Education Department

Educators and researchers often cite the “relevance” of large-scale, externally-sourced quantitative datasets as an important aspect of designing data experiences for students. However, evidence from the learning sciences and beyond has shown that focusing only on the extent to which datasets reflect students’ lived experiences does not fully explain whether or how students build relationships with data. In this study, we present syncretic data storytelling as a pedagogical approach that brings together different types of knowledge—personal experience, patterns from quantitative datasets, and analysis of the social, political, and historical context—to provide multiple pathways for students to build relationships with data. We illustrate this approach by exploring three student cases from a data storytelling workshop on the topic of environmental racism. In each case, the focal student initially did not connect with the provided geospatial dataset, but later used quantitative data in their inquiry as they engaged with other aspects of the curricular design. We show how syncretic data storytelling remediated hierarchies between everyday and school-based knowledge systems to ultimately create conditions for learning that is not just relevant but consequential, meaning that it carries implications for students’ lives.

Teaching about climate change and its impacts, like precipitation extremes, requires linking complex science concepts with consequential issues of justice for both human communities and natural ecosystems. However, teachers have few professional learning opportunities or curricular resources that address the intersection of science and sociopolitical systems content with a justice lens. In this article, we describe the design of a five-day summer institute for PK-12 teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area that was developed by a large team of teachers, informal educators, environmental justice activists, scientists, and education researchers. We present the conceptual framework for our design, a set of environmental justice lenses, and highlight three activities from the institute that focus on local impacts of precipitation extremes in urban environments, all of which can be adapted to different grade levels and teaching contexts. We also describe our iterative design process and approach to collaboration and evaluation, including revisions that we made to these activities in the successive year to better support our learning goals for teachers.

This study examines how 1.5- and second-generation Muslim undergraduates in the United States make meaning of higher education amid the competing demands of displacement, racialized belonging, neoliberal aspiration, and Islamic ethical commitment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and life history interviews with 20 Muslim students, I use an arrivant framework to analyze how the conditions of migration, empire, and racial capitalism shape students’ relationships to education. The findings reveal that arrivant Muslim students do not simply absorb or resist neoliberal educational logics but rework them through familial narratives of displacement, gendered constructions of cultural authenticity, and moral reasoning rooted in Islamic traditions. Students invoke American exceptionalist discourses of opportunity while contending with anti-Muslim racism, surveillance, and conditional belonging. Rather than treating educational aspiration as a cultural trait of immigrant families, this study theorizes it as a structural condition of arrivant subjectivity, produced by imperial histories and sustained by racial capitalism.

ABSTRACT Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) is an approach to teaching that challenges the inequitable structures that create an education debt for minoritized students. Many studies of CRP in science education focus on teachers' philosophies and dispositions; fewer studies have focused on enacted teaching practice, such as the use of curricular resources. CRP requires that teachers take an oppositional stance toward curricula and actively reconstruct them to center the cultures of their students. In this study, we use ethnographic methods informed by Ladson‐Billings' original work to investigate one teacher's implementation of a large‐scale science curriculum in a Spanish‐English dual‐language immersion class that serves Latine students. We illustrate the teacher's enactment of the conceptions of CRP, showing how she drew from the curricular resources and also diverged from them at different grain sizes, including (a) in‐the‐moment divergence from prescribed teacher moves, (b) lesson‐level divergence from curricular activities, and (c) unit‐level divergence from curricular goals. These divergences reveal how the teacher translated her culturally relevant philosophies into unique classroom practices that she coconstructed with her students. In contrast to other approaches in science education that position curriculum as authoritative and ask teachers to implement it, often with fidelity, we instead argue that teachers should be supported to take a critical stance toward curriculum and diverge from it in ways that reflect their justice‐oriented philosophies, like CRP.

ABSTRACT This paper examines a professional learning (PL) program for upper elementary teachers focused on developing instructional practices to support multilingual learners (MLLs) in science. The PL sought to support teachers' praxis, which we describe as their sense of agency to critically analyze and take action against barriers to MLLs’ opportunities to learn. We analyzed pre‐PL interviews with teachers to identify the ways that they framed MLLs from asset‐ and deficit‐based perspectives and the barriers that they identified that undermine MLLs' science learning. Then, we analyzed the extent to which the teachers' participation in the PL shifted their framing of MLLs and fostered their sense of agency to challenge the barriers faced by MLLs. We found that teachers shifted toward more asset‐based views of students' existing language resources and deepened their sense of agency to employ scaffolds that engage these resources in their own instructional practice. However, teachers continued to surface barriers in their organizational contexts, including the emphasis placed on standardized language assessments and the misalignment between English language instruction and science learning. Our analysis shows that the PL did not adequately support teachers in navigating these particular institutional barriers. Based on our analysis, we argue that teachers and science education researchers should expand their focus beyond teachers’ instructional practices and work together to remove barriers for MLLs in the larger organizational systems of schooling.

This essay articulates an innovative counterstory-based methodology of decolonialde linking which disrupts the very epistemic foundations of sociological disciplinary boundaries and ways of thinking about the production and distribution of knowledges. As non-white co-authors, we have opted to follow to adopt an expansive conception of decolonial/border-thinking gnosis and delinking as a way to embrace all knowledges, particularly those which do not conform to disciplinary modes of exposition and rationalist systematicity within the epistemic conceptions of knowledge. Using two disabled counterstories as gnosis illustrations, our essay shows how their enactment transgresses established norms for addressing and engaging with traditional, discipline-bound epistemological concerns. As such, we aim to open theoretical and methodological avenues for decolonial and non-Eurocentric spheres of imagination. More specifically, since the worlds of mathematics and mathematics education are so dominated by rationalist and neurotypical epistemologies grounded on the Cartesian duality of matter vs. ideas, both of our illustrative counterstories will deal with aspects that disrupt such epistemological paradigms through intersectional cripistemologies.

Abstract: How do teachers develop and use political knowledge to create equitable and inclusive conditions for and with disabled students, particularly disabled students of color? In this essay, we build on concepts of political teacher knowledge in mathematics education, critical inclusive mathematics education and disability studies to explore teacher knowledges that support disabled students’ mathematical learning. We focus on four aspects of political knowledge for teaching mathematics: (1) knowledge as relational and unfolding over time, (2) understanding and negotiating the political contexts in which we teach mathematics, (3) deconstructing deficit discourses about marginalized students, and (4) learning to creatively resist the systems for and with our students. To develop our theoretical analysis, we use a counterstory of a middle school Latino student named Luis and his Latina mathematics teacher, Ms. Marquez. Our aim is to open up discussions in mathematics teacher educational research about the politics at play in teaching inclusive mathematics.

The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students’ performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge. The two studies differ in the type of assessment, the types of words that were studied, and the grade levels and population considered. In the first study, an assessment of words that can be expected to appear with at least moderate frequency at particular levels of text was administered to students in grades 2 through 12. The second study considered the responses of fourth- and fifth-grade students, including English learners, to words that teachers had identified as challenging for those grade levels. The effects of the same set of word features on students’ vocabulary knowledge were examined in both studies: predicted appearances of a word and its immediate morphological family members, number of letters and syllables, dispersion across content areas, polysemy, part of speech, age of acquisition, and concreteness. The data consisted of the proportion of students who answered an item correctly. In the first study, frequency of a word’s appearance in written English and age of acquisition predicted students’ performances. In the second study, age of acquisition was again critical but so too were word length, number of syllables, and concreteness. Word location (which was confounded by word frequency) also proved to be a predictor of performance. Findings are discussed in relation to how they can inform curriculum, instruction, and research.

U2AF1 is one of the most recurrently mutated splicing factors in lung adenocarcinoma and has been shown to cause transcriptome-wide pre-mRNA splicing alterations; however, the full-length altered mRNA isoforms associated with the mutation are largely unknown. To better understand the impact U2AF1 has on full-length isoform fate and function, we conducted high-throughput long-read cDNA sequencing from isogenic human bronchial epithelial cells with and without a U2AF1 S34F mutation. We identified 49,366 multi-exon transcript isoforms, more than half of which did not match GENCODE or short-read-assembled isoforms. We found 198 transcript isoforms with significant expression and usage changes relative to WT, only 68% of which were assembled by short reads. Expression of isoforms from immune-related genes is largely down-regulated in mutant cells and without observed splicing changes. Finally, we reveal that isoforms likely targeted by nonsense-mediated decay are down-regulated in U2AF1 S34F cells, suggesting that isoform changes may alter the translational output of those affected genes. Altogether, our work provides a resource of full-length isoforms associated with U2AF1 S34F in lung cells.