Teaching Toward Rightful Presence in Middle School Stem

Practical guidance for teachers aiming to strategically support the full participation and engagement of minoritized students in STEM education.

In Teaching Toward Rightful Presence in Middle School STEM, Edna Tan and Angela Calabrese Barton introduce the rightful presence framework, a multifaceted approach to instruction that enables historically marginalized students to gain agency in their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning.

This necessary work presents practical, justice-centered STEM pedagogy that can begin to reverse the messages of exclusion that have pervaded K-12 science education. Tan and Calabrese Barton first delve into the complex legacy of systemic injustice in education, showing how forms of racialization and colonization that are manifest in schooling practices have excluded and led to the disengagement of students who have been historically marginalized because of their race, immigration status, language, class, sexuality, or gender. Through cases and vignettes from middle-school classrooms, they illustrate real-life strategies and instructional decisions that help counteract inequalities. Reaching beyond inclusion, they suggest approaches such as coplanning, coproduction, and community ethnography that disrupt the norms of the science classroom and validate the community's powerful cultural knowledge and relevant experience.

Tan and Calabrese Barton show how the rightful presence framework can foster student engagement and support identity formation. This work gives teachers and other practitioners a means to critique, challenge, and disrupt underlying power structures in middle school STEM.

Author: Edna Tan, Angela Calabrese Barton
Publisher: Harvard Education PR
Published: 10/31/2023
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9781682538463

About the Author
Edna Tan is Hooks Distinguished Professor of STEM Education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her collaborative research investigates what constitutes equitable and consequential science and engineering learning for historically underrepresented, minoritized youth across learning contexts and over time.

Angela Calabrese Barton is chair of Educational Studies and professor of science education and the learning sciences at the University of Michigan. She studies approaches to science teaching and learning in school and community settings that disrupt/transform systemic injustices in learning environments serving minoritized youth and that promote justice-oriented outcomes.