Urban Science Education Center

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Urban Science Education Center
Department of Mathematics, Science, and
Technology Teachers College Columbia University
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Mission

• To build and sustain culturally relevant,
  socially just, and academically challenging
  science education experiences for students in
  high poverty New York City public middle schools.
• To research and redesign urban science teacher
  education in order to better prepare teacher
  leaders in urban school systems, improve science
  teacher retention, and promote quality science
  teaching.
• To foster empowering relationships between
  Teachers College Programs in Science Education,
  schools, community organizations and urban
  communities

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Enacting our Mission

• To establish rich understandings of urban youth
  and the multiple intersections between their
  lives and science
• Science Toolkits
• access to and activation of human, social and
  material resources
• Funds of knowledge as strategic resources
• Science practices as strategic activation of
  resources
• relationship between resources activation and the
  location and design of the learning environment
• The relationships between the scope and function
  of science toolkits and student engagement in
  science (meaning making, identity/voice,
  agency/participation)
• To build a library of research-based resources
  about urban youth
• Rich array of research-based materials that
  describe urban youths science toolkits
• Offered in formats that teachers and curriculum
  developers can draw upon in building relevant,
  sustainable curricula and pedagogy Written and
  digital cases, archived and cataloged digital
  assets (interview, classroom interactions,
  student work, etc.), working papers, publications

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Enacting our Mission

• To creating testable, scalable models for
  curricular adaptation and sustainability grounded
  a framework for social justice
• Social Justice Framework
• Anti-deficit perspective
• Youth centered
• Inquiry and standards-based
• Urban centered scope and sequence
• Curricular Adaptations and Sustainability
• The design of Responsive Pedagogies that draw
  upon youths science toolkits
• Locally grounded science problems and practice
• Balancing academic science with science that is
  with and in the community
• Creating an urban centered scope and sequence
  that is coordinated with city and state standards
• Project/topic selection
• Grounding in local resources accessible to urban
  schools

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Enacting our Mission

• To design innovative approaches and tools to
  preparing preservice teachers to teach in urban
  settings (i.e., pedagogical toolkits).
• Design of a new course sequence with an urban
  focus
• Design on digital learning tools for use in
  preservice science education
• PARENTS (Parents and researchers talking about
  science)
• Science CUTS (Science cases about urban teachers
  and students)
• Field work experiences
• Summer internships involved in USEC activities

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Major Research and Development Projects
Girls Science Practices (NSF) 2004-2007 To describe and analyze high-poverty urban girls science practices in both form and function in the context of two specific middle school content areas To describe and analyze reform-based pedagogical strategies enacted by teachers that help girls to successfully leverage their science practices in their efforts to engage meaningfully in science To explore the relationship between girls science practices and science learning.
Out of school science practices in urban communities (Spencer) 2004-2005 To compare the science practices of high poverty urban middle school populations in both form and function in three contrasting high-poverty communities
Science Learning in High Poverty Urban Communities (NSF) 1999-2004 To describe and analyze how youth enact scientific literacies in out of school context, including the resources they draw upon and the strategies they use to activate those resources, and how/why they build the kinds of connections between school and home that they do To describe and analyze the beliefs that urban science teachers have about teaching students in high poverty communities, and to describe the kinds of urban resources that teachers successfully draw upon in their teaching of science in high poverty communities
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Major Research and Development Projects
Science Ed. in High Poverty Communities Science CUTS (NSF) 1993-2004 To design and implement a digital learning environment for preservice teachers that is grounded in research-based cases about student engagement in science and their science toolkits in high poverty urban schools
Urban Science Education Fellows Program (BMS) 2001-2005 To provide preservice teachers and graduate students studying to be teacher educators and staff developers opportunities to engage in action research with teachers in schools To document the impact that action research opportunities have on TC students and the school participations knowledge of science teaching, beliefs about teaching in urban schools and school reform. To create innovative teacher education materials grounded in the realities of urban schooling that can be used with preservice and inservice teachers.
Linking Food and the Environment (NIH) 1997-2005 To describe and analyze what high-poverty urban children understand and believe about food and the food system and how children transform and use that knowledge in their everyday lives To develop a 5th and 6th grade inquiry-based curriculum that focuses on the food system and that links science and nutritional literacies
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Urban Science Education Center

• Professional Development
• Workshop series Summer institute, school year
  retreats,
• Mini grants
• Mentors and Study Teams
• Urban Science Education Fellows

Leadership Team
Teachers College

• Student Programs
• After school programs and summer programs
• In school science initiatives
• Science role models and mentors

Interns
Partner Middle Schools

• Transformative Action Research
• Designing curricular adaptations/innovations
• Designing responsive pedagogies embedded in
  curricular innovations
• Understanding instructional and curricular
  advances on student achievement, attitudes in
  science, and science trajectories
• Understanding the role of professional
  development in enhancing teachers science
  understandings and capacities to create
  empowering science instruction
• Research and development of multimedia teacher
  learning tools focused on student learning in
  science, parental engagement in science education

Science and Community Partners
STAR Teams
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Transformative Research for Social Justice in
Urban Settings

• Four tenets that frame transformative research
• Immediate and direct impact on classrooms
• Cyclic and shared process of informed data
  collection, analysis, reflection, and application
• Can take many different forms
• Grounded in both the literature of best practices
  AND the needs of the classroom/community
• Primary methods we use at USEC
• Design experiments
• Mixed methods case study
• Large scale survey
• City- and state-based achievement data

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Partners
Schools Student Population Race and Ethnicity Free Lunch Statistics Staff.
PS 165 664 65 African Am 35 Hispanic 93 free lunch 59
PS 306 910 45 African Am 55 Hispanic 90 free lunch 75
HMSMS 150 70 African Am 30 Hispanic 95 free lunch 12
MS 306 808 45 African Am 55 Hispanic 90 free lunch 50
Crossroads MS 207 46 African Am 46 Hispanic 3 Asian, 5 White 74 free lunch 12
Westside Collaborative 210 43 African Am 44 Hispanic 9 White 4 Asian 76 free lunch 20
IS 195 947 50 African Am 45 Hispanic 6 White 95 free lunch 68
Region level Partners Community and Science Organizations
Region 1 Science and Technology Center Region 1 Science Staff Development Region 10 Science Staff Development ? WEACT ? South Street Seaport Museum ? Inwood Park Nature Center ? Playing 2 Win ? American Museum of Natural History ? Columbias Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Central Park Conservancy
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Collaborative possibilities -- Questions

• What research interests do we have in common? How
  might our research agendas merge into a
  meaningful project located in NYC and/or Boston?
• How does our approach to research and development
  inform development work at TERC (in a non
  summative evaluative manner)
• What active projects currently in place at USEC
  or at TERC can be advanced with the research and
  development approaches taken by the two
  organizations?
• Locations for development
• NYC/Boston
• In school/out of school
• Content areas/curricular initiatives