ABSTRACT
In this book, we shared a variety of ideas that emerged from research and practice in early urban elementary classrooms where teachers sought to integrate science and literacy in ways that both build on and extend children’s knowledge, enjoyment, and identification with science. We called this project Integrated Science Literacy Enactments (ISLE) to capture the essence of our work: it involved designing and studying curricular and instructional possibilities that were performed in classrooms between teacher and students in ways they could only enact. As we studied enactments, we focused on a variety of curricular, instructional, and assessment dimensions. In doing so, we tried to understand how students, especially from certain ethno-linguistic, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds that are often associated with academic underperformance, function and achieve when offered various multimodal opportunities to do science at school. The previous chapters present some of the studies that we have conducted in this context and offer ways to showcase urban classrooms as vibrant communities where students, guided by their teachers, learn science and literacy. We believe that the findings provided in this book support important understandings about this process. Below we present these understandings, pointing back to the previous chapters.
