From now until Juneteenth 2020, I will share resources that have deeply challenged my thinking and guided my activism for racial justice. I will share my learning and my story, too.
In K-12 public education, decision-making on every level is often informed by the development of literacy skills, regardless of the subject area. At my school, one of the instructional goals for as long as I can remember has been “evidence in argument.” From very early on in my career, I supported that goal by teaching students how to construct scientific explanations that include empirical evidence, ideally from data collected in class or in the field, and explaining that evidence, using scientific theory or law, to make an argument. This approach is very typical in NYC DOE science classrooms, as it evolved in response to the Common Core Standards released in 2010, and the Next Generation Science standards released in 2013.
My colleagues and I noticed that this approach tended to produce clunky, forced, and at worst, apathetic, writing. All of the acronyms and scaffolds we created were teaching our students to blindly follow rules, rather than to think critically about what the data actually means; about why the data matters in their own lives. Not only were our students consumed with “correctly” following the guidelines we constructed, but we (teachers) were, too. “Why do students keep writing their analysis in the evidence box?!,” we’d say during inquiry team meetings.
Are we placing teaching the skill of writing scientific explanations, and literacy skills more broadly, above articulating the fundamental purpose of a scientific explanation?
Allow the language written into our school and department goals to answer that second question.
I believe that the purpose of a scientific explanation is informed by the identity of the scientist, and his/her/their critical consciousness, or lack thereof. Scientific explanations have played a critical role in empowering and upholding white supremacy since the Enlightenment, but in more recent years, also plays a very critical role in actively dismantling it. I’ll never forget when Scientific American came out with “Race is a Social Construct,” in 2016, confirming the non-biological roots of race upon mapping out large samples of human genomes.
I recently clicked through all 40 bios of the team that wrote the Next Generation Science standards, who were selected from the “nation’s best as evidenced by their honors and respective roles within their state or district”. 33 of the writers were white. 2 writers were LatinX, 1 was asian, 4 were Black women, and 0 were Black men. How are we supposed to teach our young Black boys that they will become scientists when there is not a single Black man defining what is “standard” in science education?
In an attempt to actively address internalized racism and sexism from the first day of school, my 7th grade science team and I decided to start the 2019–2020 school year with the age old “Draw a Scientist” experiment. Unsurprisingly, we found an overwhelming number of Albert Einsteins, who my students did not know was openly racist. However, within my stack, I found 3 precious drawings of the same tall Black scientist with black square framed glasses. “Who did you draw?,” I asked. “Mr. Rose! He was our science teacher last year!,” they exclaimed. I quickly forwarded the drawings to my colleague; Mr. Rose sent back laugh emojis 😅.
Thank goodness our students have Mr. Rose. Thank goodness our science department has Mr. Rose.
Although students across the country are starting to draw female scientists, they are still NOT drawing Black scientists. We shouldn’t be surprised. Until we plan backwards from dismantling the legacy of anti-Black oppression that Frederick Douglass so eloquently and urgently wrote about, we remain trapped in a vicious cycle of anti-Blackness in our curricula, coded by what has been declared as “standard”.
My purpose as a public school science teacher has never been, and will never be, defined by what a select few have defined as “standard”. I’ve not met too many teachers in my 10 year career who are actually driven by standards, either. But I, we educators, are vulnerable to placing them above the passions, the pains, the lived realities of our students in a system that rates our value as educators and as school communities with compliance to those standards. It takes a community of critically conscious educators and a commitment to anti-racism to be courageous, and to “co-opt” the standards, in the words of a colleague I deeply admire. Until we can re-write them entirely, with significant BIPOC representation, I take this route.
My purpose is to empower my students to become advocates of their own lives and communities. Science can be a powerful tool in that process, and writing scientific explanations is critical to science. My anti-racist journey has taught me that in order to truly empower my students in this way, I must actively seek to learn from my students and their communities, and alongside them to extract the most suppressed data, purposefully hidden from our view. I must use my learning to design a narrative that is deeply relevant to my students, and to me as their teacher.
My partner can attest to the fact that I spring out of bed every morning. That’s because I love teaching students, and empowering them with science. But I also love designing curricula and creating anti-racist narrative with colleagues. I’m grateful to have so many colleagues in the MS 88 science department who have worked very hard to create and teach to a context that recognizes science as a necessary tool for dismantling the structural racism built into NYC’s environment and in NYC’s healthcare system. Given the vast racial disparities in health, vulnerability to the climate crisis, vulnerability to COVID-19, and in educational outcomes, we have had an overwhelming amount of data to work with.
We reteach “how to write scientific explanations” again, and again, using every pedagogical strategy up our sleeve, from small group interventions to parallel teaching, while continuously tweaking the scaffolds and rubrics. All of this honest hard work, I believe, suppresses more productive questioning of what has been forced upon the science education world as “standard.” I believe the context, the why, should be our primary focus. If we spend all of our efforts focused on literacy skills, students are deprived of a meaningful, and dare I even say, urgent, context in which to develop those critical skills. I believe wholeheartedly, the powerfully crafted explanations will follow. Here are a few samples of our 7th grade students’ scientific explanations about health injustice in NYC, via the case studies of heart disease, asthma, diabetes, and COVID-19. These students did challenging, anti-racist, epidemiological work in response to a series of lessons on health justice here in NYC. Students overwhelmingly communicated the importance of the project (and thus the writing) to them personally, given the impacts of COVID-19 within their own racially segregated communities.
As we plan in departments and integrated teams for the next school year, I urge us all to free ourselves from “standards-first” thinking. When we free ourselves from the standards as a community, we have the power to re-write the goals and policies within our control; we set a precedent for the city and nation of what anti-racist science education can be. We fight the fact that not a single Black man contributed to the definition of “standard” science education.
With all of that being said, I want to share with you the resource for Day 3: “Birding While Black,” a beautiful essay by Dr. J. Drew Lanham, “on race, belonging, and a love of nature.” Dr. Lanham is on the board of the National Audobon Society. His essay reached my Twitter feed from Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and conservation strategist who founded Ocean Collectiv. I’d recommend following her on Twitter, as I’ve learned so much from her.
“Birding While Black” led to a really rich discussion between me and my partner (who is a white science teacher), about the critical importance of centering race in science education as a means of working toward anti-racist science education. He made this lesson as a way of amplifying Black naturalist voice to nurture and cultivate more young Black naturalists, despite his not being Black. For the science educators who are not Black: We have a huge responsibility. Read the writing of Black scientists (there are so many on Twitter), amplify their voices in our curricula, and continually seek it to inform our pedagogy. Gather the courage and community to face the inextricable impact of race on science education, and on science.
