351J.A. Bianchini et al. (eds.), Moving the Equity Agenda Forward: Equity Research, Practice, and Policy in Science Education, Cultural Studies of Science Education 5, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4467-7_21, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

When seeking an international perspective, we often look to those countries where students “do well” (at least according to international exams) in science. Something apparently works in all those “successful” countries, and the challenge is to fi nd out what works and why, in an attempt to replicate it at home. Yet, if we want to extend the conversation to other contexts and other issues, a question remains to be asked: What can we learn from other types of perspectives? More speci fi cally, what can the analysis of experiences from countries usually considered to be at the margins bring to the table when we inquire about science education in the USA? In this commentary, I provide such an international perspective: a South American vision, particularly a view from the Argentine context, with the hope of building together deeper under-standings of the issues we share as a science education community of practice.

In this commentary, I look across the work of Gail Richmond, Maria Rivera Maulucci, and Felicia Moore Mensah. I fi rst talk about recent efforts for diversity and social justice in teacher education. In doing so, I draw on my long-standing work in reform-based science education programs 1 with teachers at schools with the highest levels of social and economic vulnerability in Argentina. Then, I discuss some tensions around promoting equity in academia in my country from a historical and political perspective.

The fi rst topic that I would like to discuss is the importance of taking teacher identity, school context, and explicit social justice goals into account when framing teacher education programs, especially if we share the goal of making teaching for equity and diversity hallmarks of teacher preparation. In her chapter “What Perspectives on Community-Based Learning Can Teach Us About Organizational

Chapter 21 International Response for Part V: Equity and Diversity in Science Education and Academia: A South American Perspective

Melina Furman

M. Furman (*) School of Education , Universidad de San Andres , Vito Dumas 284 , Victoria, Buenos Aires , Argentina e-mail: mfurman@udesa.edu.ar

1 For more information on these programs, see www.ebicentenario.org.ar and www.sangari.com.ar

352 M. Furman

Support of Research and Policy Work in Equity and Diversity,” Richmond discusses recent research that shows the key roles of teacher identity and school context in reform efforts, as the “one size fi ts all” model of teacher education has again and again shown its drawbacks. As she points out, in teacher education, “the extent to which there is uptake of ideas is shaped by what teachers believe about their students’ capacities as learners, how they think of themselves as educators, now and into the future, and the context in which they practice. None of these alone accounts for the extent to which learning occurs; the terrain of the profession and its enactment in schools is too multidimensional and interactional for this to be the case.”

In our work with Argentine teachers who teach youth in poverty across the coun-try, we have found similar tensions, albeit shaped within a different context. We have seen how school cultures of what we have called “low-intensity teaching” (especially due to the high levels of absenteeism of teachers and principals alike) start to be chal-lenged and reshaped when programs afford teachers the possibility of building a professional identity based on personal narratives of success with students, as opposed to a deeply engrained feeling of despair and impossibility, which is often the case in Argentine disadvantaged schools. For instance, after 1 year of participation in a reform-based science program that closely helped teachers to develop inquiry-based activities by providing intensive training, teaching materials, and ongoing mentoring, 92.9% of teachers expressed that their con fi dence in students’ possibility of learning had improved (CIPPEC 2010 ) . As one teacher mentioned, “At the begin-ning of the year I thought that my students would not be capable of this. Now that I see them so connected to science, I believe I really underestimated them.”

This comment illustrates a signi fi cant fi nding, since Argentine teachers of youth in poverty often hold a de fi cit model of their students, describing a signi fi cant num-ber of their students as “abnormal” or as “children who should be placed in special education classes.” What is more important about this fi nding is the fact that teach-ers’ views of their students are intricately connected to their own professional iden-tity, especially their sense of self-ef fi cacy as teachers. In other words, as they begin to build personal stories of success (usually related to student engagement but also, sometimes, to what children can learn), teachers start to see their students in a new light. As Mensah claims in her chapter “Retrospective Accounts in the Formation of an Agenda for Diversity, Equity and Social Justice for Science Education,” teacher educators have “a strong responsibility, an obligation” to help teachers overcome notions of who can do science. What we have found in our work is that revising these notions is very dif fi cult outside an authentic teaching context and requires sustained work in the fi eld, where teachers get to try out new kinds of pedagogies with their own students, as long as the teachers are closely scaffolded in a way that allows them to build personal stories of success, especially with those children tra-ditionally marginalized from achieving in science (Furman et al. 2008 ) . It is only when teachers start to see that those programs (usually brought to them by state or by university experts) work with their own students that teachers start to revise their assumptions around who is capable of learning science and about the value of scienti fi c skills for children’s lives. Equity, as one teacher said, “starts to go beyond politicians’ discourse to become a reality in our schools.”

35321 International Response for Part V…

We have also found that belonging to a collective of peers who are engaged in reform efforts in schools traditionally considered “at risk” is another important factor that helps teachers revise their notions about students and place equity and diversity at the center of their practice. Unfortunately, the Argentine context makes the professional learning communities (PLCs) that Richmond discusses in her chapter almost impossible to establish, since teachers usually work at two different schools every day and have almost no paid hours for meeting with colleagues. However, it becomes clear from teachers’ testimonies that belonging to a collective of peers working within similar contexts becomes an important factor in shaping teachers’ identities. As one of our teachers put it: “I don’t feel alone anymore. We are many teachers working together, and now we know it can be done. Because doing science is our kids’ right. And we have to make sure that they ful fi ll it.” As this quote shows, belonging to a collective of peers supports teachers in starting to see themselves as political actors who have a responsibility to reach all their students and who have the tools to do so.

Second, I would like to discuss the tensions involved in bringing issues of equity and diversity to academia and the challenges that scholars of color face in advancing their professional careers as academics. Richmond proposes that drawing from research in PLCs can contribute to making it possible for members of the NARST community “to feel individually and collectively supported in their pursuit of work in areas of equity and diversity.” In their chapter “NARST Equity and Ethics Committee: Mentoring Scholars of Color in the Organization and in the Academy,” Rivera Maulucci and Mensah discuss “some of the structural, social, cultural, and symbolic barriers that often impede the progress of scholars of color in the academy.”

As opposed to what happens in basic education, where the issues we fi nd in working with teachers and students are in many ways similar to the scenarios we see in the USA, in higher education and academia the tensions we face in Argentina, and South America in general, are more distant. To bring some context to our own issues of diversity, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Argentina received large numbers of Southern and Eastern European immigrants as a result of government policies aimed at increasing the country’s population. These immi-grants mostly formed what is now called the middle class and had access to higher education due to the strong investment in public education that created tuition-free public universities. After the early twentieth century, massive immigration ceased until recent decades when many immigrants from adjacent countries (Bolivia, Perú, and Paraguay) arrived seeking new opportunities. These immigrants have enlarged the numbers of socioeconomically disadvantaged people who currently have almost no access to higher education, let alone academia, a situation compounded by the neoconservative policies of the second half of the twentieth century that deeply weakened public education and the possibilities of social mobility. In the past decades, middle classes have moved to private education, starting from elementary school, which leaves many public schools attended mostly by students in poverty.

Given this context, it is easy to imagine that access to higher education is very scarce for what in the American context would be called “scholars of color.”

354 M. Furman

However, the Argentine population is much less racially and ethnically diverse than the USA, and thus it is socioeconomic status that counts the most in terms of getting access to all spheres of power, including academia. In the past decade, access to higher education for traditionally marginalized groups has increased due to the opening of new tuition-free public universities located in underprivileged areas; nevertheless, access to academia is still a far away goal for most members of these noncentral groups. As Rivera Maulucci and Mensah point out in their chapter, “Like any cultural institution, academia has its own set of norms and discourses that members from underrepresented groups may not know or may fi nd dif fi cult to enact.” In that sense, we have still much more to do in terms of making academia more equitable. It is interesting to note that academia, especially in the social sciences, has paradoxically focused on trying to understand the problems of poverty and inequity of the region. Yet, at present, we might claim that academia itself is one of our least equitable institutions.

However, it is worth mentioning that even when most scholars still belong to the socioeconomic elites (or at least the middle class), the debate on how to make science education more equitable (what American scholars call “science for all”) is very much alive. For instance, very recently, the Argentine government, following similar initiatives in Latin America, decided to give every secondary student in the country one laptop computer, as long as they remain in school and do not drop out. In addition, the government has given a “universal grant per child,” which consists of a monthly stipend for families below a certain level of poverty. This initiative has signi fi cantly increased the number of students in public schools, since in order to receive the stipend, children need to attend school regularly. What is now in debate is what kind of support teachers need to use these computers in meaningful ways with their students, in order to help them develop powerful science practices and close the achievement gap that has widened over the past decades. In sum, even when contexts are sometimes very different, it is quite important to know that there is a global community of researchers whose efforts aim to put equity and diversity at the center of their practice. Hopefully, diversity in our own research communities will make us stronger, help us think deeper, and ultimately, improve our countries’ education systems.

References

CIPPEC. (2010). Evaluación de impacto del programa Ciencia y Tecnología con Creatividad desde la percepción de los actores . Retrieved from http://www.sangari.com.ar/midias/pdfs/avaliacao_cippec.pdf

Furman, M., Podestá, M. E., Collo, M., & de la Fuente, C. (2008). Hacia una didáctica de la for-mación docente continua en ciencias naturales para contextos desfavorecidos: un análisis del Proyecto Escuelas del Bicentenario . Paper presented at the I Congreso Metropolitano de Formación Docente, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires.