NSELA 2020 Virtual Leadership Summit

The Framework / NGSS vision calls for creating opportunities for ALL students to meaningful engage in sensemaking and learning in science. A culturally responsive approach to instruction highlights the range of intellectual resources that students bring to learning situations based on their cultural histories. These intellectual resources, which are incredible assets, include the languages they speak and write, their perspectives about the world, how they gesture as part of their thinking and communication, and their knowledge of specific practices or science-related topics. But it can be tricky to ‘learn to see’ and instructionally leverage all of these resources as students engage in investigations of and make sense of the natural phenomena they observe (Rosebery, Warren, Tucker & Raymond, 2016). Through a series of concrete accounts of learning situations, this session will create opportunities for participants to work with others to ‘learn to see’ students’ sense-making resources—and connect these pedagogical strategies to their classroom practice. We frame this approach through an equity and justice framework for culturally responsive instruction centered in the NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education, which posits that science learning should be rooted in students’ ways of being and ways of knowing.