work

Current Work

The Chèche Konnen Center is currently engaged in three main activities: classroom research, professional development, and promoting conversations on issues of diversity and equity in science education.

Classroom Research. In partnership with local teacher researchers, Center staff are investigating diversity as an intellectual resource in science learning and teaching. We are studying and documenting the sense-making resources that children from linguistically, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse backgrounds bring to science, how these intersect with those of scientific disciplines, and ways to use these as the basis for teaching and learning in science.

To date, we have documented children using the following sense-making resources to powerful effect in the science classroom: forms of argumentation, speculative thinking, imagination, semantic and syntactic resources of first and second languages, figurative uses of language, interrogation of official knowledge, and analytic uses of everyday experience. Children use these resources, which go unrecognized in many classrooms, to make sense of the world across a spectrum of literacies useful in school, work, and life.

Too often, however, these resources are not recognized as relevant to academic learning. Much of our research is concerned with making them visible in relation to scientific literacies. The Center’s research practices are built on close collaborations with teachers and administrators of the Boston, MA and Cambridge, MA Public Schools. We are currently working with five teacher researchers: Folashade Cromwell, Mary DiSchino, Renote Jean-François, Suzanne Pothier, and Mary Rizzuto.

Professional Development. Over several years of research and development, the Center developed a practice of professional development called "teaching as inquiry," which integrates teacher inquiry into science, language and culture, and children's ideas and sense-making practices. These inquiries support teachers to recognize the deep connections between their children's ideas and sense-making resources and those of scientific disciplines. Working in partnership with Center staff, districts and schools across the country have adapted this approach to their local needs and interests.

National Conversation. The Center hosts conferences to promote and sustain a "national conversation" on issues of diversity and equity in science education. The goal is to broaden and deepen understanding of issues of language and culture as they relate to learning and teaching in the sciences, through grounded, interdisciplinary discussion of classroom-based research as the basis for claims and action. To date, we have hosted two conferences, one for teachers and one for educators, researchers, and policymakers.