Navigating Interculturality: African American Male Students and the Science Classroom

Abstract

We examine science learning and teaching as intercultural processes taking place at powered boundaries of race, culture, language, and subject matter. Through close analysis of a classroom event, we describe the ways in which a group of teachers and researchers came to understand the experience of an African American male student in a 7th grade science class. The group developed a layered interpretation by unpacking subtle ways in which subject matter, student sense-making, and implicit structures of race, culture, and language based in Whiteness as privilege interacted to shape unfolding interactions. Building from their analyses, they also imagined pedagogical practices for disrupting racialized orders of inequality in the science classroom.