SYMONE GYLES
Dr. Gyles' research investigates the co-design and impact of community-based and culturally responsive features of equity and justice-oriented science curriculum and instruction. Informed by her experiences as a marine scientist and middle school science teacher, her research seeks to contextualize learning in the local community, and position student, family, and community cultural ways of being, knowing and doing as valid sources of knowledge and data in science classrooms. Generally, Dr. Gyles' work seeks to re-define power and expertise in science by re-framing ideas of who holds scientific knowledge, where scientific knowledge is derived from, and who is seen as a science expert.
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study, I examine features of a community-based science (CBS) curricular design that engages students in justice-oriented science learning to advance their CSA. More specifically, I analyze the design and structure of an environmental science elective course to investigate features of CBS curricular design that support students in exercising their CSA, including: (1) leveraging learning goals to create community change, (2) developing students’ toolkits, (3) cultivating spaces for advocacy and critical hope, and (4) critical and ongoing reflection. The findings suggest that science curriculum can be purposefully designed to assist students in exercising their CSA through generative learning experiences that empower them as community change agents. As we move toward more equity and justice-centered science learning, I recommend that future science curricula take community-based science approaches to design, structuring learning around students’ CSA by attending to how formal science learning can be used as an avenue to support community change.
teach through the pedagogical approach of community-oriented framing. We introduce this approach to teachers' framing of phenomena in community as supporting students' framing of phenomena as personally and locally relevant. Drawing on classroom observations of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, we took an analytic approach that characterized features of classroom discourse to rate community-
oriented framing at the lesson level. Results show that teachers framed phenomena as both social and scientific, and as rooted in students' lived experiences, with classroom activities designed to gather localized and personalized evidence needed to explain or model phenomena. We also share examples of how Black and Latinx students took up this framing of phenomena in their classroom work. By providing a detailed description of the launch and implementation of activities, findings illustrate how community-oriented framing supported teachers in posing local questions of equity and justice as simultaneously social and scientific, and helping students perceive science learning as meaningful to their everyday lives. Community-oriented framing offers a practical means of designing locally and socially relevant instruction. We contribute to justice-centered science pedagogies by conceptualizing transformative science learning environments as those in which students understand their goal in science class as understanding, and later addressing, inequities in how socioscientific issues manifest in their community.