . . . mostscientists help each other, the engineers build stuff, then the scientists test it out.” Hewas “kinda like a scientist” because he “had not tested out anything” himself. Althoughboth boys had experienced the same science curriculum that year, each had constructeddifferently this dimension of scientific activity.

Furthermore, children in the other two classrooms considered building and making asimportant in a different way; they focused on building tools that scientists use. Secondgrader Jasper shared that if he were a scientist he would build time machines to go back intime “to see how the dinosaurs died.” And third grader Keyon talking about himself as ascientist shared,

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I would make things other people can’t . . . probably, I would want to make a microscope[because] when something’s small and I can’t see it, I can look up on the microscope downthere and I could look what kind of virus or something in it.

Although Jasper talked about an unreal, imaginary tool, whereas Keyon talked about areal and existing tool, they both seemed to indicate that their idea of science and scientistsincluded putting together the tools needed to figure something out. In some ways, for them,scientists not only have to use tools to do things, but they also make/build these tools.

Literacy Dimensions and Science-Self Representations

Children constructed differently the literacy dimensions in which they were engagedwhile in science class that year. Although about half of the children (almost three timesas many girls than boys) voiced literacy dimensions as features of science, they revealeda range of ideas about why these dimensions had primacy for them as scientists and/orfor scientists in general. For several children (Adeline, Annette, Reanna, Raymond, Cha-nise, Ellis) literacy dimensions were considered areas in which they thought their teacherwould say that they excelled. Their teachers’ assessment of their competency in writing,drawing, and/or reading, made these literacy dimensions salient features of doing sciencefor the children. For example, second grader Annette noted that “she [her teacher] likehow I draw in my journal,” and third grader Chanise shared that she was a scientist be-cause “I write information in the science book . . . [and the teacher] said good job cuzI . . . writing stuff down.”

Others, like Roshauna, Marlon, and Toshelle (but also Annette and Raymond who ex-pressed multiple ideas), found writing, drawing in journals and books, and/or readinginteresting and shared that these activities brought them pleasure. The children liked en-gaging in such practices and saw themselves as scientists when they engaged in them. Forexample, second grader Roshauna noted that she “like[s] the journals and the reading,” andher classmate Marlon shared that he “like[s] science because I like to write and draw. Ilike to write about people and I like to draw people. And I like to write songs, cuz they’reinteresting.”

Moreover, two other children brought up unique ways of constructing literacy dimensionsas part of doing science. Second grader Pricilla chose a journal page where she had madea giant drawing of bugs. Responding to the question of why this is a good example of herbeing a scientist, she shared, “it’s scientist because sometimes kids wanna be scientistsbut they can never do anything that scientists can do and this is artwork. It’s art outsideof me but on the inside it’s really a pattern to being a scientist.” For Pricilla, childrenneed to grow up to be scientists—“when you grow up and you be a scientist,” she said atanother occasion. Thus, drawing was a representation of what a “grown-up” scientist maydo, namely observe or experiment with “bugs.” At the same time, such representation wasa proxy of Pricilla’s membership in the scientific practice. For third grader Tanya, though,drawings were seen as a teaching tool that scientists use. She shared that scientists “makedrawings . . . cartoons so the kids can watch them. It help them with learning.” We willreturn to the idea of teaching as part of doing science in the following section.

These data show that children’s ideological becoming was shaped by ways in which theysaw themselves as successful in school, in the classroom. Their representations seemed tointertwine their asserted, actual competencies, preferences, and ways of making sense oftheir experiences, and their assigned, designated, encouraged ones by other people in theirlives, such as teachers, family members, and peers. Children had mostly appropriated what

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was assigned a higher value either by themselves or by others, and thus was a source ofpride, acceptability, recognition, or satisfaction for them.

Science as an Enterprise Marked by Caring

Several of the children had constructed and were constructing during our conversationwith them, science as an enterprise that was marked by caring. For them, caring took variousforms. For about one third of the children (Clayton, Antoine, Pricilla, Tanya, Reanna,Chanise, Keyon), science, scientists, and themselves as scientists were about helping otherpeople, animals, and the earth. For a few children (Jaleesa, Savanna, Pricilla, Tanya)teaching others was a salient aspect of being a scientist. For Pricilla and Tanya, science andscientists were associated with both forms of caring. Experiences that children had outsidethe classroom that involved caring contributed to their representations of themselves asscientists.

For first grader Clayton, scientists were smart (a synonym of knowledgeable as discussedearlier) and “helpful to us.” Clayton himself was helpful to others. Clayton shared that, inscience, he would choose to work with one of his classmates in particular “because everytime we do stuff, people don’t help him or nothing and I be working with somebody elseand then I be like working with Jorell and nobody helping him.” Clayton’s caring aboutJorell constituted part of his conceptualization of scientists as caring beings and of himselfas a scientist.

Clayton’s classmate’s, Antoine’s, love of engineering and association with engineersincorporated helping the wider world—“A scientist is like an engineer because scientistsbuild stuff and can help the earth.” Although he did not elaborate on how they help the earth,the theme of caring is evident. It is worth noting that Antoine wanted to be an engineerwhen he grew up and that his “uncle is an engineer and he builds trains.” Moreover, otherstudents considered building artifacts and inventing designs as an important way in whichscientists care for others in the world. Third grader Reanna communicated the altruisticfeelings she associated with scientists when she said she liked science because

it’s cool to learn a lot of stuff . . . to invent something. The first thing that they [scientists]had invent was a radio to transmit // to transform to other people because they had no phoneor nothing (***), so to talk to their mothers they had to get on the radio to talk to theirmothers, or they couldn’t get help.

Reanna was also a scientist when she herself engaged in practices that helped people. “I’mlike a scientist because I like to learn important things, the information, and what scientistshas said is like information, I want to share it too . . . I like to share about germs, so peopledon’t get sick and die.” Helping people stay healthy was also pronounced in the ideas thather classmate, Keyon, shared. Keyon saw himself as a scientist because if he could makeany project, he would “make a microscope” as noted earlier, in order to make a differencein people’s lives:

want to make a microscope [because] when something’s small and I can’t see it, I can lookup on the microscope down there and I could look what kind of virus or something in it sopeople don’t get sick or go to the hospital.

After being prompted, Keyon noted that he knew of someone “who had gotten sick from avirus and died.”

Third grader Tanya also saw caring for the wider world as part of being a scientist. Forher, a scientist was “an expert of animals and take care of the animals instead of killing

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them.” Tanya’s classmate’s, Chanise’s, altruism was expressed when she spoke about beinga scientist out in the world:

we write stuff down for them, if we see birds die // Miss M. // we write stuff down and giveit to them. We do this at home. Miss M. our gym teacher . . . It help her telling people howto do it, how to help a bird, to care for birds.

Chanise’s reference to a project in which her gym teacher was involved, which includedinforming others every time a dead bird was found, points to the influence various voices(teachers, family members, and peers) have on children’s representations of scientists andthemselves as scientists. Experiences and interactions with others were salient to children.For many, the science class was only one of the places that shaped their ways of seeingscience, scientists, and themselves as scientists. Although they were having conversationswith us—people positioned as closely related to their school science and what they weredoing during that year in their teacher’s classroom—they shared representations of selfvis-a-vis science that foregrounded interactions with others, and knowledge gained, inplaces other than their classrooms. The children’s ideological becoming was being shapedby various voices including voices of others beyond the boundaries of their science classduring the year of the study.

Finally, some children constructed a different form of caring associated with science,namely caring for others by teaching them. For four girls, three second graders (Jaleesa,Savanna, and Pricilla) and a third grader (Tanya), scientists teach others including children.For Jaleesa scientists are “very smart and I think they’re teaching other kids how to bescientists.” Savanna could see herself as a scientist if she taught a person “how to makestuff come out and about the science questions.” “I’ll teach the science kid a lot of stuffso she or he be smart,” she shared. Pricilla thought that “when you grow up and you bea scientist sometimes it’s really fun to be a scientist because you can teach people howto do stuff . . . you can teach people to be scientist, and you learn, and they gonna learn.”For Tanya scientists “make drawings . . . cartoons so the kids can watch them.” These girlswere constructing scientists as people who care not only about doing things themselvesand being smart, but also about helping others (including “kids” like themselves) learnand become smart. Moreover, two of these girls, Jaleesa and Pricilla, referred not only toschool experiences but also to experiences they had outside of school with relatives. Jaleesabuilt robots with her brother at home, and Pricilla was going to her Auntie’s house on theweekends where she was experimenting with mixing substances in a bag and putting themin the freezer, which she linked with the movie Brats.

Science as Capital in Constructions of Self

For the young African American children in this study, science had power in a variety ofways. Along with identifying the caring marker of scientists (as helping other people learnand become scientists), second grader Pricilla also saw them as “heroes.” She shared:

When you be a scientist it’s like something real good. It’s like you’re a hero trying tohelp other people grow up to be something good. To be someone. To be something. To besomeone who somebody knows, who somebody wants to look up to . . . When you do goodexperiments on science and when you sometimes put your mind to it and you know thatyou can do it . . . like scientists they can go out and explore everything, and can explorethe wild. They can go into the forest and try and find animals and everything. They candiscover animals that sometimes people don’t even know about.

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For Pricilla, scientists create knowledge that others do not, which gives them a privilegedplace in society and makes them role models. Scientists gain this knowledge throughdetermination, commitment, and explorations and experiments they conduct, but not justany experiments—“good” experiments that scientists do when they concentrate and havefaith in themselves. This type of capital that Pricilla attached to science is a form of social,symbolic capital derived from cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). It is a resource connectedto group membership that places emphasis on status and power of an individual in relationto others (a central idea in Bourdieu’s social capital) and exists when recognized by others(an important feature of Bourdieu’s symbolic capital). It comes, though, from knowledge,practices, and structures in the field of science (which constitute forms of existence ofBourdieu’s embodied cultural capital).

As noted earlier, about half of the children in the study associated possession of significantknowledge with being scientists. Although first grader Adeline did not explicitly positionherself as having a relatively higher status than others as Pricilla did, she saw knowledgeas an asset. Adeline shared that “it’s great to know a lot about something, if somebodydon’t know it, you can tell them.” For Adeline, possession of knowledge (a form of culturalcapital) positions people as the ones who can offer that knowledge to others. Althoughwe do not know how Adeline conceives the dialectic between the giver and the recipientof knowledge, she eluded to the interplay between cultural and social capital that sciencecould provide her and others.

A similar, but more nuanced, way of looking at the interplay of social and cultural capitalwas offered by third grader Ellis. He shared: “A scientist might be like if you can makesomething, you can make it good, then maybe you can make friends who tell you things andthen you have more scientists to help you and work with their machines.” As the only childwho voiced a communal sense of the practice of science, Ellis saw products and knowledgethat a member of a group contributes as the beginning of a productive relationship. Elliswas likely implying that different scientists would probably have different “machines” ortools developed, and the opportunity for an individual to have access to more than his owndevices and products could open up more possibilities. Thus, it seems that for Ellis scientificactivity includes the dialectic of cultural and social capital in a way that cultural capitalenables social capital, which in turn further strengthens an individual’s cultural capital.

Similarly to Adeline’s focus on knowledge, second grader Jaleesa believed that “scientistsare smart, they’re good, and they’re kind of smarter than people that don’t know much.” Butshe also shared that scientists are “really cool . . . [and cool means] you have like cool clothesand you be cool and you be calm and never yell at anybody.” For Jaleesa, scientists standout among others both because of their knowledge and of their appearance. Although it isnot clear from our data what type of clothes Jaleesa had in mind for scientists, both forms ofcultural capital—embodied (knowledge) and objectified (clothes)—were associated withJaleesa’s views of science. Moreover, social capital was revealed, but not linked to thecultural capital. Calmness and absence of yelling were qualities that Jaleesa was likelyassociating with functional communities, and, in her mind, scientists had these specialqualities. Jaleesa’s idea refracts her teacher’s efforts, norms, and ways of being in herclassroom; her teacher was cultivating a more subdued environment than settings whichsome of her students have experienced. Jaleesa’s teacher knew that there were violence,excessive activity, and “craziness” in some of her students’ lives and she was workingthroughout the year to “calm” some of her students down. Although Jaleesa was not oneof them, she had catered her conceptions of science and scientists to what her teacher, andperhaps others, tended to show her and her peers as valuable practices.

Children had also constructed relationships with science that allowed them to see them-selves as capable in the midst of interacting with peers and their teacher in their classrooms.

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Science was for third grader Toshelle a way of seeing herself (not scientists in general) assmart, “know[ing] things other people don’t know,” making sense of ideas, and being seenby her peers and her teacher as the one contributing to such meaning making. Toshellechose one of her journal pages to talk about where

Ms. T. had some honey and she // she // spoon // she had a spoon and she pulled the honeyout and then it was on the spoon and then it dropped and she asked “could we see gravity?”and everybody said “Yes” and then “No” and Ms. T. was confused and then I said “Yes”and she asked me why. I said “because um because the honey was going down in the jar.”

Science was also a space where Toshelle could help others who were not listening andpaying attention like her. She described herself as a “good student [who] listens and don’tget in trouble. They [good students] doing their work. . . They don’t blurt out.” In science,Toshelle thought of herself as an “active and focused” student; “active” because scientists“act smart.” Toshelle liked

when we do science and y’all [referring to two teacher educators / researchers] come andmake it better because when we do it with all the bad students it’s not that good cause theyinterrupt and we have to repeat and // or Ms. T. has to repeat cause then we have to do itover. . . ’Cause when y’all come it’s more better and then when they write they talk, [like]Damien.

Toshelle separated herself from the “bad” students who “interrupt” and probably werenot focused and were not listening, unlike Toshelle who was a “good” student. Toshellesaw these students as compromising and slowing down her own learning. She realized herteacher’s efforts to reach everybody and in some ways she acknowledged indirectly thatstudents (the other “bad” students, and possibly herself) needed to talk more and go overideas as they were writing and drawing in their journals. This was more feasible when threeof us were in the classroom than when only one adult, the teacher, was. Toshelle lovedinteracting with the adults in the room, and she loved talking about her own science ideasand her attempts to express them through words and pictures in her journal. Several of herjournal entries had pictures that included people, herself, her teacher, peers, and the visitorsin her classroom. Thus, for Toshelle, science was associated with both social and culturalcapital. Science helped position herself away from the “bad” students and with the “good”ones, closer to the teacher and the classroom visitors who helped her with science, and ithelped her make sense of ideas. Her ways of looking at science were tangled up with howshe was constructing herself in her science class.

For other children, though, science offered different forms of cultural capital. For firstgrader Karam, a reason why he liked science was that “if you focus on your things, you dosome right, but if you do science you get bigger and bigger and go to a bigger classroom andpass 10th grade and go to college [and he wanted to go to college].” Karam portrayed scienceas an enabling (and by extension a gatekeeper, if the opposite conditions exist) subject, asubject that offers students an opportunity to advance to higher grades and attend college,accruing capital. For Karam, science had power because of the possibilities it offered insideschool and in terms of moving along the educational system (institutionalized culturalcapital). Similarly, third grader Kyree noted science’s cultural power. He liked sciencebecause he

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learn[s] about stuff, and you’ll get better at it. You have to take the science test and if you’renot paying attention you’ll probably have to go ahead and go to summer school. If youwanna be a scientist, you gotta go ahead and try your best and keep your mind to it andthat’s it.

For Kyree, institutional structures, such as tests and summer school, are integral to people’ssuccess and participation in science. In contrast, the cultural capital thatsecond grader Ramell associated with science came in an objectified form. Ramellshared:

I want to be a game designer, you gotta get a degree to do that, a game degree, you canmake your own games and have a commercial of that game. . . [Scientists make games andget money] for making cool inventions. They can get a thousand dollars.

Ramell did not associate capital with scientists in general but with himself as a potentialscientist. For Ramell, being a scientist would allow him to develop materials that wouldalso offer him an economic advantage.

Yet for a few children, science had a type of affective capital; science made them have funand feel good. Science made first grader Adeline “happy.” Third grader Althea, describingherself as a scientist, positioned herself as a person “with a name” and shared that “whatthey [scientists] do makes them feel good.” Science was not an impersonal practice forAlthea, nor was done by an indistinguishable group of people. Members of that group werespecific individuals who had a name and specific birthday, but moreover, they were peoplewho experienced satisfaction from what they were doing. For Pricilla,

It’s fun to discover things, to find out things and to think of things [like] discover animals.We discover the ways you know how to balance cuz I didn’t really know how to balance, Ijust tried stuff, keep on trying and think about science.

Similarly, for her classmate Destinee,

It’s fun because when you’re trying to blow stuff and see how much inches it is. . . it’s funbecause I just like cars and I love to let it go and then measure it, let it go and see how muchfarther it go.

DISCUSSION

In this study, we explored ways in which African American children, in three classroomsin economically stressed neighborhoods where they may have faced a plethora of socialand economic hardships, related themselves to science/scientists after experiencing, forat least 1 year, science instruction that offered them varied opportunities to engage withscientific practices and ideas. Our goal was not to derive patterns and generalizationsabout African American children and their ways of seeing themselves vis-a-vis science andscientists in urban classrooms, but to study difference in the ways they do so in particularclassrooms and with particular teachers. We focused on teachers who were intentionallyworking toward both becoming themselves more comfortable with science and helpingtheir students engage with science in meaningful, varied, and dialogical ways. In this study,we did not systematically analyze how the teachers were helping their children participatein science and learn science, but our analysis was informed by classroom practice sincethe first two authors were visiting these classrooms throughout the school year. Our focus

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was on uncovering, and understanding, through various theoretical constructs, the array ofrepresentations and of individual, distinct voices that young African American children maycome to develop as they engage in reform-oriented science instruction in urban schools.Thus, we do not essentialize Black children; we document the nuanced variety of theirexpressed, negotiated viewpoints about self, science, and school in the ecological contextsof their classrooms.

As Schwab (1970) wrote “the specific not only adds to the generic: it also modulates it”(p. 35). Our data reveal all the subtleties that are played out among children in the sameclassroom, as they interact with each other and their teacher, and across different classrooms.They reveal how children appropriated in similar and unique ways their science schoolingexperience and produced knowledge of, and about, science and themselves in relation toscience. Our findings also encourage us, as teachers, to revisit and rethink ways in whichwe engage in science children of color in urban schools surrounded with poverty. Thechildren in our study had constructed representations of science, school, and self that hadmany different shades. Some seemed to keep conceptions of “doing school” out of theirconceptions of “doing science,” and others did not. Some echoed in their ways of seeingscientists attributes that are not necessarily unique features of scientists, but rather qualitiesof “good” people in functional societies that teachers promote in schools, and others didnot. Some saw science as a body of knowledge, large amounts of information, and othersdid not. Some associated science and scientists with making and building, or with variousliteracy elements, and others did not. Some saw caring for animals, people, the earth, andthe world as important in science, and others did not. Some brought up the capital theyassociated with scientists, others referred to their own capital as engaged in science, andothers did not do either.

The children’s ways of seeing science and themselves vis-a-vis science were shaped bythe ways in which they saw themselves as competent in the classroom and/or they heardtheir teachers telling them about areas in which they need to improve. How they weresocialized in the classroom, and how they perceived their teacher and peers seeing them,was echoed in their science ideological becoming. As Davies and Harre (2001) noted,“among the products of discursive practices are the very persons who engage in them”(p. 262). Ladson-Billings (1995) articulated that teachers’ ways of seeing and promotingacademic excellence are influenced by their conceptions of self and others, their conceptionsof social relations that are formed and reformed in their classrooms, and their conceptionsof the knowledge to be built. Similarly, the children’s ways of seeing science and theirplace in it were influenced by who they saw themselves and others being, how they sawthemselves in interactions with their peers and teacher, and what they thought science asa intellectual domain was about. These different types of conceptions were intertwined, todifferent degrees, in the children’s developing science ideologies.

Some of the young African American children’s ideas and positionings were related towhat “doing school” involved. Students should not be talking much. They should raisetheir hands. They should be focused. They should work hard. They should help others.They should respect the teacher. They should do what they are told. They should stay intheir seats. They should spell correctly. They should not misbehave. They should learn alot of information. They should do well in tests. They should work hard to be promotedto higher grades. Some of the young African American children’s ideas and positioningswere related to what their teachers were trying to help them construct about “doing sci-ence.” As scientists, they build, design, share, test out, observe, write, draw, try to getit right, figure things out, experiment, explore, discover, think about what they do andwhy, take care of living and nonliving things, find clues, measure, get ideas from books,and have fun.

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What we also found was that several of the children had constructed sophisticatedconceptions that involved science as capital for scientists and/or for themselves as scientists.For some of the children, science carried social, cultural, or affective capital. They hadconceptualized science as an enabling enterprise that would give them status among theirpeers, or access to further education, or knowledge that others did not have, or that wouldeven make them feel good inside. Throughout the conversations with the children, only afew of them referred to people or events outside their schools—Antoine who wanted to be anengineer because his uncle is a train engineer, Savanna who was going to a “science class”on Saturdays, Marcella who was mixing and making stuff at her grandma’s basement, Aronwho was learning science ideas from the Discovery Channel, Jaleesa who was buildingrobots with her brother at home, and Pricilla who was experimenting at her Auntie’s house.Of course, this may be an artifact of the way in which, and the place where, we conductedthe conversations with the children. Nevertheless, these conversations revealed that whatthe children did in class and how they interacted with their teacher, materials, and each otherconstituted main sites of their socialization into science, and of their construction of norms,values, and ideologies related to science. The children were constructing science identitiesas well as academic identities as African American students in their classrooms (Spencer,2009; Varelas et al., in press). This is why we need to be particularly attentive to the waysin which teaching and learning of science in classrooms shape children’s construction ofideas about science and themselves relative to science.

School practices and norms need to be examined and analyzed in terms of not only theirimpact on the degree of learning but also on the nature of learning that children achieve.When teachers worry and focus on making sure their students avoid trouble, they focus onstudents’ good behavior—following rules, listening to those who know more, and avoidingcausing trouble. These behavioral regulations then become intertwined with what it meansto students to be engaged in a particular community of practice, such as science. Thatchildren brought up behavioral norms as dimensions of doing science may mean that theyhad constructed the view that unless they behaved well they would not have access toscience, and would be invisible, outsiders, and left out. Invisibility, marginalization, andexclusion are experiences that students of color (mostly older ones) bring up as part of theirracialized experiences with science (Malone & Barabino, 2009). Moreover, if we wantchildren, and especially children of color in underserved urban areas, to realize that scienceis about questioning, testing, measuring, wondering, explaining, and so on, then we needto examine how practices that emphasize obedience to the teacher and encourage seeingthe teacher as the only authority in the classroom are consistent or not with such scienceideology. If such behavioral codes are in some ways antithetical to the active, inquisitive,questioning, flexible view of science and science learning that teachers try to enact in theseclassrooms, then how can students make sense of the competing messages they receive?

Furthermore, if we want children of color to develop what Gordon (2007) calls “intel-lective competence” that would allow African American students to develop an “adaptivehuman intellect” using their knowledge and skills to solve problems, explore ideas, per-ceive events critically, then we need to help students see science beyond a large amount ofinformation that defines them as “smart” people. Although students have to try their bestand work hard when they do science, as when they do any other subject matter, seeing sci-ence, and especially themselves doing science, as hard work may level their expectations.According to Aschbacher and her colleagues (2010), such a way of looking at science maycompromise and diminish students’ aspirations, motivation, and expectations to engagewith science and do well in it, and, therefore, to be in a position to imagine a place forthemselves relative to science.

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With our study, we add to the knowledge base of how children, youth, and students, ingeneral, frame science as a domain and their selves relative to science in the context ofclassroom reform-oriented efforts toward doing science. Carlone (2004), extending a lineof scholarship that called for more nuanced understandings of students’ roles in reformedscience classrooms, was deeply concerned with how high school girls saw themselves andformed relationships with science in their Active Physics classroom.

We attempt to transform school science by coming up with ‘empowering’ alternatives tothe prototypical school science curriculum. Yet, where is one left when the girls rejectempowering science in favor of prototypical science that makes their role as good studentsand their quest for their end of the exchange (i.e., good grades and college admission)easier? (p. 410)

In a related, but different, manner, we are troubled by the ways in which many of theyoung children in our study’s classrooms, and especially girls, focused on discipline andgood behavior fusing these with doing science. We are also concerned with the findingthat children saw themselves as smart because they possessed a large amount of scientificinformation. In contrast, though, to the high school girls, the young children of color in ourstudy did see science as holding for them various types of capital, and as enabling thembeyond just offering them opportunities to survive and succeed in the school world.

Our findings complement, we believe, a recent study (Archer et al., 2010) of views andbeliefs about science in relation to themselves held by forty-two 10–11-year-olds in fourschools in the London area, with a variety of socioeconomic status and ethnic affiliations,along with the reasons behind these beliefs. Archer and her colleagues found that “the‘brainy-ness’ of science was configured in a complex relationship with effort and ability”(p. 13). Their 10–11-year-olds did not think that they needed to be clever to be good inscience which is welcome news since one way that cleverness may be interpreted is asa natural, inherent characteristic and intelligence. However, many students referred to a“natural interest” that leads to “pay attention, remember facts, and do well in science class”(p. 14) which concerned the researchers, since it could be linked (currently or later) tothe notion that there is a “science person” (p. 15) type, which some people are and othersare not.

Moreover, Archer and her colleagues were troubled by what they called the disjuncturebetween “doing” and “being.” “While anyone can ‘do’ science, only a few will really ‘be’scientists and. . . the identities of these children are popularly ‘known’ from an early age”(p. 15). Their data revealed that, “taking up a science identity may be undesirable for manygroups of young people” (p. 19). Our data do not reveal such disjuncture since the childrenin our study talked interchangeably about themselves and scientists and, as our analysisrevealed, they appropriated practices, that they had been engaged and participated in, intheir developing identities, actual and designated, of themselves vis-a-vis scientists. Onefrom the possibly many reasons for this difference in the findings between the Archeret al. study and ours may be the different ways in which the conversations with the studentswere constructed. Archer and her colleagues presented the discussion groups with severalgeneral questions that included questions about “students’ views on science, scientists,and their science classes” (p. 4). In contrast, we situated our conversations with childrenaround their own science journals where they had written and drawn about science ideas andclassroom experiences that were aimed at developing these ideas. Thus, the methodologicaldifference may have contributed to the difference in the constructs that became salient ineach study. This highlights the necessity for continuing to pursue a variety of researchdesigns to develop a nuanced knowledge base of such complex constructs such as identity.

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The findings of the present study reveal ways in which “doing school” becomes adominant narrative that bleeds into “doing science.” Critical to identity construction areboth positioning and recognition, and norms associated with “doing school” seemed tobe important for being positioned and recognized in the classroom. This is particularlyimportant for Black students. Focusing on African American males and the ways in whichschools “disserve and underserve” them, Noguera (2003) cautions:

Learning how to influence the attitudes and behaviors of African American males mustbegin with an understanding of the ways in which structural and cultural forces shape theirexperiences in school and influence the construction of their identities. In this regard, itis especially important that future research be directed toward a greater understanding ofyouth culture and the processes related to cultural production. (p. 452)

Similarly, we see the findings of this research as a call for further investigation and under-standing of ways in which structural and cultural forces that govern students’ schoolingexperiences shape students’ academic and science identities, and their science ideologicalbecoming. Children make sense of, and coordinate, norms of schooling and science andconstruct (or not) a place for themselves in a science classroom where enabling pedagogyis attempted, forming complex relationships among their selves, school, and science.

If we are to help underserved children, whom we have been leaving behind, learnand succeed in science, we need a larger research base identifying how these childrenposition themselves relative to science, what they find as important, and how they makesense of the multiple and sometimes conflicting messages that they are hearing. As Martin(2000) points out, many actors and forces shape African American students’ ways ofconceptualizing mathematics and their place in it, but it appears that students make their ownchoices, thus foregrounding difference rather than sameness. African American students are“both reactive and proactive—resisting, conforming, making decisions, forming beliefs anddispositions, and constructing mathematical knowledge and identities” (p. 33). They actand react to various forces and interact with each other based on their past experiencesand their conceptions and expectations for success. Furthermore, these conceptions andexpectations are shaped by others’ (people inside and outside their schools) conceptionsabout them and about their education. Thus, we need to continue building a research basethat captures and sheds light on the complexities of ideological becoming in all subjectareas including science.

APPENDIX: KEY FOR SYMBOLS USED IN EXCERPTSOF STUDENT TALK

// Repetitions or false starts or abandoned language replaced by newlanguage structures

(***) One word that is inaudible or impossible to transcribeUnderscore Emphasis[] Identifies what is being referred to or gestured and other nonverbal

contextual information. . . Part of student talk has been omitted

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Documents

Young African American children's representations of self, science, and school: Making sense of difference