University of Michigan Elementary Teacher Education Program Information

This framework provides you with some reminders, questions to ask yourself, suggestions for teaching moves you can try, and suggestions about ways you can draw on resources from our teacher education classes, the University of Michigan program, and your community, as you move forward in your science teaching.

We can connect these approaches to equity to justice priorities in our U-M ETE program. For example:

• weaponization of data and testing is an example of focusing only on achievement – which, because the accountability movement prioritizes ELA and math, largely leads to a de-prioritization of science, particularly in schools that serve children who have been historically marginalized in schooling

• hierarchical and exclusionary constructions of ability and intelligence is why we need to expand what counts as science: to be clear that there are many ways of knowing and being scientific

• distorted, erased, and misrepresentation of subject matter and materials is why we focus on increasing representation and identification in science

• the marginalization of families and communities leads us to increase representation and identification in science, expand what counts as science, and see science as a part of justice movements. All of these, in different ways, let us work on bringing families and communities in, rather than keeping them out.

• normalized and harmful control and punishment of Black and Brown bodies is related to increasing opportunity and access. Black and Brown children deserve opportunities to experience the wonder and joy of the natural world – not be excluded from those opportunities either due to expulsion or suspension, or removal from hands-on investigations due to supposed “behavior issues.”  

• the pervasiveness of whiteness in schools requires us all to develop critical consciousness, which in turn helps us work on every one of these approaches to equity.