The middle grades are a crucial time for girls in making decisions about how
or if they want to follow science trajectories. In this article, the authors report
on how urban middle school girls enact meaningful strategies of engagement
in science class in their efforts to merge their social worlds with the worlds of
school science and on the unsanctioned resources and identities they take up
to do so. The authors argue that such merging science practices are generative
both in terms of how they develop over time and in how they impact the
science learning community of practice. They discuss the implications these
findings have for current policy and practice surrounding gender equity in
science education.
KEYWORDS: case study, girls, identity, science education, urban
During a unit on “how nature provides us with food,” the students in Mr.
M.’s 6th-grade life science class were learning about decomposition,
nutrient recycling, and organic matter. The students made a class compost
box as part of the larger investigation into “how nature provides us with
food.” On the day when Mr. M. brought the red wiggler worms to class for
the compost, he designed his lesson plan and management approaches to
foster student participation while minimizing the number of disruptions
he anticipated live worms would generate. For example, he had the students
draw up a sense chart, which is a box with space for the five senses that they
were to use to fill in their observations of the live worms before they were
placed in the compost, a heuristic used frequently across the school year. He
also made it clear by reminding the students of his rules several times that
they could not roam about the classroom, yell, throw, or in any way disrespect
the worms, or the activity would end. This was typical of Mr. M. While
American Educational Research Journal
March 2008, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 68 –103
DOI: 10.3102/0002831207308641
© 2008 AERA. http://aerj.aera.net
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a very hands-on teacher, he was also a rather strict disciplinarian. He had
real ability to keep student excitement up while keeping students on task.
He was especially particular during this lesson because another class had
made the compost bin just before, and it was rather chaotic with everyone
walking around.
After distributing the worms, the class erupted into the expected squeals
and groans. Students were picking up the worms, urging them to move on
their tables or in their hands. Some students were commenting on how disgusting
worms are, while others excitedly tried to figure out which end of
the worm was which. Students also talked with one another about their
observations. Statements like “The pointed part, it’s the head I think” could
be heard throughout the room.
In the middle of all of this, Amelia, a student whom Mr. M. had described
during the first weeks of school as a “troublemaker” and a “weak” science
student, was handling a worm that defecated, with the excrement falling
onto her notebook.1 Amelia appeared both disgusted and proud and shouted
loudly, “Look! The worm pooped in my notebook! The worm pooped in
my notebook!” She then left her seat with her notebook and ran toward the
teacher who was standing at another table to show him the specimen. She
shouted loudly to him, “Mr. M., look the worm pooped in my notebook!” She
called to him a few times before he gave her his attention and said “Good
Amelia, you are the only one with worm poop on your notebook. Circle it
and write worm poop next to it.” She circled the specimen with loud groans
and called to her classmates to come look at her worm poop. She then got
up again to walk around the room showing her worm poop to each of the
groups in class while also socializing with her peers. Mr. M. did not stop her
ANGELA CALABRESE BARTON is an associate professor at Michigan State University
in the College of Education, 329 Erickson Hall, East Lansing, MI 48823;
e-mail: [email protected]. Her research focuses on issues of equity and social justice in
urban centers, with primary attention on understanding the learning experiences of
low-income youth. Drawing primarily from feminist and sociocultural theories, she
is deeply committed to researching with teachers and youth to build equitable and
place-based learning environments and opportunities to gain access to and learn science
in ways that support who youth are and want to be.
EDNA TAN is a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University in the College of
Education, 326 Erickson Hall, East Lansing, MI 48823; e-mail: [email protected]. Her
research focuses on urban girls’ identity development from feminist and sociocultural
perspectives. Her work has grown out of her experiences teaching life science to
urban girls and her efforts to design pedagogical practices that draw upon students’
life worlds.
ANN RIVET is an assistant professor at Teachers College, Columbia University,
412 Main Hall, New York, NY 10027; e-mail: [email protected]. Her
research grows out of her experiences in curriculum development. She draws from
cognitive theory and is interested in how teachers and students learn to take up a
reform-based science curriculum.
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from taking these actions even though he had stated several times that students
could not get out of their seats.
During a whole-class discussion of the worm observations that followed
the group activity, Amelia was the central participant. She volunteered many
of her observations, such as “They’re wet and slimy. . . . One’s 3½ inches
long. . . . They smell like soil,” and Mr. M. repeatedly made reference to her
worm poop as “nature’s way of recycling nutrients,” one of the main aims of
the lesson.
Our attention was called to this event because Amelia was deeply
engaged in making sense of worms and because her engagement seemed to
be related not just to the worm observations themselves but to how she was
able to negotiate a new kind of participation in class—indeed, a new kind
of authority. Not only did Amelia manage to break Mr. M.’s participation rules
successfully; instead of getting in trouble, which would be a typical outcome
in this particular learning space, she was encouraged by the teacher and
guided in extending her thinking.
Amelia’s worm poop was a precious commodity because it concretely
illustrated many key terms Mr. M. wanted to bring across in that lesson. Yet,
Amelia’s worm poop was also an important commodity because its value, as
a science object, seemed to enable Amelia a greater degree of social freedom
in the classroom, something that was important to Amelia on a daily basis.
While Amelia used the worm excrement to move around the classroom, her
conversation with peers easily shifted between the science of worm observations
to social matters. By her words and actions, it appeared that Amelia was
excited about her worm’s poop and took ownership over it. When recognized
by the teacher, Amelia’s ownership over the worm poop served as an entry
point for Amelia to more deeply engage in the activity, as can be seen by her
seriousness in discussing her observations later in class that day.
We begin our article with this short vignette because it raises questions
for us about how, when, and why girls take up science in school in ways that
support who they are and who they want to be while at the same time pushing
them along to become more central participants in their science learning
communities. The questions that guide our research include the following:
• How do girls create new spaces for deeper engagement in science, and what
do these spaces look like?
• What resources and ways of being do girls take up in science class to support
their own deeper engagement in science?
These questions are important because they respond to recent calls for
deeper, more rigorous, and longitudinal approaches for understanding how
and why some girls pursue and succeed in science (National Academies,
2007). In an effort to answer these questions, we offer a framework of hybrid
spaces in support of science engagement and its implications for policy and
practice efforts to work toward “science for all.”
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Background
Gender and Science Learning
Recently, it has been argued that the “problem” of girls and science, and in
schooling more generally, has been solved (Conlin, 2003). For example,
Business Week’s cover story in May 2003 (Conlin, 2003) reports that girls drop
out of school less often and receive higher grades than boys. National trends
reveal that the academic success of girls in most areas of science now equals
or exceeds that of boys at the 8th- and 12th-grade levels (National Center for
Education Statistics, 2004). Like others, we herald these advances for all girls
in science. However, we are also deeply troubled by the continuing trends
in girls’ identification with and participation in science that receive scant
notice. Despite relative equal achievement in science education, girls tend
to not identify with science, and this impacts their movement along science
trajectories (Brickhouse, Lowery, & Schultz, 2000; Brickhouse & Potter, 2001;
Carlone, 2004). The problem grows in size the further girls progress along
their potential science trajectory. In 2007, the National Academies reported
that women who are interested in science and engineering careers are lost
at every educational transition. Furthermore, the report continues, the problem
is not simply the pipeline:
Women are very likely to face discrimination in every field of science
and engineering. . . . A substantial body of evidence establishes that
most people—men and women—hold implicit biases. Decades of cognitive
psychology research reveals that most of us carry prejudices of
which we are unaware but that nonetheless play a large role in our
evaluations of people and their work. An impressive body of controlled
experimental studies and examination of decision-making processes in
real life show that, on the average, people are less likely to hire a
woman than a man with identical qualifications, are less likely to
ascribe credit to a woman than to a man for identical accomplishments,
and, when information is scarce, will far more often give the benefit of
the doubt to a man than to a woman. (National Academies, 2007, p. 3)
While the National Academies report targets women in the academic science
and engineering pipelines—from undergraduate education to university
faculty—these concerns are relevant to youth in K-12 education. The past
15 years have revealed insights into the barriers girls face in their quest to
express interest and participate in all of the science subject areas (American
Association of University Women, 1999; Howes, 2002; Parker & Rennie,
2002; Reid, 2003; Sungur & Tekkaya, 2003). The barriers that girls face in
engaging with and succeeding in school science range from school and societal
attitudes that portray science as masculine and girls as incapable of meeting
its challenges to a lack of equity-minded curricula, pedagogical strategies,
and professional development tools.
Research in urban science education shows that girls living in highpoverty
urban communities face additional barriers to equitable science
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education. In high-poverty urban schools in the United States, students lack
access to rigorous and high-level science courses; science equipment; appropriate
role models; and certified, qualified teachers (Oakes, 1990, 2000).
Middle and elementary schools in high-poverty urban communities tend to
be greatly impacted by curricular and pedagogical practices driven by highstakes
exams in mathematics and literacy, often leaving little time for science
instruction (Tate, 2001). Youth in these schools are also more likely to bring
to the classroom discursive practices and experiences not valued in highstakes
assessments and to face teachers who do not have the knowledge or
skills to effectively bridge school knowledge with out-of-school ways of talking,
knowing, and doing (Brickhouse & Potter, 2001; O. Lee & Fradd, 1998).
However, we also know that African American girls from low-income urban
communities are outperforming boys, and we want to know what might
some of the reasons be for this trend (Lopez, 2003).
Middle school is an especially crucial time to examine how girls, like
Amelia, take up science in the classroom in ways that matter to them and
that allow them to merge their in- and out-of-school identities. Middle school
is a time when girls’ choices for peer groups, mentors, grades, and afterschool
programs play a pivotal role in the high school trajectories they pursue
and in the support they seek to become and remain engaged in science
(American Association of University Women, 1999; J. Lee, 2002; Malcolm,
1997; Orenstein, 1994). Middle school is also a time when girls’ attitudes
toward science and achievements in science drop precipitously (Atwater,
Wiggins, & Gardner, 1995).
Yet, research is also needed that moves beyond girls as a homogeneous
population and beyond achievement as the only marker of success. Our
research is keenly focused on how cultural and socioeconomic contexts
frame girls’ science experiences. We have chosen to focus our efforts on
urban girls who attend high-poverty schools, because we are particularly
interested in those girls who have been most underrepresented in the sciences.
Clear understandings in this area may lead to more powerful programs
and pedagogies for supporting high-poverty urban girls in science.
Hybrid Spaces for Science Learning
Sociocultural studies in science education have taught us much about the culture
of school science and how, for many youth, learning science is as much
about becoming a legitimate participant in the science learning community as
it is about learning the content of science (Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999; Seiler,
Tobin, & Sokolic, 2003). For some authors (i.e., Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999),
this process involves learning to cross borders between cultures, while for
others, it is more about learning how to apply resources within new fields
appropriately (Seiler et al., 2003). Despite these differences, these studies are
grounded in the belief that the science classroom is its own subculture, with
particular ways of knowing, talking, and doing that do not always clearly align
with the social worlds that youth bring to learning science.
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Aikenhead and Jegede (1999), among others (i.e., Varelas, Becker, Luster,
& Wenzel, 2002), write about how learning to participate in the subculture of
school science is often treated as a process of assimilation rather than enculturation.
In this view, science instruction is at odds with students’ worldviews,
and successful science learning forces students to “abandon or marginalize
their life world concepts and reconstruct in their place new scientific ways of
conceptualizing” (Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999, p. 274). The challenge raised by
this stance is to consider how science teaching and learning might look if
students were to be supported in becoming fluent in the subculture of school
science while not simultaneously abandoning their life worlds.
Some scholars have taken up hybridity theory to describe how teachers,
students, and others in school settings establish new forms of participation
that merge the first space of school science with the second space of the home
to create a third space that has elements of both. This third space is described
as a hybrid space because it brings together the different knowledges, discourses,
and relationships one encounters in ways that collapse oppositional
binaries, allowing them to work together to generate new knowledge, discourses,
and identities (Moje et al., 2004). In conceptualizing the third space,
Moje et al. (2004) draws from hybridity theory, which “posits that people in
any given community draw on multiple resources or funds to make sense of
the world” and that being “in-between several different funds of knowledge
and Discourse can be productive and constraining in terms of one’s literate,
social, and cultural practices” (p. 42).
Moje et al. (2004) show that three different, although related, views on
third space have been taken up in education research. One view defines the
third space as a bridge between academic and traditionally marginalized
knowledges and discourses (e.g., Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, & Tajeda,
1999). A second view defines the third space as a navigational space, or a way
of crossing and succeeding in different discourse communities (e.g., C. D. Lee,
1993; New London Group, 1996). Finally, the third space has been defined as
a space of cultural, social, and epistemological change where competing
knowledges and discourses challenge and reshape both academic and everyday
knowledge (e.g., Moje, Collazo, Carrillo, & Marx, 2001). Moje argues that
all three views are important contributions because they shed light on how
youth cross borders in school settings, allowing them to maintain or build
upon their knowledges and identities from outside of school while finding or
creating ways to succeed within the school setting.
Similarly, Roth (2006) describes hybridity in terms of the “diasporic experiences”
that youth bring to learning science. He argues that when confronted
with differences, individuals continuously engage in what he refers to as
“cultural bricolage,” or “taking from here and there to make do,” producing
new, heterogeneous, hybrid knowledges and identities (p. 6). Roth speaks to
how the lens of diaspora helps us to see how culture and identity are always
heterogeneous—always a hybrid of practices. He argues that everyone enacts
hybrid practices all of the time, but that some youth are marginalized because