Taking Science Home

Taking Science Home

This book narrates two teachers’ experiences creating and leading an elementary after-school science program at a public housing authority. The narrative employs a reflexive ethnographic approach to examine the reflections of each teacher during one academic year. The book explores the teachers’ understandings of socially just teaching, their pedagogical transformations, and a vision of how science as a discipline was important in terms of enacting a culturally sustaining pedagogy. The reflexive ethnographic perspective enables consideration of the implications of teachers’ positionality in teaching science to marginalized and/or underrepresented students in informal learning contexts. Through these examinations, the book explains how collaboration was vital in the teachers’ efforts to become insiders in the setting and engage in culturally sustaining pedagogy. The book also narrates the teachers’ development leading to articulation of a framework identified as the zone of pedagogical potential. Finally, the book uses the teachers’ reflections to consider the affordances of learning science. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications from this research for promoting equitable practices in informal settings, as well as the potential for those practices being useful in formal settings. Thus, the book should be of interest to researchers, teachers, educators, and students of education and in particular science education.

Domestic Occupations

This feminist rhetorical history explores women’s complex and changing relationship to the home and how that affected their entry into the workplace. Author Jessica Enoch examines the spatial rhetorics that defined the home in the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers how its construction and reconstruction—from discursive description to physical composition—has greatly shaped women’s efforts at taking on new kinds of work. In doing so, Enoch exposes the ways dominant discourses regarding women’s home life and work life—rhetorics that often assumed a white middle-class status—were complicated when differently raced, cultured, and classed women encountered them. Enoch explores how three different groups of women workers—teachers, domestic scientists, and World War II factory employees—contended with the physical and ideological space of the home, examining how this everyday yet powerful space thwarted or enabled their financial and familial security as well as their intellectual engagements and work-related opportunities. Domestic Occupations demonstrates a multimodal and multigenre research method for conducting spatio-rhetorical analysis that serves as a model for new kinds of thinking and new kinds of scholarship. This study adds historical depth and exigency to an important contemporary conversation in the public sphere about how women’s ties to the home inflect their access to work and professional advancement.

Bulletin