Mediating cultural borders during science field trips

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze teacher and student roles in the teaching and learning of science at an informal learning center, The Outdoor Classroom. As a white middle class informal learning science teacher, I examine my struggles to teach science to students across boundaries of race, class, gender, and experience with the outdoors during field trips. Through the field trip I did not have the time or face-to-face experience to make sense of the students’ culture, see their culture in terms of capital, and align my enactment to benefit their learning. Likewise, the students did not have the time or face-to-face experience with me in order to adapt their cultural capital and build the essential stocks of symbolic and social capital. This research demonstrates how the classroom teacher draws upon previous transactions and emotions to successfully engage her students in practices that promote the participation and learning of science. Through creating culturally adaptive ways of transacting, teachers can provide opportunities for their students to generate positive emotional energy and group solidarity in the learning of science at an informal science center.