Influencing science teachers' social justice practices
IOE researchers have paved the way for a profound shift in understanding of how educational interventions can better support all young people to engage with STEM.
“Not for me”
Research by Professor Louise Archer (Principal Investigator) and Research Fellow Dr Meghna Nag Chowdhuri has found that a key reason for underrepresentation in science is that marginalised young people get subtle as well as explicit messages throughout their educational trajectory that alienates them and makes them believe that “science is not for me” (Archer et al., 2015).
Dr Chowdhuri was lead researcher for the associated IOE Primary Science Capital Teaching Approach project (PSCTA). Between 2019 and 2022, the team worked in collaboration with science teachers across England to develop a teaching model oriented to equity and social justice in everyday classroom practice. This resulted in an expansive 100-page teacher handbook, translated into multiple languages.
Supporting teachers to teach in justice-oriented ways
The IOE Impact Fellowship 2021 enabled Dr Chowdhuri to extend the PSCTA work to prospective teachers, cascading the new approach to teacher trainers in the UK via teacher education programmes, addressing the problem identified by research that science teachers are often ill-prepared to use social justice-oriented teaching. She collaborated with teacher educators to develop what they said they needed: an infographic to quickly communicate and translate the research findings. To date, over a period of three years, the infographic has been downloaded via UCL Discovery more than 9,000 times, along with the PSCTA teacher handbook. Dr Chowdhuri has been invited by several Initial Teacher Education (ITE) providers to give keynotes and address prospective science teachers about the PSCTA, encouraging them to embed it within their pedagogy.
Participant acknowledgements include:
Through the application of the PSCTA our students gain deep insights into sociocultural issues that are often ignored in science learning yet are inextricably linked to the nature of science and its applications.
As an ITE provider with an explicit focus on social justice, we appreciate the specificity of the approach and its resources which are easy to navigate for trainees on an employment-based route.
A linked professional development course has proved popular: 20 teacher trainers and 54 science leads across UK schools signed up for the monthly online course, held over nine months. Dr Chowdhuri continues to develop her interest in social justice-oriented science practices. She is working on a five-year project focusing on early career teachers and leading Making Spaces, a project focusing on creating equitable informal science learning spaces (‘makerspaces’). Her work is proving pivotal in changing the dominant ways of teaching science, challenging inequities in science participation.
About the academic
Dr Meghna Nag Chowdhuri is a Research Fellow and lead researcher on a project focused on developing a social justice-oriented primary science teaching pedagogy. Her research interests include primary mathematics and science education, teacher professional development and issues of equity and social justice. [2021–22 cohort]