Chèche Konnen Center

Welcome to the website of the Chèche Konnen Center at TERC

The Chèche Konnen Center* is dedicated to improving science education for children who are not currently succeeding in school, whose linguistic, intellectual and cultural strengths are not recognized as relevant to academic learning. These children are disproportionately from low-income families with limited formal education; many speak a first language other than English; and in the districts where we work many are of African descent.**

Chèche Konnen means "search for knowledge" in Haitian Creole. The first teachers to collaborate with the Center gave it this name in 1987.

The Center conducts research on learning and teaching in urban classrooms and on teacher inquiry as a form of professional development. A cornerstone of this work is documentation of the sense-making resources that children from ethnically and linguistically diverse backgrounds bring to the study of science (e.g., the oral and literate traditions they command in their daily lives outside of school) and the ways these intersect with those characteristic of scientific disciplines. In line with this, the Center’s work is guided by the following principle: All children have a great deal to learn from one another. Those who typically do not excel in academic disciplines have as much to teach as do children who typically do excel. See our History.

In partnership with teachers and administrators, the Center explores ways to create classroom communities of scientific practice for elementary and middle school students (grades K - 8). In these communities, children pose and investigate questions, develop evidence-based arguments, and theorize about scientific phenomena.

Over the years, children and teachers have investigated the physics of motion, plant growth and development, metamorphosis, aquatic ecology, the dynamics of flight, and more. These investigations build on intersections between children's questions, ideas, and sense-making practices and those of the sciences as the basis for pedagogical action and curricular design. Center staff study the ways in which classroom communities of scientific practice are jointly created by teachers and students. We also study what children learn -- about scientific ideas, knowledge-making practices in the sciences, and themselves as learners and thinkers -- through their participation in such communities.

A major focus of the Center's work is on students whose first language is not English. Over the years, we have collaborated with teachers in a variety of classroom settings that serve English language learners in both urban and rural districts: transitional, developmental and two-way bilingual and English as a second language (ESL) programs. We have worked in Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Korean bilingual programs, and with ESL programs that serve students from multiple language backgrounds. We have worked locally -- in the greater Boston area -- and nationally -- in Arizona, California, Illinois, and Texas. Recently, our research has expanded to include urban classrooms comprised of students from a variety of linguistic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. Many of the children in these classrooms are from low-income or working class households and families with limited formal education, and are not experiencing success in academic subjects such as science.

For more information, see our list of Publications. See also the Fall 2001 issue of Hands On! published by TERC, which featured the Center's work. A PDF file is available for download.

*The Chèche Konnen Center has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Education Research and Improvement (OERI) of the United States Department of Education, the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs (OBEMLA) of the United States Department of Education, and the Spencer Foundation. The opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of our funders.

**For brevity, we will at times gloss this complexity by referring to these children as "ethnically and linguistically diverse." We are aware of the problematic nature of this characterization. What does it mean to characterize some, but not all, children as being from "diverse backgrounds?" Who does not participate in multiple, diverse -- sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary -- communities as a part of their everyday lives? And even as we acknowledge this fundamental heterogeneity in every person's sociocultural identity, how do we also recognize the commonalities that bind individuals and social groups across time and space? The challenges expressed in these questions are a part of what the Center struggles to understand in its work, in terms of theory, methods and pedagogy.