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Multiculuralism in the Science Classroom

I thought about multiculturalism in my classess in a couple of different ways. The first is how the cultural make-up of my students and myself afftected how I taught my classes. The second is how I attempted to teach students to be aware and thoughtful of the effect of culture and society on the scientific process and the interprestation of scientific findings.

Dealing with differences in the classroom

Race and Ethnicity

At Friends Select, all of my classes were racially and ethnically mixed, although all students seemed to be fairly well assimilated into a white, middleclass culture. Given the small size of the school and the emphasis placed on acceptance and friendship, I observed few isolated racial or ethnic cliques in either the upper or middle school. Friendships often seemed to cross these lines and were established more on the basis of years spent at the school, being in the same grade and/or mutual interests (sports, theater etc.). In my classes, there were a handful of ESL students from countries such as Korea, China and Sierra Leone. Although these students struggled with the language and vocabulary, they were well accepted by their classmates who often assisted them without being asked.

Gender

Most of my classes also had an equal number of male and female students. In these classes I found that no one gender tended to dominate the class, but rather that there were certain individuals that tended to actively contribute and other who hung back. However, I my marine biology class and my two sixth grade physical science classes were comprised of over 75% female students. In these classes, I found that the female students tended to dominate the class discussions, whereas the male students often hung back and sometimes seemed distracted or lost.

Approaches

I knew that on a basic level, I needed to acknowledge and deal with differences in attitudes, strengths and learning styles that arose from ethnic, racial and gender differences within my classes. I did this by:

  • Using a variety of lessons and teaching approaches that would appeal to different learning styles and strengths.
  • Attempting to give honest examples, through lecture, demonstration, reading and lab, of how the topics we were studying applied to students’ lives, while acknowledging that this might be different for different students.
  • Encouraging and validating differences in students’ opinions and perspectives as they arose during discussions.
  • Encouraging student debates, while insisting that students respect and listen to each other’s ideas.
  • Praising and celebrating individual students’ strengths, differences and achievements.
  • Accepting that students may be actively engaged in a lecture or lesson without always actively contributing.
  • Maintaining high, yet individualized expectations and goals for each student and attempting to explicitly and clearly communicate these goals and expectations to the students.
  • When doing group or partner work, pairing students based on complimentary strengths, which often involved pairing students with someone of a different racial or ethnic background and/or gender.
  • When making group decisions, insisting that all students’ opinions or views be heard, even if they were initially reluctant to express them.

Had my class been more diverse or less attuned to a common culture, or had I been of a very different culture from the majority of my students, Iwould have had to have made changes in my approach. I would have needed to have observed the school and classroom culture more closely before beginning teaching and made a strong effort, at least initially, to maintain a structure that students were accustombed to and undestood, even if it felt foreign to me. I would have needed to spend more explict class time on making my expectations and understandings clear. Not to do so would inhibit communication across cultural boundaries. Depending on how the students interacted with each other, I may also have needed to devote more classroom time to creating situations in which students practiced listening to each other and respecting each others' differences of opinions and ideas. I may also have been more conscious of building group work activities and activities and labs which had direct implications on students' lives into my curriculum.

Science and Society: Creating awareness

A false sense of objectivity

As scientists, we are taught to believe that our disciplines are, or at least, strive to be, objective and therefore, isolated from the effects of culture and society. It is easy, as a science teacher to dismiss or overlook the effects of culture, values and beliefs on scientific research and the teaching of science. However, to do so limits the level of understanding students are able to obtain within the scientific disciplines and the scientific process. In fact, culture and society affect every aspect of science. They are the forces that shape the questions that are asked, the approaches that are developed to answer these questions and, most importantly, how data, observations and results are interpreted. These interpretations evolve into discoveries that, in turn, shape the knowledge, actions and attitudes of society.

Students, Science and Society

The most common moan and groan regarding science that I heard from my students was that there were so many things to memorize! – so many facts, terms, formulas and sequences of events, from the steps of DNA replication to the stages in the development of an embryo. Although I agree that it is true that students must learn these facts, it is the process of doing science that should be the more central focus of science classes. However, just being involved in the process, is not enough either. I found that my students often lacked a self-awareness of the assumptions, shaped by their own culture and experiences, that they made when asking questions, designing experiments and interpreting data. The students also readily accepted others' scientific findings and opinions without any kind of critical questioning. I found that fostering this self-awareness and critical thought became one of my primary goals in creating a multicultural approach within my classroom. By demanding that my students become more metacognatively aware and see science as affected and shaped by society, they would come closer to understanding their own cultural differences.

Approaches

I worked to implement this approach into my classroom in the following ways:

  • When students brainstormed scientific questions, I asked them to examine the development of their own questions by asking:
    • Why is this question interesting/important to you?
    • What personal experiences have you had with this topic? Is it different from your classmates or from other people you know?
    • Can this question be answered with a scientific experiment?
    • Do you think that there is more than one possible answer to this question?
  • When students formulated hypotheses, I asked them to justify their predictions and explain why they believed a certain outcome would occur. I asked them to distinguish between using their own personal observations and experiences and using their scientific knowledge, or at least to acknowledge a connection between the two.
  • When designing experiments, I continually asked students to examine their own assumptions and to look for a better way to approach answering their question.
  • When analyzing data, I asked students the following questions to encourage them to consider multiple perspectives and to examine their own assumptions:.
    • What are some additional possible explanations for your results aside from those that you think are obvious?
    • Which explanation do you think is most valid? Why?
    • Would someone else have a different opinion?
    • What are examples of scientists disagreeing on the interpretation of scientific results, or obtaining different results when doing the same experiment?
    • What is your opinion in these cases? What makes you have this opinion?
  • When doing an experiment, if students obtain results that go against their initial expectations, I ask them to acknowledge any errors that they may have made in the experimental procedure or design. However, I also ask them to accept their results as valid and to attempt to explain them. I discuss with them what consequences accepting and interpreting results from a poorly-designed experiment can have and how they should be prepared to critique other scientists’ research before simply accepting these researchers’ results and interpretations as valid.

Lessons

There were a couple of labs and activities in which I made a special effort to encourage self-awareness and critical attitudes in my students. These lessons were Testing for the Mozart Effect with my sixth grade physical science classes and a project on environmental issues in Philadelphia with my seventh grade classes.