Examining relevance in pre-service science teachers’ lesson plans

ABSTRACT

Research calls for teachers to integrate students’ funds of knowledge to bridge the gap between students’ lived experiences with that of learning science – that is, to make science relevant for students. Based on this critical practice, this exploratory study focuses on how pre-service science teachers integrate relevance, specifically students’ funds of knowledge, within the lessons they intend to implement. Drawing on the literature, this study developed a coding scheme to identify the ways in which pre-service teachers (PSTs) attempted to make science relevant to students. We distinguished between constructed relevance (i.e. relevance that does not consider students’ funds of knowledge) and relevance that drew on students’ funds of knowledge. Findings indicated that 48% of lessons contained some aspect of attending to students’ funds of knowledge highlighting that pre-service science teachers understand the need to make science relevant to students beyond constructed relevance. However, lessons that did attend to funds of knowledge, were most often done through attending to how students understand how knowledge is constructed. Across PSTs, there was a significant difference in the use of relevance over time during the semester. Findings indicated productive beginnings in PSTs’ orientations to funds of knowledge without explicit instruction in this area.

KEYWORDS:

• Pre-service science teachers
• funds of knowledge
• lesson plans

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term minoritized is used to denote the socially constructed nature of minority status among groups including African Americans, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islanders, Native Americans (Stewart, 2013)—and students in poverty. The intersection between minoritized status and poverty has been shown to compound the educational inequities (Saporito & Sohoni, 2007). These are populations of students who have less rigorous opportunities to learn science [underserved academically] and those who often have to give up their cultural identity to be successful in the classroom [underserved culturally].

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Robert Noyce Grant Award Number 1439763.