Hybridizing Cultural Understandings of the Natural World to Foster Critical Science Literacy.

Abstract

Adolescents are constantly exposed to multiple cultural views of the natural world in juxtaposition with the dominant view of science taught in school. This dissertation explores the interaction of these multiple views, and how they shape students’ understanding of and attitudes toward science. Situated in a high school physics classroom, a curricular approach was designed and enacted to open a space in the classroom for the convergence of multiple discourses (or systems of cultural knowledge), and subsequently study how students navigate around them.

Ethnographic and critical inquiry revealed that when two or more discourses about similar natural events or objects (e.g., toss of a colorguard flag, human body) were directly juxtaposed in the classroom space, conceptual, affective, and ideological conflicts were generated for certain students. This was particularly so for students whose embedded experiences and social affiliations within certain discourse communities (e.g., sport clubs, church) led to their preferred ways of looking at the natural world from one particular discourse, and consequently a negative stance toward alternative ways in other discourses.

However, through appropriate pedagogical design and support, such juxtaposition also created opportunities for some students to hybridize different cultural understandings of the natural world as they navigated around multiple discourses. Informed by Bakhtin’s notions of heteroglossia and voice appropriation, the characteristics of such hybridization were found to include: (a) being aware of heteroglossic differences in the use of language, (b) a dynamic shift in identification toward the dialogic other, (c) a juxtaposition of the other’s voices in one’s utterances, and (d) a momentary suppression of one’s preferences, for strategic motives. Not only did hybridization provide a means for some students to construct conceptual knowledge across discourses, but it also helped them develop critical literacy in evaluating how various views and knowledge of the natural world are constructed by and through discourses.

The findings of this dissertation provide insights into hybridization as a crucial mechanism of learning, and provide an alternative but complementary lens for understanding how young people bridge discourses – not as a stable binary but as a dynamic and fluid in-between.