Michael Occhino

Each reading had some component of critical social theory as its underlying epistemology. It seemed that Mayberry was strongest in her feminist pedagogy stating that the whole way we do science and view science must change and be transformed. Mayberry (8) paraphrases Harding, saying “The task facing science educators is to construct a new form of scientific knowledge, a feminist science, that accounts for the social context of modern Western science and becomes a resource for bettering the welfare of people around the globe.” I agree and actually had a recent experience where one of my female students Kyrsten’s made a statement of how she “really liked this part of the course content” on environmental impact of humans; Acid rain, ozone depletion, eutrophication etc. This socially applied topic resonated with her and the others in this class which, interestingly, only has two males in it. Mayberry’s point is well taken that it is not enough to reform how we teach science, but also looking at the situatedness of the content itself.

The readings made me consider what type of situatedness we should be striving for in our schools. Inquiry can be a powerful means to learning, but to learn what? What tacit learning accompanies inquiry or any science instruction? Alper describes many numbers from the pipeline and that there are fewer women in the workforce as compared to men though more degrees than represented by the number in workforce. His pipeline shrinks from middle school on up and diminishes at each step. He posits the leak starting at 7th grade. Interventions surely must begin early! One can hope that there has been headway in this realm and I would have to say that there has been. In my experience with students “drawing a scientist” activity I have noticed a definite increase in their representations of themselves even over the past eight years that I have been doing this activity. It is my hope that girls and boys of any background and identity would be increasingly seeing themselves as being fully capable of doing science. A necessary (missing?) part seems to be that we also must explicitly have discourse around the socio-political and cultural characteristics that influence science and vice versa. This discourse may be the push that changes science itself as those we teach now navigate the unfriendly waters they may encounter from the “normative” bastion of those already embedded in the field who might be encountered as professors, advisors or employers.

All the readings incorporate and advance a belief that transformation must take place. I believe that is true. Attitudes that progress from generation to generation must be challenged and changed. This is true in all the critical theories such as feminist, queer, disability studies and multicultural education. The each are attempting to provide participants to act as agents of change in the current model. In approaches informed by disability studies we are slowly transforming from a medical model of deficits to a strength based approach focusing on what students can do. McGinnis cites the National Science Education Standards and IDEA as primary reasons for teaching students with disabilities with an inquiry based approach. His reasoning for doing so, rather than a critical analysis of the reasons, is unclear, but his point is well made that the standards say it so it should be done. I am unsure about the efficacy of this approach as I believe people respond more effectively when social justice issues are presented from a humanistic approach as opposed to a top down dictate. I was pleased to see that he at least showed some evidence (429) supporting what the standards support.

Alper, J. (1993). The pipeline is leaking women all the way along. Science. Vol. 260. 16. April.

Mayberry, M. (1999). Reproductive and resistant pedagogies: The comparative roles of collaborative learning and feminist pedagogy in science education. In M. Mayberry, & E.C. Rose (Eds.), Meeting the challenge: Innovative feminist pedagogies in action (pp. 2–22). New York: Routledge.

McGinnis, J.R. (2000). Teaching science as inquiry for students with disabilities. In J. Minstrell & E. van Zee (Eds.), Inquiring into inquiry learning and teaching in science, Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Questions are, for me, the central piece of inquiry based science teaching. I think it is the most importatnt skill that one can develop that serves a multitude of purposes. Lower level questions, knowledge and understanding, can assess prior knowledge in a perfunctory way and I liked Wolf’s Inference Questions (3) as a better way to assess. Too often, I think, teachers play the “guess wat I am thinking” game where the student has to conform their answer to what the teacher wants. The inference question allows opend ended discourse that is totally in the student voice yet is rich with clues as to what the student knows. The Arc that Wolf writes about (5) is so important and I believe is where the art form of questioning is best expressed. An inference question might spark many forks in the road to which the teacher/facilitator’s response navigates the path that the discussion takes. In order to successfully navigate these forks, the teacher must have a clear understanding of the learning process and the objectives that drive the lesson (I am sensing a metaphor here…). This line of reasoning leads back to the discussions/journals a few weeks ago about planning and why it is seminal to professional practice. If you have clarity of purpose through your objectives and planning, that translates into smooth navigation free of fog.

In comparison with Wolf, Marten seemed a bit more simplistic in question type. I liked and responded postively to the Wolf categories better. I think for a pre-service teacher, the Marten categories of Attention Focusing, Measuring, Comparison, Action, Problem Posing and Reasoning are descriptive categories and to some extent follow Bloom’s hierarchical structure. Student readiness is a critical component for asking questions and is critical for deeping the discourse on the highway.

The crux of critical questioning is choosing the best question for the best student response. This takes time and thoughtfulness in mastering. Modeling one’s thinking out loud is a strategy that I have found useful in helping steer the direction of the line of questioning. What a student says dictates how I respond and the better I know my students the better my line of questioning can be.

Concept maps have always been significant to me. They are clearly a great fit for how I think and I have had a great deal of success in using them in my practice. Click the link to the right (Michael’s Wilson Website) and choose the homework link to access some recent concept maps). As a strongly spatial thinker, one who thinks in images and graphic representations, I have foudn concept maps and graphic organizers a powerful tool in my own learning and planning. It is also a powerful, succinct way to represent relationships that words alone cannot convey.

An Epistemology:
When I look at my list of words that are elements of my epistemology of science learning, I see that there are so many links between each of them so I am going to try and post concept map of my epistemology and then do some further explaining of the linkages.

The major pieces of ideal learning include all of the concepts linke to the central star. If I were to order these hierarchically, it would be difficult for some due to overlap, for instance, brain based strategies include many of the other concepts including “Stimulating Neuronal Pathways,” “Stimulating Interest,” “Intrinsic Motivation” and “reflection.”

So when I asked my two former students about the seasons I got one answer that showed some idea of the surface area and directness of the sun’s rays as the cause. This student could not remember the relationship between directness and temperature (or season) which showed me that he did not own the concept as his reasoning was blunted at that point of conceptual understanding. He guessed “less direct=summer” and “more direct=winter.” After being prompted, he stated that he remembered a picture that I had showed him (this memory is in question as I only taught him biology for his last two years) showing the solstices and tilts of the axes.
Excerpts from a chat:
cuz all i remember
is this picture u showed us one time
and it showed the solstices
and one picture had the sun covering a wide area
and one covering a small area
and i forgot which did what
He felt like he could reason it out if he had seen the question on paper. He also answered inaccurately that the tilt was 30 degrees (close to the 23.5).

The second student answered first with “tilt of the earth,” (actually he first said leprechauns… no really, but he was joking) and that we are on an axis and we tilt on it to be either further or closer to the sun. I asked him when are we closer? His response, “the summer. He tried to explain that the suns rays are a higher density closer to the earth. I prompted him to think back on the tilt answer he gave and he said “it tilts, then a part is closer and another part is further away.

The 38 year old middle school technology teacher nailed the explanation almost perfectly with the exception of saying the tilt was 12.5 degrees.

Early on in my teaching I had an opportunity to think metaphorically about my practice and I had come up with a graphic organizer of a colander… a sieve sort of where knowledge came in through the top (standards/curriculum etc) and I filtered and sorted and separated that into manageable strands that students could feed into their brains.

A better analogy now, I believe, is embodied in a tree. As I consider a tree in terms of systems thinking, seeing the relationships between the tree and environment gives me a picture of my practice that has validity. The leaves of the tree are students who bring with them all the important properties to use the water and support that is transported through the trunk. Also, the leaves give glucose to the entire organism and that is the basic carbohydrate of life that nourishes almost all living things. Outside forces in a student’s life can be like the sun, either causing more photosynthesis or less on cloudy days.
In my analogy, I see water from the river filling the local springs and aquifers as curriculum that is drawn up the plant tissue to the leaves. Along the way, the xylem and phloem are people like me that have a leadership role and assist/nourish teachers to foster greater learning in their leaves, er, students. I also work directly in the classroom to enhance the learning of the students. Branches represent the many other teachers in my department that extend out and rely on the trunk for support and the roots for water.
Roots are kind of like administrators. Sucking up the water and some minerals to transport up the trunk and also anchoring the tree to help it weather the wind which can be compared to central office.
The trunk includes the bark which is the school building, that protects and surrounds the infrastructure.

Reflecting back on this past week I am amazed at the amount of science that I have been involved in and at so many levels. I was struck by this through a conversation with a friend where I was relating the events of the past week…
In my classroom, my students have begun their first investigation on goldnenrod gall flies and the organisms that prey upon them. They have formed a model and are working toward experimental design. I believe it is going well and feels a bit smoother than it did last year. I am looking forward to this week when they will use the galls that I collected today. Oh, yeah, that is another scientific endeavor, today I collected galls (they requested 160) and I was busy for several hours doing so. It was great being out of doors and I will relate some of the questions and thoughts I had about the experience to my students tomorrow.

On last Friday, I went on a field trip with some other classes at my school to the Genesee River Gorge at Seth Green Drive. It is a great trip and we are very fortunate to have such an amazing resource right here in our own city, ten minutes away from my school. The students are doing some field work in sketching, observing and collecting geological samples from the outcroppings there. It also ties in local history, culture and technology (there is an RG&E hydrostation at the bottom) as well as the various geological value in the rocks, fossils and landscape geology created by the river whose path was influenced by glaciers 12-20K years ago. Lots going on and fodder for that teachers classroom discourse for the next week and throughout the semester.

Finally, on Saturday was the International Coastal Cleanup. Our small attempt at citizen science and environmental stewardship. Lots of trash was catalogued and removed from the banks of the Genesee and it was fun! I am interested in seeing what my three students who participated have to say about the experience. I think they liked it.