Culturally Relevant Science Education as a Contextualizing Strategy: Supporting Mexican Nahua Students to Understand Core Ideas of Western Science.

Abstract

In this dissertation I proposed, enacted, and evaluated a process of culturally relevant curricular contextualization aimed to provide access to science to ethnic minority middle school students, in this case Nahua students from Veracruz, Mexico. Because prior knowledge is the main input for the contextualization process, this dissertation pushes the boundaries of how we approach students’ prior knowledge. I propose that cultural cognition, socialization, and cultural narratives play a central role in shaping students’ prior knowledge. Not accounting for these dimensions of prior knowledge when designing curriculum and instruction leaves marginalized students alone in navigating the differences between their culture and home language and the culture and language of school. Against this backdrop, this study takes culture and socialization into account by using multiples sources (cognitive tasks to explore teleology and essentialism, ethnographic observation of students’ community and classroom, and interviews with students and adults in students’ communities) to develop eight principles of contextualization, aligned with the scholarship in Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Indigenous Education. The significance of this study lies not only in providing a set of principles and concrete examples for contextualization of science curricula, but also in providing an empirically developed process of curricular contextualization that integrates culture and cognition, socialization, experiences of border crossing, and a social justice approach. The curricular unit that was contextualized using this approach resulted in students’ learning gains, development of a positive ethnic identity, agency to use both their own traditional knowledge and Western science knowledge in a context-­‐‑dependent manner, and imagining possible futures in science. This dissertation may be one of the first studies in which border crossing is documented from the point of view of the students, and in the context of learning specific core concepts of Western science with a contextualized curriculum. The process of contextualization and the categories of border crossing presented in this dissertation can be of great value to science teachers and curriculum designers willing to engage in culturally relevant pedagogies, as they will have a better idea of the various experiences their students may have and anticipate appropriate strategies to support all students’ learning.