Our work in science is not labcoat extraordinary, it’s deeply human, every human. 

For me, being a teacher is a political act. It’s a commitment to my community and the opportunities, experiences, deep joy, and sense of belonging I want all students to have. It’s a commitment to their families and their home communities and cultures as well. I want all my students to have as many opportunities available to them for as long as possible, and I think that means making space and not just for my students, but for their families, and their culture, and the knowledge they come through the door with and the knowledge they can ask the elders in their families to share is all part of allowing them as open a future for as long as possible as we can. 

One of the things you see in grad school for teaching, specifically teaching math and science, are those exercises where students are asked to draw what a scientist looks like at the start of a unit that intends to change students’ ideas of who does science. The point of those studies is that at the beginning students draw mostly white men in lab coats. Maybe even mostly older white men. During a unit of study students learn about all of these incredible non-white, not cis-male scientists and the hope is that at the end of a unit like that students see themselves more reflected in science. I think this work is important both for the ways that it may help students see a path as more viable because they know others who are not part of the dominant white culture have gone before them, and because it simply is more true and accurate.

The problem I have with this type of exercise alone, is that it still positions science as something exceptional. Students across all different identities and experiences see science as something that is done by those who are extraordinarily smart or hard working or creative, or in some other way atypical. My goal with this work is not only to strengthen connections between home and school, but also to challenge the idea that science is something only some people do/can do. Science is so deeply human. We are curious, we look for patterns, we cannot help but ask why and how and observe and test our ideas. The ways that it has been framed by the dominant white culture as exceptional is a form of cultural and intellectual theft. Disrupting that narrative and reframing what science is and what it looks like to do science is part of how I see my role as a teacher as deeply political. 

The Positioning Culture, Families & Communities as Rightfully Belonging layer of PASTEL has always resonated with me. Being part of the PASTEL project has given me a space and a team of colleagues to explore and refine my teaching practice from this angle.

In my work with PASTEL (Promoting Asset-based Science Teaching for Emergent Language Learners), I wanted to make home-school connection assignments more meaningful. In my experience with district-purchased curricula, home-school connections are usually a bit of a throwaway. Often, they are a letter to send home to the family about what the unit is about. Sometimes, there are questions parents can ask their students to try and get more information from the student about what they are learning. Occasionally, they include investigations to do together as a family, or they might recommend books to get from the library.

I wanted to change home-school connections from being throwaways, or one-way communications from school to home, into a meaningful dialogue between home and school. I wanted to reshape home-school connections to include more ways of knowing and reposition families as having deep, valuable knowledge about the world that has a central role in our scientific investigations. My students should see the connections between our science classroom, their adults at home, and the scientific knowledge and skills we all possess. 

CREATING AND USING HOME-SCHOOL CONNECTIONS IN AN EARTH SCIENCE UNIT.

The science curriculum we used is based around puzzling phenomena. The unit questions students are trying to answer are how or why questions. The hope is that by working through the unit and coming up with an explanation for the puzzling phenomenon, students’ understanding of the larger world will also broaden and they will feel like they understand something about the world they didn’t before. This is one of the joys of teaching science for me. Being there to help facilitate students’ making meaning through their curiosity, exploration, and analysis. 

Our unit of study is an Earth and planetary science unit. Students are learning about the movement of the Earth and the position of the Earth, the sun, the moon, and stars in space shape our experience. In this unit, students are trying to figure out what constellation could have been on the missing piece of a mystery artifact that students are told was made about 1,000 years ago. 

Throughout the unit, the curriculum focuses primarily on students explaining what the mystery artifact might represent, but not why it was made, how it might have been used, and why it was preserved. We agreed that for something over 1,000 years old to have been preserved, it must have been made with care and valued by the community that made it. This was a missing piece in the unit that I knew family connections and familial and cultural knowledge could help enrich and deepen our understanding in our classroom, and help students share back to their families the importance of these connections in our classroom.

In planning the family interview questions, I wanted to give students questions to elicit personal memories and cultural knowledge about how humans everywhere, for a very long time, have made use of stars. This long history is part of the unit itself; the puzzling phenomenon is about decoding a “mystery object” that is more than 1,000 years old. I didn’t want my students to think that connection to stars and storytelling about space is only something ancient or elite; I wanted them to have the opportunity to connect directly. 

The first questions I sent home were as follows: 

1. What did you think or feel about the stars and space when you were a kid? What do you remember?
2. How do you feel when you look at the sky at night now? What do you wonder?
3. Have you ever been somewhere where you could see A LOT of stars at night? What was it like?
4. Have you ever heard about people in the past using stars to help time? Tell me what you’ve heard about.

When I got back the first responses, I realized that the memories and knowledge families shared gave the learning we did so much more context and meaning. Students got back stories from their families about when their parents or grandparents were children and where they lived, and what they saw in the sky. Students also got stories from their home culture, like great uncles who used the night sky for navigating as fishermen, or longstanding knowledge of looking to the sky to plan for when to plant or harvest. The information students brought in from their families was touchstones and real-world knowledge and experience that students were already familiar with. It elevated their understanding right away. Sometimes these connections help to directly position the experience of a beloved family member as integral to understanding an aspect of the phenomenon. 

One of the first major concepts for students to grasp in the unit is why stars are not visible in daytime. To build this understanding, we talk about and look at examples of light pollution. Many of my students’ families shared memories of living in places that were more rural and being able to see so many stars at night (question 3 in the first family connection). One family shared, “The sky in Vietnam in the summer has few clouds and you can see a lot of twinkling stars in the dark sky.” Another parent said, “Light from the city illuminates so you can barely see stars, making it feel like I’m not home [in the Philippines].” In class, we rightly positioned this as scientific knowledge that we could refer back to during investigations and class discussions about how the proximity of the sun prevents us from seeing other stars during daytime.

Teachers As Learners: Ruby’s Studio Day

While Ruby’s classroom was the center of the work done in this Studio Day, the participating teachers had the opportunity to engage in meaningful learning and explore how they might attend to their own students’ home connections. The work of this Studio Day was shared with the extended PASTEL network and became a major feature of the project’s collective learning and PLC meetings this year. In the year-end interview, many of the teachers reflected on the Studio Day and Ruby’s work to position families as having a rightful belonging within the classroom. Studio work is especially important for tailoring home-school connections to each classroom, building each participating teacher’s expertise in adapting students’ contributions to learning goals, and responding to students’ home-school connections in meaningful ways.

“I loved learning about the continuous cycles of family connections. It shouldn’t just be surveying families… but also facilitating students to talk with their families, and promoting conversations at home.”

“I really learned from Ruby, specifically with the communication that she would send out to families for every unit. Bringing it back and then posting that up on the science wall and making it public.”

“I learned from Ruby’s studio, where they share the home knowledge and use it in the classroom. And then they take home what they’re learning on the school side, and share it with their families, and their families respond to that information, and they bring it back. And then families and then the students bring back again the response to the academic side.”

The studio day was a collaborative endeavor to both consider how students might revise their scientific writing and thinking and how they might meaningfully incorporate family knowledge and home connections into their scientific explanations.

What we tried

We started the Studio Day by previewing the lesson that Ruby would teach to the 4th-grade group, which she had planned in collaboration with Kerry and Jessica. The class had collaboratively written a paragraph explaining their current thinking about the artifact, which was written up on sentence strips, and students were asked in table groups to revise the paragraph by rearranging, ripping, and adding to the sentence strip to construct a paragraph that better represented their thinking. We ran out of time within this lesson to bring in the home connections. Afterward, we debriefed, analyzed student work, and discussed how students could benefit from more scaffolding around the goals of revising, particularly with attention to who the audience might be for these revisions. We discussed possibilities such as having the revisions be written as letters to their families.

Continuing with the theme of incorporating family knowledge, we then turned our attention to planning the 5th-grade lesson. We reviewed the family knowledge that had been shared, which was written out on cards, and read and discussed a short article about funds of knowledge.

We then collaboratively re-designed the 5th-grade lesson, so that:

• Students would work directly with the family’s knowledge notecards
• Ruby would model how to incorporate family knowledge into the scientific explanation paragraph
• The revision would be scaffolded to focus on one element at a time (incorporating family knowledge, removing extra sentences, and including evidence)

As we debriefed this experience, we discussed the PASTEL Cake Commitment of Cultures, Families, and Communities as rightfully belonging. Participants remarked on how students spontaneously made connections to family experiences in the second lesson (for example, referencing looking at the stars with a brother) that likely wouldn’t have come up in the first lesson.

What we learned
Teachers discussed coming away from this studio with appreciation for what it can concretely look like to bring family knowledge into the science curriculum. As researchers, we further theorized the process by referring to a home-school curriculum development cycle described in the article “Strawberries in Watsonville” (Morrison, 2017). We adapted the cycle to describe and extend what we saw Ruby doing during the studio day (See “What to try in your classrooms” below for more information on this cycle.)

What to try in your classrooms
Consider exploring this cycle (modified from Morrison, 2017) as part of your science teaching:

1. Students gather information at home and in the community. At the beginning of the unit, send home a request for family stories. 
2. Home knowledge is shared, organized, and synthesized at school. Create an evidence board with home knowledge and refer to it routinely.
3.  Students take home their academic work to share, and families respond. Toward the end of the unit, send home the class explanation and make connections to family stories.
4. Family responses become part of and extend classroom learning. End by using family stories as a central part of the knowledge building, i.e., create a class letter that incorporates multiple stories into the science explanation.