Creating a Culturally Responsive Science Classroom

To my dearest Dante,

You walked into my classroom on the first day of school, and before I even had time to greet you, you said “Ms., no disrespect, but science just isn’t my thing.” You smiled warmly and took your seat, and I knew that despite my dedication to care for you this year, I had already lost you. At least in the beginning.

How am I supposed to be culturally responsive and sustaining in my science classroom? Isn’t my job to teach you how to memorize information, follow strict procedures in a lab, collect data, and draw conclusions that are unbiased by your personal experiences? Where is there room for your—or anyone’s—personality and culture when science is all about using facts to explain phenomena? This stereotype is probably why the research into what makes a culturally responsive and sustaining science classroom was so limited when I started learning about it. And I wonder… How have you been affected by the stereotype that science is so impersonal? Is that part of what drove you away? Even when a novelist who doesn’t look like you writes about something you’ve never experienced, at least you can imagine what it might be like to live their character’s life.

Science is done by people, for people, in an effort to answer questions about the natural world. And the way we answer questions is through science. Take the Moon for example. Every year or so you probably see a certain “supermoon” start to trend. Last year it was the Super Strawberry Moon, this year it’s the Worm Supermoon. Did you know that these names come from Native Americans, who gave the full moon a different name each month to connect it to their own experiences as the seasons passed (National Geographic Staff, 2019)? For example, the Anishinaabe, Cherokee, and Mahican tribes named the Strawberry Moon for when the fruit comes into season (American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association, n.d.), and the Naudowessie tribe named the Worm Moon for when the emergence of beetle larvae signals the beginning of spring (Almanac, n.d.).

And what about your star sign? Dante, I know you’re a Sagittarius, but do you know why? Even before there was written language, there were scientists! We have cave paintings that show people were trying to connect the movement of stars in the night sky to observable phenomena on Earth as early as 25,000 years ago (Campion, 2008). See? Science is so much more about humans and our experiences than most people think. And the best part? Science is for everyone, and should be done by everyone.

Going back to what you told me on the first day of school, that you “just can’t do science,” I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how we can work together to rewrite that narrative in our class this year. I hope that over the course of this school year you will not just have the opportunity to do amazing science, but to discover and internalize that you are a scientist.

For now, let me ask you: What would it take for you to be excited to approach novel problems, because it’s an opportunity to work towards a solution? As your teacher, I am dedicated to finding ways that you can empower yourself through science. Remember how you thought a scientist is someone who sits alone in a lab mixing together different chemicals? In reality, scientists are so much more.

Scientists are collaborators. It’s a great story when you hear about the one guy who made a ground-breaking discovery all on his own, but in reality scientists work in teams that require frequent, productive conversation.

Scientists are communicators. To share what they’ve learned with the world, scientists speak at conferences and on the news, publish articles, and can be some of the best public speakers around. Scientists even use social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok to broadcast information and network with colleagues.

Scientists are problem solvers. There are so many things wrong with the world, from hunger to pandemics to droughts. When faced with these issues, scientists brainstorm the kinds of solutions that can change the world. And almost none of these amazing results were achieved on the first try. What truly makes a scientist is the ability to try, fail, and then try again.

But enough with my motivational speech. What can I actually do to help you feel more comfortable taking up a scientist identity? As I mentioned, I’m grounding my teaching in something called CRSE (culturally responsive-sustaining education) to help you feel that science is for you. I’m trying to teach in ways that value what you and my other students bring to the table, draw on your cultures to help you feel connected to the content, hold high expectations for everyone, and help you think critically about socio-political structures and processes (Howes & Wallace, 2022; Wallace et al., 2022). With these objectives, I am hoping that you see yourself as a science scholar, and take agency in your role as a scientist.

The first step in this process was figuring out the source of the problem: Was I the only teacher with some students saying that they “just can’t do science,” or were other science teachers observing similar things in their classrooms? I regularly meet with a team of teachers from other schools around our city, and all of them have reported that they too have students who shy away from science. We started meeting to discuss literature and figure out how to improve our teaching practices. It quickly became clear that before we could do anything, we had to answer a fundamental question: What does a culturally responsive and sustaining science classroom look like?

We started with this idea of “cultural relevance.” To us, that means making connections to references that you would get. If I try to get you thinking about rocks by describing the tombstones in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that’s going to fall pretty flat (though maybe it would work for your parents). But if I start my minerals unit by mentioning the diamonds on Jay-Z’s watch, and show pictures of Drake’s marble bathtub to introduce metamorphic rocks, it is more likely that you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I can also make my class more relevant when I teach about latitude and longitude. For instance, I can have you learn to plot locations on the map based on cities where you and your classmates have family. It helps to ground new information in the things you already know, but it’s still not enough. This brings us to the idea of culturally responsive education. If we go back to what you’ve observed about science and scientists in the past, it’s evident that this field is whitewashed by history. On one hand, that means that white Europeans are being glorified as the heroes of science. But on the other hand, that means that people of Color have been excluded (Fields, 1998). Not just hidden from history, but shut out completely. It’s almost as if we are supposed to believe that people of Color can’t or shouldn’t do science.

If I want you to feel like you belong in my class, I need to respond to this crime of history. That goes way beyond the content of my mandated Earth science curriculum. This isn’t something you’ll see on your standardized test at the end of the year, but is an important part of the critical stance we both need to take to rewrite the narrative.

With this in mind, my teacher group began to consider the idea of student identity in science class. We knew that it would be an uphill battle trying to convince our students that they look like scientists, especially given the persisting racial inequities in the field. Instead, we speculated we might help our students begin to see themselves as scientists if they could think and talk like scientists. And so, we agreed that culturally responsive education in the science classroom could be characterized by student voice.

We all had different ideas about what student voice should look like. In this context, when I use the term “student voice,” I am not simply talking about how many times you open your mouth, or the noise levels in our classrooms. I am referring to your participation in academic conversations in which you demonstrate critical thinking using evidence and analysis. When it comes down to it, that’s all science is! Science is the process of using observations and reasoning to answer a question or solve a problem. If we can help our students develop those abilities, and make it clear that engaging in those practices is what scientists do (NRC, 2012), then you will have no fuel to support the argument that you “can’t do science.”

Thus, our hypothesis was born: If we can help our students develop their “scientist voices,” then they will be able to identify as scientists. If our students identify as scientists, they will be more likely to pursue higher education and a STEM career. All we had left to do was test our hypothesis. (Even though I’m a teacher now, I’m still a scientist, too!) We also had different ideas about how to foster student voice in our classrooms.

For me, there were four important considerations to keep in mind regarding how to foster student voice in my classroom that helped me figure out what strategy to use.

1. It had to be something that gave my students the opportunity to make their own choices. Obviously, an assignment is going to be more engaging if it’s something students choose. More than that, choosing can put students in charge of their learning, requiring them to take agency in the classroom and ownership of learning and success ( Baroutsis et al., 2016; Morrison, 2008).
2. It had to be something that positioned my students to practice being responsible. As a teacher, it is not just my job to teach facts about Earth science. One of my most important roles is helping students learn how to be successful once they are out of school.
3. It had to be grounded in real science. Many of my students think of science as something that “other” people do in “other” places. If we could learn about diverse examples of science in the real world, it would be easier for students to make connections between science and their own lives.
4. It had to provide the opportunity to have academic conversations about science. The point of this was to help my students feel comfortable having their voices heard in a scientific setting, so that they could develop the confidence necessary to see themselves as scientists.