Designing Pedagogies for Indigenous Science Education: Finding Our Way to Storywork

Abstract

This article explores teachers' sense-making in teaching science. The literature on nonmajority teachers' experiences in designing and planning for instruction is limited. Examinations of teachers' understandings of science teaching and learning in the context of educational reform have failed to look closely at teachers as designers of community-based science-learning environments. We analyze the sense-making that occurred when American Indian teachers met in an informal learning environment to design and implement science curricula. Findings reveal that teachers engaged with community-based stories while designing curricula and framed stories in terms of lesson launches or instructional beginnings (Jackson, Garrison, Wilson, Gibbons, Shahan, 2013). Drawing on the work of Jo-ann Archibald (2008), we view this process as akin to “storywork” and suggest that teacher design meetings serve as a critical site of sense-making where teachers can build shared knowledge of science content and design pedagogies that are “culturally sustaining and revitalizing” (McCarty Lee, 2014).