Social Justice in a Ninth-Grade Science Classroom

During the Summer Institute, I was also working in a fly lab on campus with a veteran science teacher from Central High School. At the end of every session, I would walk over to the lab and we would chat about PhilWP for about 10-20 minutes before she left for the day. We talked a lot about culturally relevant pedagogies, social justice in the classroom, and how different this might look in a science classroom as compared to a history or english classroom. We also talked a lot about my hesitation to do a lot of the activities that involve class-sharing of personal stories, as I teach at a neighborhood high school with limited classroom management abilities.

She suggested that I try to use “awesome science” to create this type of open classroom environment. Although I may not be able to incorporate social justice into the curriculum the same way an English teacher does, I can still create a classroom where respect for ideas and opinions matter. Crazy phenomena breeds questions, and I could model respectful ways to respond to rapid-fire, sometimes ridiculous, questions and comments. Students will see that everyone has opinions, so it is important to always keep an open-mind and listen, as it only takes one crazy idea to set the foundation for an amazing discovery (in science, and other parts of our society).



This lab report is the product of the first “awesome science” experiments I did on the second week of school. I ordered a 50 worker termites from Carolina Biological and the students worked in assigned groups to try and figure out why termites exhibit strange following behaviors with black ballpoint pens.