Resisting and/or Expanding through Hybridity: An Examination of How Teachers Negotiate Equitable Field-based Education in Theory and Practice
Abstract
Equity in science education is a central goal for many educators, researchers, policymakers, learning institutions, community organizations, and more. Scholars are increasingly looking to critical, intersectional, transdisciplinary, and dialectical theories to better understand the tensions that promote or limit equitable science education (Stetsenko, 2016; Sharma, 2020; Higgins et al., 2017; Takeuchi et al., 2020; Strong et al., 2016). This dissertation explores one specific intersection of science education inequity: access to equitable field-based education (EFBE). Utilizing critical ethnography (Freire, 1970; Barton, 2001; Trueba,1999) and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) (Vygotsky, 1986; Engestrom, 1987; Cole, 1988; Leon’tev, 1978; Sannino, 2015), a patchworked theoretical framework I call critical ethnographic CHAT (CE-CHAT) (Higgins et al., 2017), this research aimed to understand how teachers, who were former participants of a professional development program for pre-service teachers that aimed to prepare them to teach EFBE in their future classrooms, took up the program goal of EFBE in their first year(s) teaching, in both theory and practice, exploring the overlapping systems constraining or expanding the process of hybridization. The findings from this study provide insight into the multiplicities of enactment (Buxton et al., 2015) and nuanced pathways that teachers took when trying to hybridize and enact EFBE in their classrooms and the tensions they faced. From these pathways, a story of resistance and expansion emerged, as all the teachers I spoke with, regardless of where they were on their pathway to EFBE, strongly believed in the goal of EFBE and saw it as something they could accomplish overtime.