RESEARCH ORIENTATION:

Understanding how science education can be a transformational force in the lives of culturally marginalized and economically disadvantaged children rather than contribute to the reproduction of their disadvantaged positions in society is central to my research agenda. Thus, I focus upon building understandings of the ways in which students’ embodied cultural, social, and symbolic resources are both consciously and unconsciously accessed and appropriated in ways that may mediate their modes of participation in science class and lead to their empowerment and/or disempowerment as science learners. Moreover, I study how marginalized students may experience shifts in their self-identification as science learners as well as how school science also shifts and takes on creolized forms as aspects of students’ cultural ways-of-being integrate within more traditional forms of participation. For instance, in my 2009 Cultural Studies in Science Education article, I closely studied how students’ utilization of orality, in the form of rap practices, can be rich resources for developing creolized forms of school science, and I looked at how rap creates entryways for students to form and reform hybridized identities in which canonical science discourse and lyrics about non-science subjects can begin to be fluidly and seamlessly integrated. 

Research concerned with expanding the traditional definitions of scientific literacy, recognizing student agency, and enhancing marginalized students’ identification with science requires critical, participatory ethnographic research designs. I prioritize the empowerment of the students and teachers involved and the extent to which the research process is educative, empowering, fair, and catalytic. So that the research processes (and not just the research findings) are transformative for marginalized youth I introduce unique research group dynamics and nontraditional approaches to data and artifact collection, production, and analyses that involve the participants. My co-authored book in preparation, Collaborative Educational Research With Urban Students: An Empowering Experience, provides images of how traditional views of research participants in science education studies can be challenged. We share the emergence and development of student researcher roles within our respective programs of research and discuss the ways their involvement has allowed our understandings of urban science education to expand.

This ‘critical’ research orientation has additionally resulted in my longitudinal commitment to many of the students with whom I have conducted research.  My single-authored book project, High School in the Inner City and the Years Beyond, documents the practices, perspectives, thoughts, reflections, and emotions that I have been privileged to witness over a ten year relationship with three young adults who are the main characters in their own life stories.  The manuscript reveals the structures influencing their lives during their high school years.  Additionally, interviews conducted following high school graduation reveals structures that shaped their post high school experiences, and includes their accounts of higher education experiences. Thus the manuscript allows readers to witness firsthand, through the eyes of the young adults, what a high school education translates into, while growing up in the inner city.  That is, readers will leave this manuscript with new and nuanced understandings of the role of education in assisting the teenagers to fight cycles of social reproduction as they become young adults. It will conclude with recommendations for policy makers, school administrators, teachers, care-givers and, most importantly, inner city youth who are fighting economic and cultural marginalization on a daily basis.