ERIC Number: EJ958419
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Apr
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0157-244X
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Teachers' Inclusive Strategies to Accommodate 5th Grade Pupils' Crossing of Cultural Borders in Two Greek Multicultural Science Classrooms
Piliouras, Panagiotis; Evangelou, Odysseas
Research in Science Education, v42 n2 p329-351 Apr 2012
The demographic changes in Greek schools underline the need for reconsidering the way in which migrant pupils move from their everyday culture into the culture of school science (a process known as "cultural border crossing"). Migrant pupils might face difficulties when they attempt to transcend cultural borders and this may influence their progress in science as well as the construction of suitable academic identities as a means of promoting scientific literacy. In the research we present in this paper, adopting the socioculturally driven thesis that learning can be viewed and studied as a meaning-making, collaborative inquiry process, we implemented an action research program (school year 2008-2009) in cooperation with two teachers, in a primary school of Athens with 85% migrant pupils. We examined whether the two teachers, who became gradually acquainted with cross-cultural pedagogy during the project, act towards accommodating the crossing of cultural borders by implementing a variety of inclusive strategies in science teaching. Our findings reveal that both teachers utilized suitable cross-border strategies (strategies concerning the establishment of a collaborative inquiry learning environment, and strategies that were in accordance with a cross-border pedagogy) to help students cross smoothly from their "world" to the "world of science". A crucial key to the teachers' expertise was their previous participation in collaborative action research (school years 2004-2006), in which they analyzed their own discourse practices during science lessons in order to establish more collaborative inquiry environments.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Action Research, Grade 5, Science Instruction, Migrants, Inclusion, Multicultural Education, Educational Strategies, Cultural Differences, Sociocultural Patterns, Elementary School Teachers, Inquiry, Cooperative Learning, Culturally Relevant Education, Classroom Communication, Elementary School Science, Urban Schools, Scientific Literacy, Discourse Analysis
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education; Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Greece
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A