1 / 11

Urban Science Education Center

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

caitlin
Download Presentation

Urban Science Education Center

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

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

  2. 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

  3. 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 youth’s “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

  4. 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 youth’s 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

  5. 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

  6. Major Research and Development Projects

  7. Major Research and Development Projects

  8. 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 teacher’s 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

  9. 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

  10. Partners

  11. 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

More Related