Student-Powered Science: Science Education for and by African American Students

Abstract

A liberatory pedagogy, from a Freirean perspective, seeks to transform the classroom into a dialogic and student-powered learning environment by restructuring the student-teacher dichotomy. The purpose is change—not only to individual students’ lives and opportunities but also to the wider social reality. While these are the goals of many science educators, we rarely see Freirean perspectives specifically applied to science teaching. This article considers liberatory pedagogy applied to science teaching where it is perhaps needed most—in a classroom with racially and economically marginalized youth—and explores the challenges that both the structures of urban science classrooms and traditional views about science education pose to the application of Freirean pedagogy.