Community-Initiated Science for Transformative Teaching

ABSTRACT

In this paper, the authors explore how teachers and community members in Nepal come together to transform students’ science teaching and science learning experiences. The community members, primarily parents of the students, took the opportunity to drive the kinds of science topics and the nature of science activities the teachers needed to teach in their children’s science classrooms. This paper qualitatively documents the interactions between the teachers and the community members, the teachers’ decisions regarding their science lessons, and the nature of critical consciousness discourses in teachers’ built-in classroom interactions with students. The data were collected over 8 weeks through classroom observations, interviews, and student artifacts. The analysis showed that community-initiated partnership with science teachers builds science teaching that values critical community well-being and that the teachers have the agency to provide spaces for learning focused on critical consciousness. The paper uses transformative learning theory, liberation social psychology, and deliberative democracy as the guiding theoretical perspectives to understand transformative science teaching through teacher–community partnership.

KEYWORDS:

• Community initiated
• community–school partnership
• democratic and liberatory teaching
• science teacher
• transformative teaching

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the JRM Foundation, Idaho, and the College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota, for their support. The views in this paper are of the authors, not the foundation and CEHD. The authors also thank the reviewers for their invaluable suggestions to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the JRM Foundation and College of Education and Human Development.