With contributions by Robbin Riedy and Melissa Campanella

At a network meeting of the ACESSE partnership, state leaders worked with team members to analyze definitions of equity in science education that had been offered to interviewers from the research team. They looked at strips of paper with anonymized excerpts and tried to sort them into piles. One leader was surprised to find that there were many definitions of equity being used in her own state, because there were a number of equity-focused initiatives in the state already that had a coherent message about the goals of science education. For example, she found many leaders centered their explanations of equity on issues such as access to science classes for special education students or resource disparities between building sites, important issues but only partial visions of equitable science education. She had learned that issues of students’ interests or identity within pedagogical and curricular choices where important aspects of the Framework vision often left out of practice. She wondered what to do next with this information.

The state leader in this excerpt faces a common situation: there are so many different ideas about the aims of science education in a state, it’s difficult to know where to start to develop a common vision for teaching and learning. And while A Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012) provides one common starting point for developing a shared vision, the Framework itself presents many different definitions of equity. Sometimes equity is presented as an ideal of “all standards, all students,” and in other places, educators are invited to make connections in teaching to students’ specific cultural values and practices, in order to make science more meaningful for groups that have been marginalized in science. The Next Generation Science Standards themselves alternate between a view of science as ultimately beneficial to society and the planet, and a view that emphasizes that students should learn about the ways that science and technology have harmed communities (Gunckel & Tolbert, 2018).

In this guide, we will:

1. Develop an argument for the importance of centering a vision of equitable teaching and learning in standards implementation;
2. Describe the key elements of the vision of equitable teaching and learning presented in A Framework for K-12 Science Education;
3. Provide some tools for helping teams investigate their own and others’ ideas about equity; and
4. Describe strategies for crafting coherence through participatory processes where teams can arrive at a shared vision they embrace and support.

The Importance of Vision

The emergence of common standards and related systems of accountability for meeting those standards was one way that policy makers sought to promote greater equity across districts and among schools, by ensuring all students were being prepared to succeed at set expectations. School accountability revolves largely around student achievement measures and other performance indicators associated with college and career readiness. A different approach, the one embraced by the ACESSE Project, puts vision at the center.  A vision for teaching is an image of what classrooms could look like and be. It’s an ideal that may not be realized in practice, but that is held by educators as a guide for what they should be doing and what students should be learning. A vision is both a guide for the present and for the future (Feiman-Nemser, 2001; Hammerness, 2010). It is, in its best form, something that inspires growth (Corno, 2004; Hammerness et al., 2005).

To be inspiring and a good guide to practice, a vision needs to be specific but also have many different possible ways to realize it. The principles or assumptions of the Framework are a good example. If one assumption is that children are all born investigators, then a clear implication is that we need to see all students as capable of doing and learning science. At the same time, there are many ways to show that we take this assumption seriously: by engaging students in modeling at an early age, by eliciting and following students’ questions, by giving students’ ideas time to develop and form in public, without judgement. It helps, when articulating a vision, to name different ways that people can express their visions and still be consistent with one another.

Teachers’ visions matter. Research shows that a teacher’s vision affects how they make sense of students’ ideas (Coffey, Hammer, Levin, & Grant, 2011) and what curriculum materials they choose (Drake & Sherin, 2009). Teachers’ visions also predict what they learn from professional development and how they take up what they learn in their own classrooms (Hammerness et al., 2006; Munter & Correnti, 2017).

A vision is important for science leaders, because it can also guide changes made to policies and practices at the state, district, and school level. The Framework’s vision for teaching and learning guided the development of the Next Generation Standards. But vision’s influence shouldn’t stop there: it should animate discussions of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development at all levels of the system. A vision can serve as a kind of North Star for crafting coherence at the system level.

Just as we speak of our own vision as sharp or fuzzy, wide or narrow, visions for science education can be clear or murky, broad and encompassing, or limiting. A sharp vision can help educators and leaders notice the consequences of small decisions for realizing a vision; a fuzzy vision views all initiatives to promote change in science education as “good,” simply because they’re pointing in the same general direction. Sharpness matters for getting assessments that are three-dimensional implemented in a state or district, for creating protocols for observing teachers that are true to a common vision for teaching and learning, and for how teams deliberating over curriculum decisions go about their work. A broad vision is one that encompasses more than a single technique or silver bullet for improvement; it encompasses strategies for teaching, curriculum, professional development, assessment, and more.

A broad vision is helpful in another way, when it encompasses the perspectives of those who are often excluded from deciding on the goals of science education. Family and community members are often brought in after visions  are decided, and leaders “communicate” new policies and programs to them that reflect the vision. But parents and community members have hopes and dreams for children and youth, many of which are not considered but would enrich the development of a shared vision for science teaching and learning.

Three Types of Visions

Three general types of visions will be discussed in this chapter: target, existing, and negotiated. Target visions are those that have already gained some consensus in a community and provide broad descriptions of what activity should look like in practice. Such visions may be detailed in research articles or strategic planning documents. A target vision for equitable science education is outlined in the Framework. Target visions are often translated into policies, guidelines for implementation and standards, and are manifested in curriculum materials and pedagogical practices.

In contrast, existing visions are the varied ways that individuals and organizations currently envision activity. These types of visions range in how they are found in the world from formally defined vision statements of organizations to unwritten personal visions held by individuals. Existing visions may contain problematic perspectives, such as deficit perspectives of student learning (e.g., Valencia, 2010) that need to be unpacked, interrogated, and sometimes desettled through sustained professional learning. Alternatively, existing visions may illuminate aspects of the target vision that do not go as far as the community might find necessary (e.g., justice perspectives, see North, 2006 and Rodriguez & Morrison, 2019).

A third type of vision is the most important for crafting a coherent science education system: negotiated vision. A negotiated vision is the result of engagement with both target and existing visions, to arrive at a consensus among different stakeholders as to what elements of vision are most important to promote. This type of negotiated vision is one way to craft coherence both from the “top town” — leaders presenting target visions to followers and other stakeholders — and from the “bottom up” — stakeholders giving voice to their own ideas and having the chance to make sense of and develop further target visions for their own practice or roles as parents and community members. Negotiated vision builds ownership in a way that is critical for implementing reforms (Coburn, 2003; Datnow, Hubbard, & Mehan, 2002; Datnow & Stringfield, 2000). Just as scientists and engineers work collaboratively to build consensus models to explain a phenomenon or designed solution, a leader can engage stakeholders in connecting and shifting their existing visions of equitable science teaching and learning to the target vision of the Framework. We can think of a negotiated vision as a kind of consensus model of teaching and learning that is provisional and that develops as we gather new evidence from implementation and bring new stakeholders into the conversation about what science teaching and learning should look like.

Centering Equity in Vision

Equity is important to keep front and center when articulating vision. Attending to equity, moreover, requires identifying and addressing sources of inequity that inhere in existing visions, as well as engaging stakeholders in acts of “social dreaming” (McLaren, 1991), that is, coming together to challenge inequities and to imagine new possibilities for ways that transforming education help create a better, more just world.

One of the sources of inequity that must be addressed are people’s values and beliefs about children, education, and the world. Visions can have “dark sides” (Hammerness, 1999), when those values and beliefs reflect dehumanizing images of others, images that may be linked to race, class, gender, sexual identity, or perceived ability. Dark sides don’t just show themselves directly, either — they may show up in ideas such as what is “appropriate” to teach “kids like the ones I serve,” who “aren’t ready” for the kinds of learning experiences demanded of a target vision for science teaching. They may show up in ideas, too, about the fundamental scarcity of educational resources, over which “fairness” demands we have “students compete” based on merit or accomplishment. Dark sides stay in the dark, and don’t become possible to critique, so long as we are silent about who exactly we are talking about when we say “urban youth” or “kids like mine” and about the conditions of inequality of opportunity that make it difficult for students to take advanced courses, sit in a classroom with an engaging and caring teacher, or go to a school with abundant resources and social supports for students.

To “center” equity in vision is to keep these questions front and center:

• Who is at the table when target visions are cast and negotiated visions created, and who is missing?
• How will systemic inequalities in society (e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism) and schools (e.g., segregation, tracking, unequal allocation of resources) affect implementation of the negotiated vision?
• How will the vision guide changes to systems to reduce the harms caused by these systemic inequalities?
• How will the vision support students whose opportunities are constrained by systemic inequalities in society and schools?

A vision that centers equity also centers subject-matter specific concerns, because the discipline matters when it comes to equity. It’s imperative to show, therefore, what equitable teaching and learning looks like in science, if we are to convince science teachers to be guided by a vision that centers equity. The Framework, as a target vision, provides just this kind of specificity.

The Framework as a Target Vision for Equitable Science Teaching and Learning

A Framework for K-12 Science Education provides a starting point for a vision for equitable teaching and learning that leaders can use. In this section, we review three different aspects of the Framework vision: (1) the guiding assumptions articulated in Chapter 2; (2) the three-dimensional view of science learning; and (3) the centrality of interest and identity in equitable teaching, articulated in Chapter 11.

Guiding Assumptions of the Framework

The guiding assumptions of the Framework are grounded in a large body of research on how people learn science (e.g., National Research Council, 2007) and on studies of the work of scientists and engineers (e.g., Latour & Woolgar, 1986). Research on how people learn helps us to understand how what children bring to science classrooms — their interests, experiences, identities, and capabilities — are important resources for organizing instruction. Research on what scientists and engineers actually do provides us with inspiration as to where we want students to go, if we are to give them a feeling for science and engineering as disciplines.

One of the assumptions of the Framework is that children are born investigators. That means we can approach students as if they have an innate curiosity and propensity to ask questions about the world. Their questions matter, and can help us organize instruction around them. Children come to us with many capabilities as well, for reasoning and creating models of the world, that we often underestimate. Approaching children as born investigators means learning to see their thinking and reasoning skills–however underdeveloped from an adult point of view–as assets they bring, rather than as deficits to overcome.

A second assumption is that science teaching should focus on core ideas and practices. All too often, science instruction focuses on “bare facts,” and students are expected to memorize definitions and formulas, as if that were what was most important in science. But a focus on “core ideas” and “cross-cutting concepts” means that instruction should focus on those theories and ideas that scientists use to help explain a wide range of phenomena, that is, ideas that if students learned them, they could see and appreciate science as one lens for making sense of the world. A focus on practices means that instruction can prepare students to understand how science knowledge and engineering know-how develop. Additionally, engaging in such practices also allows learners to develop positive STEM identities. It can help students appreciate how scientists approach unfamiliar phenomena and how engineers define and address contemporary problems.

A third assumption is that understanding develops over time. By focusing on a few core ideas and practices, the Framework sets up students to encounter, revisit, and develop their understanding of core ideas and practices over the course of many years and in a variety of contexts. Science and engineering require both knowledge and practice is the fourth assumption of the Framework’s vision. This aspect of the vision counters a common way students encounter science–solely as established knowledge. It is important for students to learn and build on established explanations and models in science, but those explanations and models are actually “temporary settlements,” that is, agreements that are subject to change and do when new discoveries challenge them. The idea that science is both knowledge and practice is why curriculum should be designed so that students have the sense that they are figuring out core ideas together, through engaging in science and engineering practices.

Science instruction should also connect to students’ interest and experience, according to the Framework. In addition to drawing on students’ own questions, it should relate to things they experience everyday, are in the news, or are culturally significant in some way. By organizing instruction in ways that connects to students’ interests, experiences, and identities, teachers can help students experience how science is relevant to their lives and to community priorities.

Finally, science teaching should promote equity. Leaders have a particularly important role in promoting equity, because an important aspect of equity is ensuring all students–at every grade level–have opportunities to learn science. Promoting equity also is supported by instruction that begins with the premise that students bring knowledge and capabilities to the classroom that are resources for teaching (Assumption 1) and that students’ interests, experiences, and cultural identities matter (Assumption 5).

A Three-Dimensional View of Science Proficiency

The Framework expands dramatically the notion of what it means to become proficient in science. No longer is it sufficient for students to be able to recite definitions or simply recall simple explanations and models presented in textbooks. The vision of the Framework is not “light” on content, though; rather, it is “content-plus.” Instead, students are expected to be able to apply what they know and can do to explain phenomena in the real world and solve problems that are priorities for communities of people and that relate to pressing global matters, such as climate change. There are three aspects of proficiency that are integrated, when students apply knowledge to explain phenomena and solve problems: understanding of disciplinary core ideas, grasp of science and engineering practices, and understanding of crosscutting concepts.

Disciplinary core ideas. These are the big ideas of science that help explain many different phenomena in the world. The Framework elaborates on four major sets of ideas in each of three scientific disciplines: the physical sciences, the life sciences, and Earth and space science. Over the course of their K-12 trajectories, students encounter and revisit powerful explanatory concepts like the particulate nature of matter, adaptation and natural selection, and plate tectonics, that they can use to build understanding of specific phenomena and approach unfamiliar phenomena. The focus is on a few such ideas, in order to help students explore ideas in greater depth than is typical. Many ideas or facts teachers are used to teaching are excluded from the Framework, as a consequence of the focus on core ideas.

Science and engineering practices. The practices are the ways students encounter in a modified form the ways that scientists and engineers develop, critique, and communicate knowledge. Providing students with an opportunity to engage in practices gives them a feeling for science as providing powerful ways to make sense of the world, and over time, they can gain what might be called a grasp of practice. A grasp of practice means knowing how and when to use practices, not simply a knowledge of scientific procedures (Ford, 2008). It involves an experience in which students can see how practices work together to answer questions they have about the world or solve  problems that are important to people in their lives (Manz, 2015).

The practices are not intended to be taught or used in isolation; nor are they a replacement for teaching about the scientific method. Rather, they are to be used together to build knowledge in the classroom, and in ways that are integrated with core ideas and crosscutting concepts, the third dimension of proficiency. Students should gain a sense of the  ways that what counts as a good model or method of investigation differ across the subdisciplines of science, in part because of the nature of the phenomenon studied, as well as how modeling as an activity is something that unites science. Only through engagement with multiple scientific phenomena and engineering problems over many years can students gain such a grasp of science and engineering practices.

Crosscutting concepts. There are seven crosscutting concepts presented in the Framework that represent ideas that are useful for making sense of phenomena and solving  problems across a wide range of scientific discipline. Unlike the practices, these are not so much things that scientists do as they are a set of “lenses” that scientists and engineers bring to their investigations. When scientists encounter a new phenomenon, or engineers are faced  with a new problem, they start to ask questions that are grounded in crosscutting concepts. They include questions about the scale at which phenomena occur, patterns that are observable and that beg to be explained, and cause-and-effect relationships that might exist. In addition to serving  as lenses, they are tools for deepening scientific sensemaking, that is, ways to help scientists and engineers go deeper and revise explanations or models that are not supported by current evidence (Rivet et al., 2016).

Promoting crosscutting concepts as a dimension of proficiency is a means to allow students to explore unfamiliar phenomena. They are powerful tools students can bring to new phenomena that give them confidence that they can use–just as scientists and engineers do–science and engineering concepts to make sense of the world  and address problems that are important to them and their communities.

Culture-Based Pedagogies as Tools for Promoting Equity and Leveraging Diversity

Chapter 11 of the Framework explores a range of specific pedagogical strategies for promoting equity and leveraging diversity in instruction. It is grounded in the idea that science is a cultural endeavor–that is, that science has a culture or is a cultural way of knowing, alongside others but distinct in its purposes and activities. This notion is strongly rooted in studies of what scientists actually do, and in the observation that scientific cultures differ across subdisciplines and even across different laboratories (e.g., Galison, 1997; Knorr-Cetina, 1999). This chapter’s ideas are rooted in a second assumption, that science and engineering instruction should be experienced as meaningful to students, because it connects to students’ interests, experiences, and identities, and to the priorities of their communities. According to the Framework,

…[A] major goal for science education should be to provide all students with the background to systematically investigate issues related to their personal and community priorities. They should be able to frame scientific questions pertinent to their interests, conduct investigations and seek out relevant scientific arguments and data, review and apply those arguments to the situation at hand, and communicate their scientific understanding and arguments to others.  (NRC, 2012, p. 278)

Further, science and engineering instruction should provide opportunities for students to develop identities as “competent learner[s] of science with motivation and interest to learn more (NRC, p. 286).  This stance, that teachers should organize learning to motivate all students to engage in science, supports stated goals within the Framework of broadening participation in our democracy and fostering students’ interest in STEM careers and identities as capable learners in science and engineering.

The pedagogies that support this vision and that are introduced in the Framework are all culture-based, that is, they recognize that learning is a cultural endeavor and that learners’ own cultural repertoires are essential to supporting science and engineering learning (see National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). Examples of culture-based pedagogies include those that identify and draw on students’ funds of knowledge, that encourage students to leverage everyday ways of communicating their ideas (including gesture and movement) to learn science, and that name ways that cultural practices map onto science practices (see Bang, Brown, Barton, Rosebery, & Warren, 2018, for a review). They also emphasize ways that teachers can learn to recognize the sensemaking repertoires of students who come from different backgrounds than they do (e.g., Rosebery, Warren, & Tucker-Raymond, 2016).

Leveraging diversity also means presenting images of who does science and engineering  that reflects the wide range of people who do science. To support building identities in science, students need to see people who look like them and come from their communities doing science both in everyday and more complex ways, acknowledging expertise outside of a laboratory or formal environment. And, they need to understand both how science has helped  and harmed people in their community, to gain a grasp of the complex ways that science  and engineering are implicated in perpetuating inequity, as well as how they can serve as tools of power for marginalized communities.

Actual Visions: Learning About and Beginning Where People Are

All people have ideas about what should be happening in a learning setting that are informed by their own lived experiences (Jackson, 1975). We know, too, that for people to learn and develop new ideas, we need to make visible and build upon their current thinking (NRC, 1999, 2018). But when leading for change, the learning needs of adults are often overlooked, as are the resources they bring to the situation to help them make important shifts to their thinking about what science teaching and learning could be. Just as students interpret science learning based on their past experiences and beliefs, teachers’ views of what the science classroom should look like are influenced by their values, beliefs, and interests.

Simply sharing new goals or visions for science, such as those in the Framework, will not be sufficient to ensure that educators and administrators are actually aligned to the new aims. Teachers may respond to inconsistencies between an institutional or policy-based vision and their own values and experiences by changing their behavior, without changing their underlying beliefs (Coburn, 2003). This can result in superficial changes in classroom learning; teachers might do fewer “recipe book” labs, but still hold the belief that science is for the “best and brightest” and only allow the AP classes to plan investigations.  They may also address the new vision in only symbolic ways, for instance, using phenomena that appeal to students’ interest in instruction, while still teaching in a purely didactic way. Alternatively, teachers may over-assimilate, that its, they may not notice differences between their practices and beliefs and those contained in an institutional vision. In this case, they operate under the assumption that they are already doing the things called for under the new policy, while not fully understanding the degree to which their practices are actually different than those called for in the new expanded vision (Hammerness et al., 1999).

As part of the ACESSE project, we developed two primary methods of sensing existing vision. The first was a survey of teacher vision in collaboration with state leaders to help us understand better where teachers in our network were beginning. The second was a focus group protocol.^[1]

The Vision Survey

Existing surveys of science teaching often focus on teacher beliefs or on what they do in the classroom (e.g., Hayes et al., 2016). These can be valuable for understanding where educators are now in their teaching, but they are less useful for guiding improvement in a direction where teachers want to grow. In ACESSE, we developed and revised a “vision survey” tool to address this need. In the original vision survey, we worked with state leaders to develop a set of statements that they have heard teachers say about their visions for ideal science teaching, as they went about their work across their states. We took these statements and refined them into a survey that we gave to hundreds of teachers in 13 states.

Importantly, we didn’t just ask educators to indicate whether they endorsed the vision of the Framework, or to say which parts they liked the most. We also asked them about ideas they might hold that reflect both “darker” parts of vision (such as whether they held views of children as incapable of engaging in science practices at an early age) and older ideas about science instruction that did not reflect the vision of the Framework (e.g., the importance of learning about a broad range of facts). We developed the statements for teachers to endorse in collaboration with state teams, so that they might reflect what teachers actually say they value in their teaching.

Table 2.1 below shows the statements included in the current version of the vision survey. Of note is that the vision survey includes separate banks of items related to the cognitive dimensions of the Framework’s vision (three-dimensional science teaching) and the cultural dimensions of the Framework’s vision (interest, identity, and a cultural view of science). Half of the statements in each item set are aligned to the vision of the Framework, and half are not aligned. We also ask teachers to say for each set of items which one is most important and which they’d least like to see in their science classrooms. The survey thus yields two kinds of “scores,” the degree to which teachers’ actual visions align with that of the Framework and the dimensions of science learning that are most embraced and least embraced by teachers in a given area.

Table  2.1. Items on the Vision Survey

The survey also asks educators to indicate needed areas for future professional development. This item was intended to help states identify focal points for professional development where there was strong interest and  will on the part of teachers to grow as professionals.

Researchers on the project fielded the survey with over 1,000 teachers across the states in the network and found a striking and consistent pattern. Most teachers’ visions centered on the idea of science as both a body of knowledge and practices for developing that knowledge, as well as the need for instruction to connect to students’ interests and experiences. Teachers were less focused on equity, and they were almost as likely to endorse statements that were not aligned with the vision of the Framework as they were to endorse statements that were aligned. Perhaps surprisingly, the most popular area was one that was a focus already of their vision, namely connecting to students’ interests and experience. In addition, a sizeable number wanted to learn how to give students more agency in the classroom, leading investigations and driving instruction forward through their questions. The vision survey, and an associated protocol for administering it and making sense of the results is included in the workbook that accompanies this practice guide.

Conducting Focus Groups

The vision survey is just one tool leaders in the ACESSE network used to learn about existing vision. In Iowa, for example, science leaders considered other sources of data, such as the qualitative analysis of focus group data, to determine that science instruction based on students interests’ and experiences represented a leading edge of practice and shaped that state’s professional development efforts accordingly.

The focus group protocol that Iowa leaders used was created through a collaborative, co-design process during an ACESSE meeting in the fall of 2016 (see Chapter 5 about how co-design was used in this project). After participants engaged in a facilitation and ethics training, the protocol was used to run focus groups across the 13 project states. Teachers, administrators, and community members shared their ideas about how science instruction should take place in their state; the meeting conversations were transcribed, and state team members formed small groups to review the anonymous data. In small groups they were able to identify common themes across the conversations, using an approach to coding that ACESSE meeting leaders modeled for state leaders. In a reflection activity, one participant said of the focus group data that they read, “I saw in reviewing the data that respondents are not looking at equity in the full scope that the Framework is recommending. Inclusive science instruction among different cultures or making diversity visible was really not part of their understanding of equity”. In this way, they were able to use the focus groups to identify a part of the vision for science that they wanted to work to shift.

Looking at qualitative data was new for many leaders who were more accustomed to looking at quantitative data. In general, leaders felt like qualitative data helped them get a more “nuanced” and “real” sense of the beliefs of people in their systems, that it helped them build new understandings of the Framework as leaders, and gave them a new perspective on the needs within their states (Kaplan et al, 2018). Many leaders reported that their analysis of focus group data informed how they adjusted their states activities to support implementation of the Framework, including redesigning professional development, and changing their practices to incorporate more listening. Below are a few highlights from their reflections. One of the leaders reflected on the process this way:

I attended two of the three focus groups and was impressed that the groups were so deeply engaged in understanding and addressing the questions. What strikes me as the state science lead is how the highlighted topics from Chapter 11 in the Framework were missing in the language used by all three focus groups. There seemed to have been more language reflective of NSES [the National Science Education Standards of 1996]. This tells me that I need to take time and educate our networks so that they can really begin to internalize the Framework’s Equity message. I feel that I missed a huge opportunity during the four years of transition to set this stage better.

Another leader said:

It appears as if we need to recast our professional development with some stronger messaging around designing instruction for all learners, with clear evidence and examples of how this looks at all grade levels with a variety of students. We have been using the NGSS equity case studies for analysis, but clearly we need more. We have to work on ensuring all students are in classrooms with teachers who believe they can meet these expectations. The data shared with us clearly demonstrates that some students do not have teachers that have this belief or possibly the teaching tools or even capacity to support them in learning in this way.

We have adapted Iowa’s protocols for Conducting Focus Groups and Coding Focus Group Data  for use in your local contexts.

Getting to a Negotiated Vision: Anticipating Challenges Related to Equity

Assessing alignment between existing visions and target visions is one step on the way to getting to a negotiated vision (Munter, 2014; Weidler-Lewis, Penuel, & Van Horne, 2017). Negotiated visions don’t come about without wrestling with disagreements and tensions. Shifting towards a negotiated vision away from existing visions can result in resistance rooted in discomfort with unfamiliar destinations (Bang, Rosebery, Warren, & Medin, 2012). Existing visions can also be a result of differences in learning theory that is guiding how a person understands learning activity. Teachers often teach the way that they learned best when they were in school. For example, those most successful in schooling in the past may be those most accustomed to direct instruction or lectures. As a result these educators may think that learning is when knowledge and practices are transmitted from teacher to student through lecture or demonstration, reproducing this form of interaction (Cazden & Beck, 2003). Data on where teachers are — which come from surveys and focus groups — can help state leaders anticipate where resistance to equity is likely to arise.

One concrete strategy for addressing the unfamiliar is to focus directly on understanding current visions and understandings of equity, as we did in the ACESSE Project with state teams. We used anonymized quotes from interviews with science educators, and we engaged state teams  in making sense of whether these visions of equity were coherent with one another and aligned  with the Framework’s definition of equity. The activity involved looking at interview transcripts and collectively discussing, “what is this person talking about when they talk about equity?” Some common underlying assumptions and definitions of equity that we discovered included: equity requires that all students and teachers have access to the same resource and material, equity means fairness, and equity involves differentiating instruction. Highlighting the unstated assumptions underneath discussion of equity surfaced just how understandings, experiences and definitions of the same word can vary. This is the type of activity that can help educators reflect more deeply on their practice, and build more coherence between their vision for science and target vision for the state. It is important to remember that no education reform is starting within a blank space, a new vision for science will build on prior facets of understanding.

Underlying different conceptions of equity are often different ideas about the goals of promoting equity in science education. For some promoting equity is  about “stopping a leaky pipeline,” in which people from underrepresented groups in STEM who are initially interested in STEM careers switch out of those careers. For others, promoting equity is a matter of diversifying science so that the best and brightest can help our nation compete with other nations economically. For still others, promoting equity is a means to remedy past social and ecological injustices perpetrated against particular groups and against other species on Earth. Many highlight that promoting equity is a matter of expanding access to quality opportunities to learn both in and out of school. Others focus on reducing achievement gaps in science. All of these facets and definitions of equity are present in the Framework (Figure 2.2), which presents not a single definition but many, some of which likely point toward different directions for a negotiated vision for science education in a state or district.

Figure 2.2. Facets of Equity in the Framework

Engaging Negotiated Visions in Action

The next few chapters will outline how visions of equity can more fully be developed in collaboration with networks of individuals and how learning activity across educational systems can organize for educational reform around specific levers. Later chapters will then explore how such progress towards a negotiated vision that has been collaboratively designed around a lever can be measured and resourced to ensure effective implementation. The strategies and tools found here are designed and tested to support systems change across educational contexts at state, district, and building scales. Collectively, they provide clear statements of negotiated visions, maps to identify key participants in the system, specific descriptions of what implementation activity is centered around, examples of instruments to measure change, and ideas on how to resource such work; it is in the holistic nature of this approach that effective change can occur. The ACESSE project found that a key condition for learning and change was the time for collective sensemaking both for leaders and teachers within a system to ensure everyone is moving towards the same negotiated vision most effectively given scarce resources. Long-term, sustained reform needs to engage such practices around sustained professional learning to ensure systemic buy in of all participants. This is potentially more important when centering equity in educational reform, as change in this area requires participants to engage in significant intellectual, professional, and emotional effort.

Reflection Questions

Explore the following questions individually and with your local collaborators to refine your personal and collective understandings around engaging with work around target, existing, and negotiated visions.

• What notions of equity do you bring with you to your work? Why might you hold these beliefs, given your personal history, the context in which you grew up, etc?
• When you read through the Framework, what definitions of equity most resonate with you? Why? What aspects register as potentially problematic? Why?
• How have you heard equity talked about in your context? Who says these things? Why might they hold these beliefs? Who haven’t you heard from?
• Which people/communities are most impacted by historic and present day injustices? What visions for equity and justice do these people and communities hold?
• What is your current relation to these people/communities?  How do these notions overlap with/diverge from your own?

Implementation Activity in Local Context

In thinking about how to engage the ideas in this chapter in your own context consider engaging local collaborators with the following resources:

• Identifying aspects of the Framework already present
• Surveying for existing visions of equity in science education
• Sensemaking around negotiated vision from data on existing visions

References

Bang, M., Warren, B., Rosebery, A., & Medin, D. (2012). Desettling expectations in science education. Human Development, 55, 302-318.

Bang, M., Brown, B. A., Barton, A. C., Rosebery, A., & Warren, B. (2017). Toward more equitable learning in science: Expanding relationships among students, teachers, and science practices. In C. Schwarz, C. Passmore, & B. J. Reiser (Eds.), Helping students make sense of the world using next generation science and engineering practices (pp. 33-58). Washington, DC: NSTA.

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Workbooks for Guide 2

Workbook 2.1: Vision Survey
Workbook 2.2: Administering the Vision Survey and Making Sense of Data

Protocol

Worksheet

Workbook 2.3: Writing Your Aim Statement

Protocol

Handout – Facets of Equity Resource