When genres meet: Inquiry into a sixth-grade urban science class

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING

VOL. 39, NO. 7, PP. 579–605 (2002)

When Genres Meet: Inquiry into a Sixth-Grade Urban Science Class

Maria Varelas,1 Joe Becker,1 Barbara Luster,2 Stacy Wenzel3 1

College of Education, 1040 W. Harrison Street, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60607-7133 2

Chicago Public Schools

3

Institute for Mathematics and Science Education, 950 S. Halsted Street, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60607-7019 Received 9 May 2001; Accepted 11 December 2001

Abstract: In this study, we explore oral and written work (plays and rap songs) of students in a sixthgrade all African-American urban science class to reveal ways affective and social aspects are intertwined with students’ cognition. We interpret students’ work in terms of the meeting of various genres brought by the students and teachers to the classroom. Students bring youth genres, classroom genres that they have constructed from previous schooling, and perhaps their own science genres. Teachers bring their favored classroom and science genres. We show how students’ affective reactions were an integral part of their constructed scientific knowledge. Their knowledge building emerged as a social process involving a range of transactions among students and between students and teacher, some transactions being relatively smooth and others having more friction. Along with their developing science genre, students portrayed elements of classroom genres that did not exist in the classroom genre that the teacher sought to bring to the class. Students’ work offered us a glimpse of students’ interpretations of gender dynamics in their classrooms. Gender also was related to the particular ways that students in that class included disagreement in their developing science genre. ß 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 579–605, 2002

One way to contrast contemporary ideas on science education with more traditional approaches is in terms of the role of the assimilating frameworks that students bring with them to the classroom. More traditional approaches may be seen as conceiving science education in terms of replacing students’ conceptions and understandings with others that conform more to

Contract grant sponsor: UIC Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholarship. Correspondence to: M. Varelas; E-mail: [email protected] DOI 10.1002/tea.10037 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). ß 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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what is accepted in the scientific community. More progressive approaches, in contrast, may be seen as conceptualizing science education in terms of building on and transforming the knowledge that students bring with them to the classroom. In this view, students’ assimilatory frameworks are critical to their construction of scientific knowledge. Moreover, in a sociocultural perspective, learning and intellectual development are intertwined, and involve the encounter between children’s assimilatory frameworks and cultural achievements incorporated in disciplinary knowledge. Dewey (1938) emphasized that our learning and development involves not simply being in an experience, but working on it in such a way that the experience is made into something meaningful for ourselves. It is in this process that we undergo the experience and are transformed by it. However, our encounter with the world in such undergoing of experience is not an individual affair. It involves not only the individual’s assimilatory frameworks, but also the disciplinary knowledge that has been culturally achieved. Thus, Dewey emphasized the encounter between the child and the curriculum (Dewey, 1956). The products of previous human endeavor, existing cultural achievements, mediate the individual’s ‘‘undergoing’’ of experience, and guide it in particular ways. Similarly, Vygotsky’s (1978, 1934/1987) idea of the zone of proximal development is not simply a concept of social interaction between adult and child, and teacher and student, but crucially involves the effect of the organized structures of knowledge, procedures, and goals, achieved in a particular community, on the individual’s assimilatory frameworks. This type of sociocultural perspective is distinct from transmission learning on the one hand and Piagetian-inspired discovery learning on the other (Driver, Asoko, Leach, Mortimer, & Scott, 1994; O’Loughlin, 1992). Children do not reinvent scientific inquiry by themselves. Instead, children learn by encountering concepts, ideas, procedures, and strategies that have been established by others over the course of time. They make sense of these by using the assimilatory frameworks that they bring to the classroom, which, in turn, are changed by the encounter. It is this encounter between knowledge already achieved by the science community and the students’ own assimilatory frameworks that the teacher facilitates in the science class (Becker & Varelas, 1995; Varelas, 1996). This process is, of course, problematic. In particular, people may resist the change to their assimilatory frameworks. This may take the form of overt resistance, but it may also take the form of compliance. People may adopt the outer forms of the culturally achieved knowledge structures without integrating them with their own experiential understandings, leaving the former poor in meaning and the latter without the transformational effect of the former. Furthermore, the process of education, seen from a sociocultural perspective, encompasses a tension among voice, preferences, and needs of individual participants on the one hand and the culturally achieved understandings and forms of expression that are incorporated in disciplinary knowledge and practice on the other. The latter serve both as tools for the individual’s development and as constraints on it, facilitating some possibilities and hindering others. Both Dewey and Vygotsky encouraged us to consider students’ assimilatory frameworks not only in cognitive terms, but also, in a broader sense, involving social interactions and affect. Students’ social interactions and their affect are organized and structured together with their cognitions. This suggests that for many students, motivated and enthusiastic engagement with science content may be best achieved through creating environments and opportunities that encourage students to bring their assimilatory frameworks for science content into contact with assimilatory frameworks that have significant positive social and affective aspects. To explore this idea we developed the concept of assimilatory frameworks as genres.

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The Concept of Genres Genres are ‘‘staged, goal-oriented, social process[es]’’ (Martin, Christie, & Rothery, 1987), ‘‘purposive ways of doing things in a culture’’ (Christie, 1993). Wells (1993) saw genres as social activities that have a recognizable organizational structure constituted by a dynamic decisionmaking process to which all participants contribute. Genres are both the tools by which we make sense and perform in the world, in concert with others, and a product of this activity. Seen in this way, genres inherently incorporate social aspects of our ways of doing and knowing. Furthermore, inasmuch as people in different places and times develop particular ways of making sense of their lives and acting in the world, and these influence succeeding generations, genres are cultural and historical. We consider that to varying degree genres also incorporate affect. The purposes and strategies that people use in doing and knowing involve affect, such as affection, hostility, pride, pleasure, and distaste, that is expressed in some genres more than in others. In science classes a multiplicity of students’ and teachers’ genres meet. We focus on three types of genres. The students bring with them youth genres, classroom genres that they have constructed from previous schooling, and maybe even their own science genres. Teachers bring to their classes their favored classroom and science genres.

Youth Genre We derive our concept of youth genre from Daiute (1997), who identified ‘‘a form of discourse characteristic of children’’ (p. 323) she called the ‘‘youth’’ genre. Although influenced by adult genres in their culture, children share their own values, practices, and symbols, and share ways of interpreting and reconstructing the world around them. According to Daiute, educators have not paid enough attention to ‘‘understanding youth culture as a positive resource for children’s cognitive development and learning’’ (p. 323). Although youth culture and discourse are not monolithic, Daiute identified the following as elements that characterize youth genres: playfulness, affect, intensity, sense making, reciprocity, experimentation, and argumentative stance. Furthermore, Daiute noted: ‘‘Children’s interaction styles are important marks of youth genre, and . . . important tools for learning. Their banter, laborious explanations, exaggeration, and teasing are all part of the problem solving process’’ (p. 329). Daiute called for exploring, and taking into account in the classroom, children’s youth genres, their own ways of integrating social, cultural, and affective resources to organize cognitive work. The youth genre is also shaped by the children’s membership in their particular ethnolinguistic culture. This article focuses on Barbara Luster’s class (one of the authors). All the children in Barbara’s class were African American. Barbara herself (as a member of this culture) and scholars in African-American studies and culturally relevant teaching have identified several dimensions of what Nobles (1980) construed as the ‘‘black cultural ethos’’: movement, affect, expressive individualism, communalism, and social perspective of time. As Ladson-Bilings (1994) wrote, ‘‘non-western world views, particularly African, place a totally different emphasis on self, conceiving of self as coming into being as a consequence of the group’s being . . . one’s self-identity is therefore always a people identity or what could be called an extended self’’ (p. 69). Students’ gender also affects their youth genres in particular. Boys and girls may adopt different ways of relating to each other (e.g., Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986; Guzzetti & Williams, 1996; Rosser, 1990; Roychoudhury, Tippins, & Nichols, 1995), and this aspect of the youth genre may influence the ways that students construct their classroom and science genres.

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Classroom Genre We conceive of classroom genres as dynamic systems of relations, expectations, norms, habits, and interactions between the teacher and the students, among the students themselves, and among the students, the teacher, and the subject matter. There are a variety of classroom genres, and the classroom genres that students bring to any class may not necessarily be the same as the classroom genre that the teacher of this class favors. We—and in particular, coauthor Barbara Luster, on whose class this study focuses—favor a particular classroom genre, one that emphasizes creating a classroom community, engaging students in creating classroom norms, and in planning and structuring activities. In this genre students work together, sharing ideas and understandings, and classroom conversation is continuously celebrated, with emphasis on collaboration as opposed to individual students working in an isolated manner competing with each other. It is a classroom genre structured as a web of relationships among students and teacher as opposed to the teacher interacting separately with individual students. These relationships facilitate the development of students’ favorable dispositions toward science—feelings of interest, caring, excitement, and pride of accomplishments. In terms more directly related to teaching and learning, this classroom genre involves more emphasis on multiple and varied opportunities for students to express and further develop understandings as opposed to a more teacher-controlled delivery of subject matter with students copying down notes the teacher writes on the board, and traditional tests; more emphasis on students’ active participation in constructing ideas as opposed to students receiving the teacher’s knowledge or the textbook’s authoritative facts; more emphasis on linking classroom content with students’ personal experiences as opposed to treating subject matter by itself; and more emphasis on challenging students’ ideas and probing their understanding, as opposed to simply accepting or rejecting their ideas. Yet, in keeping with the sociocultural perspective, it is a classroom genre in which teachers bring to students their knowledge and understandings of cultural achievements that comprise scientific activity. Furthermore, in this genre students have specific responsibilities that facilitate their learning—they need to stay focused, pay attention to each other and the teacher, study, and keep up with the lessons. However, students’ experiences may lead them to construct a classroom genre different from the one their teacher favors.

Science Genre Science is primarily concerned with inquiry—considering and posing questions, formulating hypotheses, gathering data (observing, measuring), drawing conclusions, and developing explanations. It is a dynamic activity with many facets. The science genre we espouse highlights in this inquiry the interplay between theoretical understandings and empirical data, which we call the ‘‘theory–data dance’’ (Varelas, 1996; Varelas & Becker, 1997; Varelas, Luster, & Wenzel, 1999). In this science genre, the emphasis is on the dialectic relationship between developing theories (scientific explanations about phenomena), and collecting and analyzing data (evidence) in the natural world. Furthermore, we see science as involving a negotiation of ideas among practitioners who constantly examine the fit between theory and data. Science is a genre of ‘‘cognitive achievement as it is enmeshed in the social matrix’’ (Storer, 1973, p. 281), that is ‘‘an affectively toned complex of values and norms which is held to be binding’’ on the scientist (Merton, 1973, p. 269). In this science genre, participants continually probe each other’s ideas and push one another to develop their ideas more rigorously. There is a continuous sense of engagement, intensity, commitment, dedication, disappointment, and satisfaction as scientists pursue their practice.

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For science education, adopting this science genre implies working toward an integration of (a) hands-on experiences in which students acquire more empirical knowledge with (b) discussions in which the teacher contributes relevant theoretical understandings that have currency in the scientific community. This brings a fit between the classroom and science genres that we favor, both reflecting the overall sociocultural perspective that we noted earlier.

The Meeting of Genres As teacher-researcher Karen Gallas (1994) wrote: Teaching is not just about the microcosm of the classroom and discrete subjects in the curriculum, although discussions about classrooms often imply that that is the case. Teaching and learning are embedded in the world outside the school, and the children bring different parts of that world with them, as do I. In the classroom, all of our worlds are joined; new discourses are created and different ways of knowing the world are spawned for each of us. (p. 158)

In the same spirit, we believe that a major task of science teachers today is to develop spaces where students’ propensity for social interactions and affective reactions are brought into play to foster their engagement with science and their construction of scientific understandings. We conceive of this partly in terms of opening the science classroom to the students’ youth genres, and genuinely welcoming these genres for the sociality and affect that they allow the students to bring to their encounter with science. In addition, this is promoted by the kind of classroom genre that we favor (as described above) with its emphasis on a community of learners (Varelas, Luster, & Wenzel, 1999). Thus, we see the reform in science education (with its focus on childcentered, inquiry-oriented classrooms and self-motivation) largely in terms of facilitating the meeting of the three genres presented above. In her science class, Barbara pursued this approach partly by encouraging her students to express and work out their scientific understandings in forms that are nontraditional in the science classroom, such as rap songs and plays. In this way, she both offered opportunity for students’ youth genres to enter the science classroom, and disrupted the hegemonic practice of the students’ prior classroom and science genres (Hildebrand, 1998). This might also allow those African-American students who do not want to ‘‘act white’’ (Fordham, 1996) to construct effective science genres. In this article, we use oral and written work from students in Barbara’s sixth-grade, all– African-American urban science class to explore the way affective and social aspects are intertwined with students’ cognitions, and we interpret this in terms of the meeting of genres. If genres, as assimilatory frameworks, play a key role in teaching and learning in science classrooms, analyzing classroom experiences in terms of genres may shed light on the fullness, complexity, and richness of learning science in urban classrooms. Furthermore, such analysis may highlight and thus help us appreciate the interplay of cognitive, affective, and social dimensions of human experience that unfolds in classroom settings. To explore the meeting of the genres, we do not need a static definition of each genre in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Rather, we need to be able to recognize as distinct from one another the genres we use at any particular point. Table 1 summarizes the tenor of the distinctions we make presenting main elements of each genre as they are used in the analyses that follow.

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Table 1 The three genres Youth Genre

Our Favored Classroom Genre

 Sense-making through experimenting

 Making meaning through sharing ideas and discussing

 Reciprocity

 Developing and discussing multiple and varied understandings

 Sense of community identity  Argumentative stance  Banter  Exaggerating

 Interplay between teacher’s and students’ roles

 Playfulness

 Collaboratively setting classroom norms

 Teasing

 A community of learners

 Intensity

 Feelings of interest, caring, excitement, and pride of accomplishments

Our Favored Science Genre  Creating knowledge through posing questions, making predictions, collecting data, drawing conclusions and developing explanations (theory–data dance)  Negotiation of ideas  Probing each other’s ideas  Sense of engagement, intensity, commitment, disappointment, and satisfaction

Method Research Context This article is based on a collaborative teacher action research project based on a school– university partnership that we have been building for several years. This project focuses on studying teacher change ‘‘not mandated by others but undertaken voluntarily’’ (Richardson, 1994, p. 6) as teachers engage in systematic inquiry on issues that they consider critical to their role as teachers of science. Part of this collaboration was a professional development project called Inducting Students Into Science (ISIS). The participants were teachers from a large urban public school system—Barbara Luster being one of them—and university faculty members, Maria Varelas and Joe Becker. We met regularly in 2- to 3-hour sessions every other week, and in a 2-week summer session. Together we revisited content knowledge, developed curriculum units on particular science topics, analyzed videotapes of the teachers’ classroom teaching of the units, explored the students’ ideas and questions as these units were used in the classroom, and, in the light of all these experiences, rethought teaching practices and modified the units leading to a new cycle. Barbara took a step further, pursuing more systematic analysis of her teaching and her students’ learning, thus conducting teacher research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993) in collaboration with the rest of us, university-based researchers. She became particularly interested in studying what she does as a teacher and what impact it has on her students and herself. She sought insights that would help her understand and improve her practice, understand her classroom, her students, and herself. As part of this experience Barbara introduced several innovations in her science classes, and these provided special opportunities to observe and examine the interplay of genres as students experienced the science class. Participants and Setting The data reported and discussed here are taken from science lessons Barbara taught at an inner-city public school. The school for preschool through eighth grade is located in a predom-

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inantly African-American neighborhood. Most students come from low- and middle-income homes. In this school, pride was taken in the African-American culture and at being black; administrators and teachers tried to create an ethos that promoted strong links between learning and the students’ cultural identity. The site for this investigation was Barbara’s sixth-grade, selfcontained classroom with 25 African-American students (11 boys and 14 girls). Science was usually taught 2–3 days per week for a period that could range from 40 minutes to 1 hour. The data come from two science units that Barbara taught. These units had been developed in the ISIS project. At that time Barbara had 1 year of full-time teaching experience at the elementary level. She had been a part of the design team of both units. The first unit explored the phenomenon of evaporation and the second the phenomenon of sinking and floating. The Evaporation unit took five lessons, some of which lasted longer than an hour, and the Sinking and Floating unit took eight lessons, some of which again lasted longer than an hour. Data Sources and Analysis To explore the meeting of the genres, we used written and oral work of students in Barbara’s science class. First, Barbara invited her students to submit written work in the form of plays or rap songs. At the end of the unit on sinking and floating, Barbara wanted to give her students an opportunity to collect their thoughts, reflect on their learning, and share it with her. One of the features of that sixth-grade class on which Barbara was working was the diversity of modes of expression of ideas that she allowed and encouraged her students to use in all subject-matter areas. In that spirit, she did not want to restrict her students to expressing their science learning through an essay format, so she told them that they could chose any form they wanted, including writing plays or rap songs. As the students chose for themselves the genre of their written artifact, most of them chose one of these nontraditional ways. Fourteen students turned in their work: 11 girls and 3 boys. A total of 6 girls and 2 boys chose to write plays, 3 girls and 1 boy chose to write rap songs, and 2 girls chose to write essays. Students worked on these written artifacts individually as homework. Second, Barbara asked her students directly to consider their relation to scientists. At the beginning of the school year (first occasion), Barbara asked the students to think about the following question and share their responses orally in class: ‘‘When you do science in school, are you like a scientist and why or why not?’’ Nine students, 5 girls and 4 boys, responded. About a month later, at the end of the unit on evaporation (second occasion), Barbara asked the students to think about and again share orally in class ‘‘whether or not they felt like scientists as they were exploring evaporation and in what ways.’’ Twelve girls and 5 boys responded. Barbara did not have explicit conversations with her students about the nature of science and scientists’ work. Data reported and analyzed in this report consist of transcripts of videotaped lessons, students’ written work, and Barbara’s reflections. All students’ names used are pseudonyms that indicate their gender. These data were analyzed using a qualitative, interpretive design (Geertz, 1973; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) seeking new ways to apprehend and appreciate the interplay of the three genres in the students’ construction of scientific knowledge. The transcripts and the students’ written work were studied and annotated. This was an intensely collaborative process among the authors of this report. Our interpretations of these data were shared in regular meetings where tentative assertions were generated and discussed. These assertions were further revised and modified as each of us presented her or his way of understanding specific students’ contributions. The themes and patterns that emerged are seen not as generating a knowledge of pure facts and truths, but as a coordination of data and interpretation that may serve communities of science educators concerned with these issues.

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The interests of each of the authors played crucial roles. We made particular use of Barbara Luster’s own insights regarding her students and their youth genre as members of the AfricanAmerican culture that she shared with them. This was especially important in our collaborative analysis of the students’ plays and raps songs. Barbara’s reflective engagement with her own developing classroom genre, and the engagement of the other authors in developing similar classroom genres, underlay our search for similarities and differences between the teacher’s and her students’ classroom genres.

Interpretive Analysis and Findings Our analysis explores the meeting of genres in Barbara’s class. Below, we present in succession findings concerning ways affect and cognition come together to shape scientific knowledge, the social process of knowledge building, and ways that students’ prior and current classroom experiences are interwoven in this process. In each section, we interpret the findings in terms of the meeting of youth, classroom, and science genres that was played out in Barbara’s class.

Meeting of Youth and Science Genres: Strengthening the Link Between Affect and Cognition In students’ rap songs and plays, we repeatedly found that affect was intertwined with students’ expression of their conceptual thinking about the science content. Students expressed joy, conflict, surprise, pride, anxiety, and other emotions connected with doing and thinking science. Some expressed a playful orientation to the tasks. Their affective reactions were an integral part of their engagement in cognitive work. We see the high level of affect in students’ rap songs and plays as emerging from the relations the students made between their youth genres and the science genres that they were constructing. The rap songs some students composed reveal ways that the students connected with the subject matter. The balance between the forces of buoyancy and gravity was a major conceptual component of the unit of sinking and floating, being central to the theory level that Barbara introduced to the class. To connect this theoretical aspect with her students’ experiential knowl-edge, Barbara spoke of it in terms of a tug-of-war. The contrast between gravity and buoyancy comes through strongly in students’ rap songs. Students exhibited a range of ways of appropriating Barbara’s emphasis on the balance between the two forces, all with marked affect. Considering the balance between these two forces as a theoretical concept, it appears that this infusion of affect allowed students to emphasize in their rap songs the theoretical aspect of the science genre. Brandy’s rap song exhibits that she has taken up this metaphor with some understanding. This understanding itself is not much elaborated; however, we see the considerable affect associated with it. Brandy’s rap song1 was as follows: I’m a take up space Gravity don’t know me Putting forces in a tug-of-war Buoyancy won that war

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Cause Waterforce like magic What Gravity don’t like it Not even one bit Gravity wanna box Eitty, bitty, bitty, bang, bang Waterforce won Waterforce won Waterforce won.

In contrast, Sylvester’s rap song shows more fully how this form allowed a student to exhibit a good understanding of the scientific principles of sinking and floating with expression of associated emotions. Sylvester’s rap song starts with: My name is Sylvester cool as can be and I going to show you about sinking and floating.

As Sylvester continues, he brings out the ‘‘fight’’ between gravity and buoyancy in the model for sinking and floating, his appropriation of the metaphor Barbara had introduced to the class. It a fight gravity and buoyancy as cool as I can be it depend on weight for gravity.

Then, Sylvester explicitly relates the balance between the two forces to the outcome, to whether the object sinks or floats. In doing so, he refers to the boat that the children constructed in class, and the empirical data they collected. If a mass is very full inside a boat it mostly likely to sink and not float

Later on in his rap song, referring again to the boat the students made in class, Sylvester writes: If take some clay and make it out a boat put into a container it not a joke the clay boat will certainly float. Buoyancy beat gravity and it was kind of cool gee the match between them gee.

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Ownership and pride come out right from the beginning of Sylvester’s rap song. He immediately takes on the central role of teacher, which is echoed later in his song. The pride and confidence Sylvester exudes here are linked directly to his science content knowledge and understanding. In his rap song, Sylvester shows at the beginning that he links gravity with weight, and later on that he knows that buoyancy depends on volume. He appears to link the volume of the objects with the amount of water displaced. Furthermore, he shows his knowledge that whether an object sinks or floats depends on which force is stronger than the other. We suggest that the rap song form invites Sylvester to display his confidence in association with his knowledge. Sylvester had a quiet personality in class that hid his sense of confidence and pride in himself; we might not have seen this side of him had he not been invited to show his knowledge using this mode of expression, a part of his youth genre that especially invites the expression of affect. Playfulness, affect, intensity, and banter come through as the youth genre unfolds in students’ songs. Playfulness is also revealed in plays students composed. Liza’s play is an example of such a playful way to share interpretations and understandings. Liza’s play has five characters: Float, Sink, Grave, Bo-yancy, and a narrator. There was no teacher or student in Liza’s play. The four named characters argue who is ‘‘going to win the race.’’ When Sink and Grave win, Float says: ‘‘You only won because Bo-yancy kept falling.’’ As Sink and Grave leave to ‘‘go get some pizza and celebrate,’’ the narrator announces, ‘‘Bo-yancy and Float were still arguing.’’ Liza’s personalized way of talking about forces is influenced by the ways people react to wins and losses. In Liza’s play, the scientific understandings communicated are limited to the race between gravity and buoyancy and how when one overpowers the other, either sinking or floating results. As noted above, most of the students’ plays and rap songs refer to the tug-of-war between gravity and buoyancy—a theoretical element, an important part of the explanatory framework that Barbara and the students were developing in the Sinking and Floating unit. The prominence of the tug-of-war in the plays and rap songs may be due to its drama. It involves a level of intensity that captured the students’ minds, and which they infused with affect. Anthropomorphizing the forces in the form of a tug-of-war associates affect, and social understanding, with the theoretical construct of forces, and allows students readily to adopt the central theoretical element of a balance between two forces. The power of this metaphor arises from the way it brings into play students’ affect in connection with a form of struggle to which they relate. Within the scope of this article, we consider this knowledge to be most strongly associated with the students’ youth genres. Thus, we suggest that in bringing this metaphor to the class, Barbara enlisted the students’ constructive use of their youth genre in building their science genre. This enlistment brought with it affective elements that encouraged students’ engagement with science. The youth genre served as a bridge that let the students connect their own experiences with understandings they were constructing. In contrast to the plays and rap songs, when Barbara asked her students (in the second occasion) whether they felt like scientists, those who stated they did gave reasons that were mostly associated with empirical elements of doing science: data collection and recording dominated over aspects of theory building. For example, they cited that they were checking how much water evaporated, that they were looking for results, that they were checking the readings in the graduated cylinders, and that they were charting results. Only two students, both girls, brought up elements that could possibly be linked to the work of constructing theory, to understanding an explanation, although they were ambiguous in this respect. These students said that they felt like scientists because they were ‘‘thinking’’ and ‘‘using my imagination.’’ There was no explicit invitation in this question for the students’ youth genre.

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Meeting of Youth, Classroom, and Science Genres: Strengthening Social Interaction in Learning Students’ rap songs and plays depicted how members of the class interacted with each other as they constructed scientific understandings related to the phenomena and ideas they were exploring. Students’ knowledge building comes through from these works as a social process involving a range of transactions among the students and between the students and the teacher. Some of these transactions were relatively smooth and others had more friction. The students’ works embody the social principle of language as Bakhtin (1981) characterized it: ‘‘the socially charged life of the word.’’ Students’ engagement in science could not be divorced from who they were as young black students in Barbara’s class, which is indeed part of a larger context of schooling. This shows how students’ youth and classrooms genres come into play as students construct their science genres. Starting with rap songs, Sylvester’s song, presented earlier, highlights how the students celebrate and emphasize the ways that they are connected to each other—a strong element foregrounded in their particular culture—demonstrating the interaction between the students’ youth genre and their developing science genre. A similar interaction is seen in Julie’s rap song. Julie’s rap song has the flavor of a chant in a community of people who celebrate together what they know. In contrast to Brady’s and Sylvester’s songs, here the balance between buoyancy and gravity is not portrayed in terms of a fight with a cheer for the winner. Instead, although they are contrasted, each is celebrated. The social aspect of knowledge construction comes through, with the affect, in the communal-singing flavor of her rap song. Julie starts her rap song as follows: Help me please, I need a note on how things sink and float. If you wanna know, I’ll tell you right, some things are heavy, and some are light.

Julie continues her song, mentioning the two forces that act on an object submerged in water: The force that pulls down is gravity, it was put there for you and me. Gravity! Buoyancy! Gravity! Buoyancy! The force that pulls up is buoyancy, it was put there for you and me.

Furthermore, in plays students composed, their self-identity is projected in relation to the other members of the class community. Strong students such as Anatosha and Sylvia give themselves and other strong students central roles in their plays. Erika, a weaker student, portrays

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in her play a boy asking for help from another boy, possibly reflecting her own confusion. Erica’s play is a dialogue between two boys with fictitious names, Joe and Mike. Joe does not know anything and Mike teaches him. Her play starts off with Joe asking Mike, ‘‘Why do things sink and float?’’ to which Mike replies, ‘‘Why because of the buoyancy, and things sink and float because of the volume and buoyancy.’’ Joe: I will have to work on sinking and floating becaus I don’t know nothing about it. Mike: I will teach you everyday after school everything you need to know. Joe: Thanx. Thanx you’re the best friend anybody could have. Joe: Can you teach me about clay boats and clay balls. Mike: I sure will. Joe: and can you teach me about space and weight.

After the Narrator summarizes, ‘‘Joe wants Mike to help him with space volume buoyancy and weight, so Mike sayed he will,’’ Mike continues, ‘‘I know everything about float and sinking,’’ and Joe responds by saying, ‘‘I want to know everything about sinking and floating just like you Mike.’’ The play ends as follows: Mike: This is how things sink and float. Joe: ok. how. Mike: because when you make a clay boat it depends on how open it is and how closed it is. Joe: thanx. Mike: is that all you wanted to know. Joe: yes I believe so. Mike: ok. Joe: thanx for all you did for me.

Interestingly, Erica’s play involves only two boys and no teacher. Erica portrays the warm relationship between the two boys. Joe sees Mike as his model, his best friend, and a helping hand, and Mike is confident of his knowledge and offers his help to Joe. Erica portrays Joe as bringing up important experiences and ideas from the class (i.e., the experience the students had with a piece of clay shaped in a ball and then as a boat, and the ideas of space and weight that, of course, relate to buoyancy and gravity), but being confused and asking Mike for clarification. Joe seems to receive Mike’s help passively and accept his thinking. Erica portrays students working on school science, possibly outside the regular class time. There is an emphasis on how or why things sink and float. However, the boys’ conversation is limited, so we get only a glimpse of Mike’s understanding: how open or closed a boat is relates to whether it sinks or floats. In fact, Mike is surprised that Joe wanted to know only that, but as Joe reassures him that this is the case, the conversation ends. Erica was a struggling student in the actual class. One way to interpret her

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play is as a disguised or symbolic portrait of her struggles. The lack of a teacher’s presence in her play may indicate her sense of being lost in Barbara’s actual class, and her need to seek help from her peers. Willie, like Erica, was struggling academically in Barbara’s actual class. In Willie’s play, as in Erica’s, there is no teacher, only student–student interactions. Willie’s play is also a dialogue between two boys with the fictitious names of John and Mike, both of whom contribute science ideas. John first asks the question, ‘‘How do things sink or float,’’ to which Mike responds ‘‘No daaaa because of gravity and buoyancy.’’ The play continues: John (excited): For real, I didn’t know that. Mike: Well it’s a lot of things you don’t know.

Then, the roles reverse. John invites Mike to ‘‘do an exciting experiment’’ with him. John gives directives to Mike, such as ‘‘go get a bucket’’ and ‘‘put the clay boat in the water.’’ John also asks Mike questions, such as ‘‘do you know why it sunk.’’ The following conversation takes place. Mike: no John: because of gravity Mike: what is gravity? John: gravity holds things down Mike: So buoyancy holds things up right John: Yea good guess

Willie’s play brings out some reciprocity in the children’s involvement in developing meaning. Like Erica’s play, Willie’s play involves only two boys and no teacher. We do not know whether these two boys are in class or somewhere else. As the boys explore sinking and floating, they demonstrate that they know that it involves two forces, gravity and buoyancy, that have specific directions. However, we also get the sense that sinking is primarily linked with gravity only. Furthermore, in Willie’s play we get a feeling for the intensity of interactions between children—they are ‘on each other’s case’ (‘‘well it’s a lot of things you don’t know,’’ and ‘‘yea good guess’’). It is also worth noting that affect is linked with social and cognitive aspects. Doing an ‘‘exciting experiment,’’ as John calls it, is what science means to them. The affective reaction to experiments may be seen as a catalyst to the cognitive work. The social relations portrayed are linked to the students’ youth and classroom genres. The following two points are intertwined in students’ plays. First, in their plays, girls portrayed girls as relatively more attentive and contributing than boys, and portrayed boys as relatively inattentive and not understanding the lessons. Second, in several of the plays, the teacher, Barbara, is portrayed as a firm and caring orchestrator of her class. In the students’ eyes, she had the role of moving things along and making sure that everyone was on board. We see how students registered her warmth in interactions with them and her acceptance of their ideas. The students portrayed this as integrated with firm control and high expectations for students’ involvement, effort, and achievement—attributes noted in the literature in regard to effective African-American teachers of African-American students (Foster, 1997).

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Anatosha’s play is an example. In her play, Anatosha uses real names of students, which we have replaced by the pseudonyms we have chosen for this paper. At the beginning of the play, the teacher announces that the students will be videotaped and the students greet the research assistant who comes in to tape the class. The class calls the teacher Sister Luster. Then, after the teacher announces that they will be talking about sinking and floating, the class replies, ‘‘Oh man, do we have to?’’ to which the teacher responds with a firm ‘‘Yes.’’ Then, when Bobby asks, ‘‘What’s the purpose?’’ the teacher bluntly responds, ‘‘Don’t have time for it.’’ Anatosha continues, ‘‘It’s going to be fun. Let’s get the show on the road.’’ After that Anatosha and Tommy become involved in the following exchange: Anatosha: It’s going to be fun. Let’s get the show on the road. Tommy: Anatosha, I hate you. I don’t want to learn anything. Anatosha: Well, you should. (Whispers: Boger Nose Butt.)

The teacher then asks, ‘‘does any one want to predict what were going to do?’’ She gets answers from Latoya (‘‘We will learn about why things sink and why things float’’), to which she responds, ‘‘Right, Good Latoya,’’ and Anatosha (‘‘How objects stay on top of water. Why they go to the bottom’’), to which she responds ‘‘O.K.’’ The teacher then asks what they have learned, and three girls respond. Anatosha says, ‘‘How gravity pulls down. Water force pushes up.’’ Brandy says, ‘‘Why things sink why things float.’’ Brook responds, ‘‘How they fight each other to win. The game of Push-of-War.’’ The play continues: Luster: Tommy what did you learn. Tommy: How water float. Nina: Wasn’t even paying attention ugly butt. Liza: I really don’t know. Martin: I was talking to Liza. Luster: Thank you, the people who paid attention. Class: Your welcome. Luster: Not all of you

Then the students interact with the research assistant, who is leaving for that day, and the tension between Anatosha and Tommy continues: Anatosha: That was fun. I can’t wait until Monday. Tommy: Quit lying.

Finally, the teacher thanks five girls by name (four who in the play had contributed ideas, and Nina who, in the play, only commented on Tommy’s behavior): ‘‘you guys did a great job paying attention.’’ The girls respond, ‘‘Your welcome Sister Luster.’’ In Anatosha’s play, affect and social relations are intertwined with thinking. We see Anatosha’s rough exchange with Tommy, and also Anatosha’s commitment to learning as

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opposed to Tommy’s lack of interest in learning. In her firm stance against Tommy’s lack of interest in learning, Anatosha is joined by Nina. Martin, another boy, also acknowledges that he has not been paying attention. Thus, neither of the boys who appear in Anatosha’s play contributes to the collective thinking. The four girls who contribute in the play, including Anatosha herself, were all strong A students in Barbara’s class. Tommy and Martin were struggling academically. Thus, Anatosha’s play gives us a glimpse of the tension between high-achieving and underachieving black students, exposing underachievers’ refusal to learn as opposed to their inability to learn (Fordham, 1996). Anatosha’s play also reveals a range of students’ affective reactions to the topic explored and the work associated with it. They range from complaining to having fun. In addition, there is variation in how the teacher is depicted interacting with the students. The teacher validates Latoya’s contribution, but gives a neutral ‘‘O.K.’’ to Anatosha. The teacher is not content with just the three girls volunteering their understandings, and she asks Tommy to share what he learned. In Anatosha’s eyes, the teacher pursues engaging Tommy in the learning process. The teacher is also appreciative of the girls’ class participation. Despite the range of interactions between teacher and students, Anatosha portrays in her play a powerful relationship between her (and some other girls) and the teacher. The girls call the teacher Sister Luster, a phrase common in the African-American culture indicating respect, a sense of community, comradeship, spiritual bonding, and a mentor–mentee relationship. It is also a phrase that indicates Anatosha’s and the other girls’ pride in their heritage, who they are as African-American girls. This phrase was common in Barbara’s actual class, probably reflecting the school’s special effort to emphasize and cultivate nurturing aspects of the African-American community. In their plays, students also revealed tensions among peers that highlight gender-related issues. In this way, they offered us a glimpse of their interpretations of gender dynamics in their classroom. Students argued with each other. Their arguments were not about the scientific ideas they were discussing. They were about who they were as African-American boys and girls in Barbara’s class. They were about issues of social power and control within their peer group, and they had a strong affective component. Anatosha’s rough exchange with Tommy is one example. Nina’s play also offers us two instances of boys bullying girls. In the first, Nina (who uses real names of students in her play; here we have chosen pseudonyms) portrays Kenny threatening Anatosha. The teacher interjects—she protects her students by forestalling other students’ disrespectful behavior. Kenny: Anatosha, you better get out my face before I hurt you. Mrs. Luster: Boy! Come here. Stop threatening girls.

Then students stage a tug-of-war given Nina’s suggestion: ‘‘I think we should choose 8 people to show what the gravity and buoyancy does.’’ After acting it out, the following exchange takes place in Nina’s play: Mrs. Luster: Now, write what you felt. Nina: I felt strong. Martin: You know you are weak. Class: Laughs (ha, ha, ha)

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In the second case, the class laughs as Martin ridicules Nina’s comment. As Nina talks about how she felt pretending to be a force (gravity or buoyancy), Martin responds to her with a sexist remark. Nina portrays a contrast in her play. On the one hand, Kenny insults Anatosha and the teacher stops it immediately. On the other hand, Martin ridicules Nina and this prompts laughter from the class. In this way, Nina may indicate her pain relative to experiences she had in the actual class where she was not popular. She seemed insecure and needy both intellectually and socially. This also fits with her request in her play for teacher affirmation of her understandings despite her solid knowledge. Guzzetti and Williams (1996) pointed out that gender research has been mostly conducted from researchers’ observations and has neglected to study the students’ own interpretations. The present research supports Guzzetti and Williams’ finding of girls being much more aware of gender dynamics than boys. It also supports findings of past research about boys’ intimidating behavior in kindergarten through Grade 12 classrooms (Harris & Associates, 1993; Sadker & Sadker, 1994; Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, 1992). Furthermore, these data show us glimpses in Barbara’s class of what Gallas (1994) called ‘‘bad boys,’’ and expose ways that others—especially girls—in that class interpret and make sense of their behaviors.

Meeting of Classroom and Science Genres: Challenges and Successes In their plays and rap songs, students exposed both challenges and successes in establishing aspects of the science and classroom genres that we favor and Barbara was attempting to bring to her class. Starting with challenges, despite Barbara’s intention to construct science and classroom genres that include members of the community challenging each other’s ideas and explanations, we do not see much of this in the students’ plays. In the plays, students mostly added to each other’s ideas and interpretations, and the teacher either validated students’ contributions, posed general questions, offered instructions, or reminded them of ideas. Barbara confirms that challenging ideas was not happening in a strong way in her actual class. Barbara found it difficult at that time to balance moving the lessons forward on the one hand, and on the other hand, probing children’s ideas and pushing them to consider similarities and differences. The students’ plays are consistent with the scarcity of this element in the actual classroom. Sylvia’s play is the only one in which a little probing and building on each other’s ideas are portrayed. In Sylvia’s play, as the class gets under way, students build on each other’s ideas and extend them further as a result of probing and questioning by both teacher and students, as portrayed in the following sequence with Anatosha, Brooke, and Brandy. Sylvia’s play (in which real names of students were used, which we have replaced by pseudonyms) starts with the teacher saying: ‘‘today we will be learning about sinking and floating. Who knows why objects sink and float?’’ First ‘‘everyone groans.’’ Then Sylvia answers the question (‘‘objects sink and float because of gravity and buoyancy’’). The teacher further probes Sylvia’s answer: ‘‘what does gravity and buoyancy has to do with it?’’ Three girls give their answers, building on each other. Anatosha: Gravity and buoyancy is part of sinking and floating because when an object sinks, gravity wins. When an object floats buoyancy (water force) wins. Brooke: Also because gravity and buoyancy are constantly having a tug-of war or having a battle.

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Brandy: When an object just stops, and doesn’t float or sink it’s at the ideal level. That’s when neither gravity or buoyancy is stronger than another. It’s when they’re both equal to each other.

Later in Sylvia’s play, Latoya probes the class further, asking, ‘‘does gravity and buoyancy depend on anything?’’ Darlene answers her question: ‘‘gravity depends on the weight (mass) of an object. Buoyancy on the volume (amount of space an object occupies). It also depends on the amount of displacement.’’ The teacher thanks Darlene for ‘‘clearing that up,’’ and proceeds to check with Latoya: ‘‘Latoya now do you know what they depend on?’’ Latoya answers ‘‘Yes, I think I do.’’ Furthermore, some students included in their plays elements usually found in science classes but which were not present in Barbara’s class and do not fit with the science genre she wanted her students to develop. These elements included sending a student to the hallway for being inattentive, getting ready for a test, reading a science book, and copying notes the teacher writes on the board. We illustrate these below. In Nina’s play Tommy is ‘‘goofing off’’ and he is disciplined by being sent to the hallway, something that Barbara has never done with this group of students. Although there was no test in the actual class, Nina’s play also refers to a test for which the students need to get ready. In Darlene’s play, students who contribute to the class discourse mostly read from the textbook, although in reality the actual class did not use a textbook during their explorations. When the students respond to the teacher’s question about why things sink or float at the beginning of the play, they take into account only one factor, the weight. It is only through the ‘‘science book’’ that Darlene brings to her play the crucial scientific idea of the coordination between gravity and buoyancy. Darlene uses fictitious names in her play that extends over 2 days. The students who appear are 6 girls and 1 boy. The first day opens with the teacher saying: ‘‘Today’s lesson is about sinking and floating. My question is why do things sink or float I will like some prediction.’’ After a girl’s response (‘‘Thing sink because of its heavy weight. Thing float because of its light weight’’) and a boy’s response (‘‘I think things sink and float because of its lightness and heavyness’’), the teacher tells them to ‘‘turn to page 52 in your science book. Who will like to read.’’ Students take turns reading. Kim: Things sink in float because of gravity in buoyancy. Buoyancy is the push the object up. Bess: Gravity pull the object down. As water force pushes up gravity is pulling down. The to are always in a tug of war on the object. Sarah: One of the two alwas win between buoyancy and gravity. Teacher: Beth read.

In his play, Bobby portrays students copying in their journals notes written by the teacher— probably his idea of what schoolwork is about. (The teacher then says, ‘‘Now class, we will just take notes down, so as I write on the board, you write on your paper, so take out your science journals and copy this down,’’ to which ‘‘everybody [says] OK.’’) Interestingly, although in the actual class students took notes during the discussions, the teacher did not ask them to copy

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down notes she would take on the board. It may not be coincidental that Bobby does not put forth in his play any deep understandings as he portrays a class that copies down notes the teacher has written. All these elements from genres different from the classroom genre Barbara was attempting to bring to her class interfere in her success in bringing to life her favored classroom and science genres. However, such elements represent students’ attempts to use their existing classroom genres to make sense of their current science class. These elements were a part of the classroom genres the students had built through their previous experiences and provided resistance to the students’ construction of the classroom genre that Barbara was trying to institute. Recognizing differences between classroom genres may take time, and might be facilitated if students are led to discuss and explore such differences. However, despite lack of argumentation and differences between the classroom genre that Barbara was trying to establish and classroom genres students had experienced in other classroom settings, students’ plays reveal ways that students were developing multiple understandings in Barbara’s class. These understandings come about as the classroom and science genres meet. We saw one example in Sylvia’s play. Nina’s play also demonstrates this meeting. In Nina’s play, the students engage in hands-on experiences (which Nina likes) making boats and testing out whether they float. They also talk with each other and the teacher about the ideas involved in this unit. As they try to make sense, they try to put together notions of gravity, buoyancy, weight, mass, volume, and space, and how they are related to sinking and floating. The tug-of-war ‘sticks’ in students’ minds, as they experience how gravity and buoyancy oppose each other. Although Nina presents the more scientifically accepted ideas, including the coordination between buoyancy and gravity, she also exposes some students’ confusions, such as their notion that only weight determines whether things sink or float. Nina’s play is the longest of all and has two parts. In the first part, Martin asks whether they are ‘‘going to do sinking and floating today,’’ to which the teacher responds, ‘‘yes, we are!’’ Then Brooke asks whether she can ‘‘pass out the clay,’’ and the teacher answers yes and continues, ‘‘can anybody tell me what is the amount of space the object occupies on?’’ Martin answers, ‘‘buoyancy depends on volume.’’ Then, the teacher asks the class to ‘‘make clay boats,’’ and Nina reacts, ‘‘yes! We get to do something in clay.’’ The teacher continues, ‘‘now make your predictions before putting them in the water.’’ The teacher reminds the students of ‘‘the story,’’ a term Barbara frequently used for the theoretical element of a science unit. The teacher continues: ‘‘as the water force pushes up gravity which pulls down the 2 are always in a tug-of-war.’’ Four girls and a boy contribute to the discourse. Nina: Now, if the buoyancy wins isn’t that when the object will float. Martin: I though it will float because of the mass. Brandy: Martin you is correct Brooke: Isn’t the thing called when the gravity equal to water force, ain’t this called an ideal level. Anatosha: Yes it is. Brooke: If the object sink the gravity is pulling it down? Right? Brandy: To your question you is correct.

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Nina: I thought that the object will float because it does not have as much weight.

Furthermore, Sylvester’s rap song highlights the encouragement that students were offered in the actual class to make things meaningful to themselves using different tools, one of which is to think of examples—an important tool in the science genre that the class was also constructing. In his rap song, Sylvester offers an example of how buoyancy depends on the volume of the submerged object. And going to show a example, but not necessarily three. For instance if a took a round clay ball gee deap into a container full of water and not tea. It will sink and not float gee. It don’t have any space gee and it need buoyancy to float gee. Buoyancy is important gee that why you learn this step from me. Buoyancy depend on volume gee. The more displacement is kind of cool because help the buoyancy pull.

Up to this point we have discussed the interplay of science and classroom genres on the basis of evidence from the students’ rap songs and plays. We find additional evidence of the successes and challenges of this interplay in students’ discussions as to whether they felt like scientists. On the first occasion when students shared whether they felt like scientists, 3 girls and 1 boy responded that in school they felt like scientists because they experiment, do research to find out answers, and tell people how something happens. Two girls and 3 boys did not think they were like scientists in school because they were not paying attention, did not know what to do, did not have to do experiments at home, were given answers in books, and got grades in schools (more on this later). On the second occasion, students’ responses differed. Eight girls and 3 boys felt like scientists when they worked on the evaporation unit, 1 girl and 1 boy did not feel like scientists, and 3 girls and 1 boy felt like scientists in certain ways but did not feel like scientists in others. The reasons that students offered for feeling like scientists were: measuring, recording, charting, looking for results, using imagination, thinking, learning new things, knowing what to do, studying, listening, doing what they were supposed to, and agreeing with each other. The reasons that students offered for not feeling like scientists were: disagreement among themselves, not having materials that scientists have, not measuring, and getting off the subject. On each of the two occasions, the students’ responses reflect elements of their classroom genres. Students’ responses in the first occasion (such as not paying attention, being confused, finding answers in books, and not doing experiments at home) reflect elements of the different

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classroom genres they had experienced before coming to Barbara’s class. Students’ responses in the second occasion reflect Barbara’s attempts to establish specific responsibilities in her classroom (such as knowing what to do, studying, listening, and doing what they were supposed to, which we take to mean staying on task). They also reflect Barbara’s favored science genre that includes both empirical and theoretical elements. The issue of grades further exemplifies the meeting of classroom and science genres. At the beginning of the year, one of the boys, Andersen, argued that he was not like a scientist when he did science at school because ‘‘in school you get a grade for it, but when you’re doing it by yourself, you don’t.’’ The discussion continued: Tchr: When you get a grade for it, so you don’t think scientists get a grade for their work? Andersen: Nope. Boy: Yes, they do. Tchr: If you think they do, raise your hand and explain why do you think they do. Let’s respond to Andersen, you all have a response? Boy: I think scientists get a grade, because if they don’t get grades, why would they get paid? Kenny: I think they do get grades, because if they mess up, they’re going to get fired. Girl: I think they do get a grade if they get a lot of research. Tchr: They get a lot of research? Girl: They get in a lot of research. Tchr: Okay, but how are they getting the grade? I don’t understand. Girl: Because all that research is very important and it teaches us the details about what’s going on. Tchr: Somebody else has a response? Alvin? Alvin: I would say no. Tchr: Why is it that you don’t think they do? Alvin: I think they’ve done their thing in school. Tchr: Nina? Nina: I say yes because when Tchr: Excuse me, Nina. Someone over here is being disrespectful. I think they’re ready for you now. Nina: Yeah, because when they take a test it’s going to show if they studied or they didn’t know a lot about that (. . .)2 Tchr: Let’s hear from Latoya.

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Latoya: I think they do get paid. Class: Grades! Latoya: I mean, I think they do get grades because they’re still teaching stuff and they’re still learning stuff at the same time.

The above excerpt of classroom discourse gives us a taste of how students differ in how they conceptualize the existence and role of grades in the science genre relative to the classroom genre. In the excerpt we notice two prevalent notions: one (represented by Andersen and Alvin) is that grades are a feature of school only, and the other is that scientists also get grades. However, students used various lines of reasoning to support the latter. Some students assimilated the science genre to the classroom genre. Latoya considered that teaching and learning exist in the science genre and therefore, that grading also exists there. Other students did not present such a literal assimilation. Instead, they broadened the concept of grades to cover a more general idea of consequence and compensation. In this way, we get a feeling for how students negotiate and conceptualize a particular feature of the classroom genre relatively to the science genre they are constructing. As a final point, the student discussion about their view of themselves as scientists brings out ways these black boys and girls differ in how they view science and disagreement. On the second occasion when students shared whether they felt like scientists, all the girls who brought up disagreement and arguing in their answers (4 of 12) associated disagreement and arguing with not being scientists. All the boys who brought up disagreement and arguing (2 of 5) associated them with being scientists. The girls considered disagreement and arguing to be antithetical to scientific activity. This is consistent with studies that suggest that females are socialized to prefer a more inclusive and cooperative style and to strive for integrating voices rather than highlighting differences (e.g., Belenky et al., 1986; Guzzetti & Williams, 1996; Rosser, 1990; Roychoudhury et al., 1995). As we strive to develop and incorporate gender-sensitive approaches to science teaching and learning, and at the same time to engage students in scientific activity, we need to examine places where these two general goals overlap and places where they clash. In making this point, we echo a concern raised by Roth (1997), who articulated a tension she felt as a teacher of elementary school children. Disagreement among scientists, disagreement between theory and data, and disagreement between different theories or between different sets of data are major driving forces of progress in the field of science, and critical elements of the science genre that we favor. The question thus becomes how we respect some girls’ preference for reaching consensus and an integration of ideas and at the same time help them appreciate the value and significance of disagreement as an element of the science genre. Considering that students’ ideas and preferences about relations with their peers are part of their youth and classroom genres, the above data illustrate how these genres may influence the students’ construction of a science genre. Both in the discussion on grades and in the students’ perceptions concerning disagreement among scientists, we see that social factors from other genres enter significantly into the students’ construction of their science genres. Boys’ and girls’ different ways of viewing disagreement are part of their ways of building and understanding social relations. These are strongly influenced by the larger culture’s practices and narratives about relations between males and females, relations that these young people appropriate and imbue with meaning primarily through their youth genres.

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Implications for Practice and Further Research In this study of student work produced in Barbara’s sixth-grade, all–African-American class, we had the opportunity to explore the interplay of youth, classroom, and science genres. The framework of the three genres allowed us to explore how students experience a science classroom when these genres are allowed to overlap and shape each other. As we studied these overlaps among genres, we showed how messy and mixed-up students’ learning of science is. The framework of the three genres offers teachers and researchers a language to capture, appreciate, and inquire into the complex ways that children in our classrooms appropriate and make sense of science and ways of teaching and learning science. We have mostly used students’ plays and rap songs as an opportunity to explore the interplay of genres in the science class. However, based on considerations outlined in the Introduction, we suggest that the students’ engagement in producing this work has particular educational value, specifically for the construction of scientific understandings. In our opening remarks, we referenced the encounter between the students’ assimilatory frameworks or genres, and new genres brought to them by the teacher, specifically citing the ideas of Dewey and Vygotsky. As we pointed out, both scholars conceptualized the individual’s development in terms of an encounter between the ways of thinking and making sense of the world that people have constructed in a relatively spontaneous and informal way, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the existing disciplinary cultural achievements in which organized understandings are represented and used. We suggest that the kinds of student work that we have presented in this paper are effective sites for such encounters. Forms such as plays and rap songs invite students to bring the meaningful ways they have of expressing and organizing their ideas into contact with the disciplinary knowledge that is coming to them in a more abstracted, less experiential form, a form less connected to familiar social and emotional meanings. Plays and rap songs are situational rather than abstract, and empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced. Thus, students’ engagement in such work not only provides us with windows into students’ experience, it provides sites where students might be especially drawn to push further the very encounters which form the basis of their becoming enculturated into the disciplines. The students’ plays and rap songs are narratives, stories that the students constructed to capture, order, and possibly explain their science classroom world. As Bruner (1986) wrote: ‘‘Story must construct two landscapes simultaneously. One is the landscape of action . . . the other of consciousness: what those involved in the action know, think, feel, or do not know, think, or feel’’ (p. 14). The perspective we are developing is this: When we invite students to express themselves in these forms, we present them with opportunity to work out their scientific understandings in connection with major tools of sense making that they have already achieved. In discussing Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development as applied to children’s pretend play, Go¨ncu¨ and Becker (1992) emphasized that it was the children’s own enactment of pretend situations that provided them with an external representation which they could use as a means to develop further understandings. It is in these terms that we also see the lively kindergarten classroom described by Paley. In Wally’s Stories, Paley (1981) gave an account of the 5-yearolds in her kindergarten class creating their own dramatic world, and in doing so revealing a richer range of thought and language than they did in traditional classroom exercises. Here, too, we suggest that we are not merely being afforded a better view of the children’s knowledge and thinking. The children’s creative activities produce the sites where they most strongly bring their own means of expression and thought into contact with the contributions of the teacher and other adults (such as the authors they read). In the present study, the students’ creation of rap songs and plays can be seen in a similar way. In creating their plays and rap songs, students produce

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expressions of their scientific understandings contexted in and structured by their own familiar genres. Moreover, the form of the play particularly invites expression of different ideas by different characters. In creating such dialogues, students produce for themselves opportunities to work out the relations among the ideas. We saw an example of this in Nina’s play. Borrowing Gee’s (2001) term, in some ways, plays and rap songs are ‘‘mono-dialogical discussions’’—discussions that students have with themselves about science and their science learning in Barbara’s class. Gee recommended that ‘‘face-to-face conversation-like discussions need to be supplemented with discussions where children are asked to take longer turns, expand their language, and make clear their reasoning and its connections to what others have said’’ (p. 25). He continued that ‘‘in such ‘mono-dialogical discussions’ students need to be overtly scaffolded in how they use and think about science social languages, interpretations, and arguments’’ (p. 25). Although students in Barbara’s class did not engage in the latter, especially the plays they composed offered to most of them opportunities to take longer turns and make connections to what others had said. The writing genres of rap songs and plays do not encourage details, differentiations, and systematic relations that are needed for students to master the academic language of science (Gee, 2001). However, for Barbara’s black students, rap songs and plays may facilitate their developing identity as learners of science in conjunction with their identity as black youth. Black students who mostly feel alienated by science, and have not imagined how their own cultural identity allows them entrance to the mostly foreign culture of science, may be helped to construct their identity as science learners through using tools that allow them to express who they are and how they come to develop their science understandings. Teaching well means making sure that students not only achieve but that also develop a positive sense of themselves as meaning makers (Becker, Knight, & Varelas, 1993). Rap songs and plays as written artifacts in the science class offer opportunities for both. Although the plays and rap songs that the students in Barbara’s class composed were hybrids of everyday language and science language, they allowed many of Barbara’s students to portray their developing identity as science learners through their own strengths. As stories, they allow students ‘‘to cast a different light to the event itself; . . . allow[ing] child and teacher to reenvision the process of learning and teaching in a way that defies standardization and objective description of what has been learned’’ (Gallas, 1994, p. xvii). Furthermore, as our analysis showed, these plays and rap songs—writing genres that appealed to Barbara’s black students—allow teachers to appreciate how the meeting of the three genres comes to shape the meanings and sense that students develop in the science class. A fruitful idea to explore might be to use these writing genres partially to scaffold students into scientific discourse. Plays and rap songs constitute nontraditional science writing genres that may rupture the current science hegemony and that may facilitate the realization of ‘‘enabling pedagogy’’ (Hildebrand, 1998) that ‘‘engages students in significant, challenging, and meaningful learning, that is sensitive to their diverse learning interests, concerns, and needs, and that addresses their social contexts, values, and life experiences in an enjoyable and intriguing manner’’ (p. 354). Moreover, such nontraditional science writing genres may be particularly useful to underachieving African-American students who ‘‘seek to limit their contact with all segments of the school curriculum that might suggest that they are acting white—that is, trying to lessen the perception of lack in the Black Self while avoiding the construction of the Black self in the image of (an)Other’’ (Fordham, 1996, p. 285). Several more specific issues emerge for further exploration. First, in their rap songs and plays, students revealed relationships with peers, with the teacher, with the subject matter. However, we do not know how aware students were of the points they raised. Conversations with

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the authors of the rap songs and plays might shed more light on the conscious meaning they themselves placed on the actions, language, and behavior that appeared in their plays. Second, repeated use of such tools as plays and rap songs over the school year may allow the teacher to see how the meeting of the three genres evolves over time—how the students see themselves as learners of science in the midst of their community of peers and the teacher. In this way, teachers can get a better feeling for how the meeting of the genres comes to shape their students’ developing identity as science learners. Coupling such repeated use of such tools with conversations with the authors about their artifacts might facilitate their development as reflective learners—learners who become more attentive to and aware of the ways that a classroom community builds knowledge and understandings. This may facilitate the emergence of metacognition. It will depend, of course, on the familiarity of the tools the students use. The more familiar tools will allow students to transform them to objects that can be reflected upon, thus affording them the opportunity to better grasp the relationships among meanings. Third, the difference in boys’ and girls’ perspective on disagreement needs to be explored further. The students’ construction of science genres, and participation in scientific activity, may be highly influenced by their attitude toward disagreement, and their readiness to challenge one another’s opinions and accept such challenges. Furthermore, we need to situate the issue of disagreement within the context of the classroom genre. Although students and teacher were contributing ideas, there was little explicit discussion of the similarities and differences of the ideas offered. We need to explore how such discussion can be promoted without producing adversarial situations that may be unattractive to some students. Fourth, we noted earlier that the students depicted in their plays elements of traditional classroom genres not present in the actual classroom. This juxtaposition of elements that did not exist in their class with elements that did exist can be understood in two ways. One possibility is that students may have not noticed the differences between what they had experienced in the past and what was offered now. Another possibility is that students were telling the teacher that they would have preferred to have present those elements that were absent. In both cases, we need to keep in mind that at first, students assimilate their experiences into their existing genres that may not necessarily reflect what exists in the current class. It may be worthwhile to help students consciously differentiate between what is offered in the class and what they anticipate on the basis of their existing genres. Furthermore, a dilemma arises for the teacher. If the genre of the science class that students have come to know and expect—with its particular norms, expectations, and routines—is transformed, how can students feel a sense of belonging in a class that does not quite look and feel the same as other classes they have experienced? The black students in Barbara’s class had experienced learning of science in classroom and science genres different from those that Barbara espoused and brought to her science class. When teachers transform their practice, both teachers and students experience the tensions of change. How can we enable all students, and especially students from groups underrepresented in science, to make these transitions? As Freire (1993) argued, social structures (classrooms being one of them) are characterized by a dialectic relation between permanence and change. ‘‘The social structure, in order to be, must become; in other words, becoming is the way the social structure expresses ‘duration’ ’’ [emphases in original] (p. 160). As teachers, we need to know more about the students’ experiences and interpretations during this change to shape our own transformation of teaching practice. The plays and rap songs that students composed, and that constituted the core of the data we analyzed in this study, offer us one tool for such a task. This research was supported by a UIC Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholarship to the first author. We are indebted to Barbara Luster’s sixth-grade students who were eager to talk,

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do, and think science and open their minds to us. The authors also thank Christina Matyskela Balga for careful and thorough transcriptions of the videotapes used in this study. Some of the data in this article were presented at the invited address—Division K ‘‘Race and Gender in the Classroom: Perspectives from School-Based and UniversityBased Researchers,’’ American Educational Research Association (AERA), March 24–28, 1997, Chicago, Illinois.

Notes 1 We provide the reader with exact quotes; we have not changed the spelling or grammar that students used in their rap songs and plays. 2 Ellipses in the transcript indicate a pause in speech.

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