Principles for Designing Science Methods Courses Toward Humanizing Science Teaching and Learning

263 Principles for Designing Science Methods Courses Toward Humanizing Science Teaching and Learning
D Keifert, Bethany Daniel, Heather Johnson, Déana Scipio, Yaa Dankwa, Sophia Jeong, Alejandra Santely, Khadija Zogheib, Enrique Suárez, Myeongji Kim
Strand 7: Pre-service Science Teacher Education

Supporting transformative science teaching and learning necessitates adopting humanizing approaches centered in collective learning (Andrews et al., 2019; Mensah, 2009). Central to this work is developing critical consciousness, or “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Freire, 1970, p. 17). Critical consciousness serves as a foundation for a professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) that is “grounded in theoretical traditions dealing with cultural, social, and political issues that are interconnected with classroom dynamics” (Beyer, 2001, p. 152). Salazar’s (2013) principles and practices of humanizing pedagogy identify the kinds of interconnections that teachers need to be prepared to address. Our symposium includes five papers that take up different principles/practices from Salazar to explore teacher candidates’ experiences in science methods courses. Collectively, we explore relationships between designed elements of methods courses and teacher candidates’ humanizing experiences for themselves and their future students. These design/experience relations shed light on successes and challenges in humanizing science teacher candidate learning to inform future work by teacher educators.