Teaching Toward Rightful Presence in Middle School STEM

Edna Tan, Angela Calabrese Barton

• Publisher: Harvard Education Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781682538463
• eBook ISBN: 9781682538470
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Practical guidance for teachers aiming to strategically support the full participation and engagement of minoritized students in STEM education.

In Teaching Toward Rightful Presence in Middle School STEM, Edna Tan and Angela Calabrese Barton introduce the rightful presence framework, a multifaceted approach to instruction that enables historically marginalized students to gain agency in their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning.

This necessary work presents practical, justice-centered STEM pedagogy that can begin to reverse the messages of exclusion that have pervaded K–12 science education. Tan and Calabrese Barton first delve into the complex legacy of systemic injustice in education, showing how forms of racialization and colonization that are manifest in schooling practices have excluded and led to the disengagement of students who have been historically marginalized because of their race, immigration status, language, class, sexuality, or gender. Through cases and vignettes from middle-school classrooms, they illustrate real-life strategies and instructional decisions that help counteract inequalities. Reaching beyond inclusion, they suggest approaches such as coplanning, coproduction, and community ethnography that disrupt the norms of the science classroom and validate the community's powerful cultural knowledge and relevant experience.

Tan and Calabrese Barton show how the rightful presence framework can foster student engagement and support identity formation. This work gives teachers and other practitioners a means to critique, challenge, and disrupt underlying power structures in middle school STEM.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Thomas M. Philip
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Rightful Presence in Middle School STEM: A Guiding Framework
• Chapter 2 “I Only Bought One Bag of Chips”: Youth Bids for Rightful Presence
• Chapter 3 Pausing for Justice: Teachers Responding to Student Bids
• Chapter 4 Coproduction Toward Rightful Presence in Sixth-Grade Nutrition
• Chapter 5 Pedagogies of Critical Community Ethnography: Breaking Silos Between Students’ Everyday Lives in Community and in School Science
• Chapter 6 Committing to Rightful Presence Teaching and Learning
• Appendix Examples of Debate Handouts in Mr. M's Class
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index