ABSTRACT
In the preceding two chapters, we encountered children and youths whose experiences in school science have often been negative. Despite extended efforts, Latisha continued to get unsatisfactory grades. Even if these youths were to receive top grades, few would have opportunities to engage in trajectories of upward mobility. The needs of these students, as the needs of diverse groups of people-except white middle-class males-are often not met, leading to, by and large, their exclusion from science. In school science, there are often differences in achievement along the lines of gender, race, and social class. Yet across many studies, there were no such differences in achievement (as shown by statistical tests) after students participated in innovative, hands-on, and discourse-focused curriculums that I (Michael) had designed with resident teachers to promote an agenda of science for all students. The tests in another recent teaching project of mine revealed that five of the seven students in the top achievement quartile had been students who were designated by the local school system, North Vancouver, Canada, as cognitively disadvantaged (learning disabled) or socially disadvantaged individuals. When fellow science educators asked me why the normally highest achieving students were not also
the highest achieving students in my teaching experiment, I felt embarrassed because I did not have a clear answer. My subsequent analyses of the data showed that while normally “disabled” or “lower-ability” students sometimes had problems on written tests, but when a great variety of test formats were used, it allowed them to achieve as well or even above other students. Whereas these analyses provided partial answers to my colleagues’ questions, we still do not have a model that explains why traditional orderings of students were altered in the curriculums that I was designing. It turns out that if we use a system-oriented perspective of the activities in which such students are involved, we come to understand why the “learning disabled” students have done so well.
