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Assistant Professor Hosun Kang will present at the March 8 meeting of the Center for Research on Teacher Development and Professional Practice, 12:00 to 1:00 pm, in Education 3216. The title of her presentation is "Responding to Whom, about What, When and How? Re-defining Responsive Teaching that Promotes Equity in Secondary Science Classrooms."
Abstract This paper seeks to articulate teachers’ productive responsiveness to learners in the context of secondary science teaching. Research increasingly shows that teachers’ responsiveness to diverse learners is essential to creating strong learning contexts for youth from non-dominant backgrounds in science classrooms (Bang & Medin, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Nasir, Rosebery, Warren, & Lee, 2006). With the widespread use of technology, such as videos, there are increasing efforts to study and characterize teachers’ responsiveness in complex classroom settings (e.g., Russ & Luna, 2013). The underlying assumption of this endeavor is that characterizing teachers’ responsiveness will help teacher educators to facilitate professional learning both in pre-service and in-service contexts, therefore in turn improve students’ learning in classrooms. Despite its potential, the current body of literature on responsive teaching is limited to guide the design of professional learning toward equitable and responsive teaching in secondary science classrooms for two reasons. First, there is lack of a well-grounded framework or tools that help us to recognize ‘productive’ responsiveness in various instructional contexts. Second, there is lack of conceptual clarity about the relationship between responsive teaching and equity. The purpose of this study is further to unpack the notion of responsive teaching with special attention to the issue of equity in secondary science classrooms. Employing a qualitative ethnographic case study approach, I explore two high school teachers’ responsiveness in their instruction—one teacher working at a school located in predominantly white, middle class communities and the other at low-income Latinx communities. In addition, this study discusses the methodological issue in recognizing ‘productive responsiveness’ using videos. Comments are closed.
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