Students as curriculum critics: Standpoints with respect to relevance, goals, and science

TitleStudents as curriculum critics: Standpoints with respect to relevance, goals, and science
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsMorales‐Doyle, Daniel
JournalJournal of Research in Science Teaching
Volume55
Issue5
Pagination749-773
ISSN1098-2736
AbstractThis article presents the findings of an ethnographic interview study that examined the ways students experienced a justice-centered AP chemistry course at an urban neighborhood high school. Justice-centered science pedagogy is an approach to teaching science that treats inequity in science education as one component of larger systems of oppression. The analysis of interview transcripts, which included pattern matching and coding, revealed variation in the ways students' viewed the relevance of the curriculum, the goals of science education, and science itself. These results underscore the importance of researchers and teachers taking seriously students' ideas about the means and ends of their own science education. Three standpoints with respect to science curriculum are proposed to explain the variations in students' perspectives and suggest implications for science educators. These standpoints trouble recent research that examines motivation in high school science classes and add nuance to research that investigates relationships between science learning and social agency by reframing these problems in terms of curriculum and issues of oppression.
URLhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/tea.21438
DOI10.1002/tea.21438
Short TitleStudents as curriculum critics
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