ABSTRACT
In this final chapter, Torres-Guzmán and Howes share with us their experiences trying to infuse and integrate ideas of science, language, and culture into a particular teacher preparation course. As they make clear, the experiences they share are not meant to be exemplary; their story, as they describe it, “is not one of unbridled success, but one of stumbling and occasional revelation as we attempted to help our students (and ourselves) use the complex networks made visible as we focused on the inextricable connections among language, culture, and science.” For this reason, this chapter is a fitting one to conclude this volume. It takes up the call to develop interdisciplinary, language-and culture-cognizant, approaches to science education, while modeling the importance of reflective practice and, as part of that, being honest about the challenges such a paradigm shift entails. But with the sense of honesty about their process that TorresGuzmán and Howes develop comes, as well, a powerful sense of promise. Hearing what these scholars, a bilingual teacher educator (TorresGuzmán) and a science teacher educator (Howes), learned from their collaboration, and, further, what their students learned from the collaboration, helps us envision what opportunities moving beyond business-as-usual could afford us. These scholars’ “unusual business” helps chart a different course for the future of science teacher education, a course in which the kind of culturally-responsive pedagogy they attempted to model is dead center.
