Students’ Sense-Making: A Source of Creativity in Teaching

As part of a science unit on water conservation, Haitian middle school students were discussing ways in which water is wasted in a typical American home. Earlier in the year, in keeping with their school district’s science framework, they had studied the water cycle. During a class discussion, one student, Markenson,* addressed a question to the teacher: “Ms. R, I need to know the difference: when I read in our book [the earth science text] about water, it said it’s always the same amount of water as there was long ago. Then what makes this one [the water conservation curriculum] say water is wasted?” Another student, Jean Marc, jumped in to suggest that water is never wasted: “Even if it is used up it comes back again. It passes through some place that cleans it.” Mirey then articulated some of the tensions associated with relationships between water resources, water use, water conservation, and water scarcity: “There are some people here [in the United States] who like to waste water. . . . There are other people elsewhere who can’t find any. The amount of water on earth is not the amount of water for us to use.” Keenon took up Mirey’s line of reasoning specifically in relation to the distribution of water resources and water use habits: “People here and people in Haiti, there are places where they can’t find water. Is it the places where they are wasting water that they always find more?” As the discussion continued, the students considered possible meanings of, reasons for, and consequences of wasting water, including water scarcity in its relationship to wealth, poverty, and environmental degradation in Haiti and the United States. 

This kind of discussion does not take place often in middle school science classrooms, let alone those in which students are learning English. Markenson and his classmates freely expressed their thoughts to one another, elaborated one another’s ideas, argued for and against particular framings of water issues, and joked with one another as they constructed arguments.

It was not Ms. R’s plan to engage her students in analyzing relationships between different views of water they had encountered in school. However, in the moment, Ms. R, who is also Haitian, recognized that her students were employing a conversational style widely used among Haitian people to engage in highly spirited and focused debate of ideas. The practice is called bay odyans (Hudicourt-Barnes 2003). Aware of the deep meaning-making that can develop through bay odyans, Ms. R. decided in the moment to shift her curricular plan. She encouraged the discussion, allowing it to flow from student to student without filtering through her. In this way, the students explored varied meanings around an issue of concern to them and their homeland: water use and availability in the United States and Haiti, shaped by economic, political, and environmental forces. By approaching the curriculum as open territory for critical inquiry, Ms. R and her students engaged with water as an ecologically complex phenomenon – a perspective not accounted for by the curriculum.

At the time of this discussion, Ms. R was participating in an educational research project investigating intersections between students’ community-based sense-making practices and those of science. The  project was a partnership between teachers in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and researchers at the Chèche Konnen Center** at TERC in Cambridge. Co-founded in 1987 by the authors of this Perspectives piece, the Center collaborates with teachers to improve teaching and learning for students whose families speak a first language other than English and, broadly, for students from communities of color.

One of the Center’s goals is to specify the varied sense-making practices that students learn out of school in their everyday lives and, through classroom-based research partnerships with teachers like Ms. R, to explore and demonstrate how these practices can be used to deepen learning in academic subjects. Bay odyans is one such practice. It is not viewed as an academic practice by either Haitians or non-Haitians. Indeed, Haitians think of it as a public form of entertainment not associated with school. To non-Haitians, the spirited nature of bay odyans can be misinterpreted as rude and combative, when in fact it bonds participants through performance, humor, language play, and exploration of ideas. Bay odyans is just one of many out-of-school sense-making practices that young people everywhere learn as they participate in the everyday activities of life – practices that have powerful potential for classroom learning and teaching.

Another goal of the Center is to create professional learning communities in which teachers can develop skill in understanding and responding to their students’ varied sense-making practices as part of learning and teaching. A first principle of the Center’s professional development work is that students are always making sense. This grounding perspective encourages teachers (and researchers) to consider possible meanings based on evidence they gather from listening closely to their students rather than diagnosing or evaluating their students against standard views. It also encourages teachers to experiment with classroom discussions and other instructional activities that invite, make visible, and extend students’ ideas, experiences, questions, and perspectives on scientific phenomena.

Teachers who participate in the Center’s professional development report that it changes the way they teach. They come to view teaching as ongoing inquiry into their students’ learning and their own teaching. As they listen closely and expansively to their students’ ideas, they grow in their appreciation of their students’ sense-making and create meaningful, engaging opportunities to learn in science. As a result, their students learn important scientific ideas with depth, rigor, and feeling. Recently, th Center’s work has expanded to designing and exploring a “studio learning environment” in which perspectives and practices from the arts, humanities, and sciences are being integrated to support youth in cultivating their curiosity, imagination, and engagement with complex scientific phenomena. Findings from the Center’s research have been published widely in books and journals.

The Chèche Konnen Center’s sense-making orientation is designed to work against longstanding deficit views in education and society of children and communities of color and varied language histories. We believe that teaching deeply and justly in U.S. classrooms entails attuning one’s eyes, ears, hearts, and minds to students’ sense-making as a source of creativity in teaching and learning. As we saw with Ms. R, when teachers are attuned to their students’ sense-making repertoires, they can then draw on them to open up powerful opportunities for students to shape identities as engaged and critical scientific thinkers.

For more information on the Chèche Konnen Center at TERC, see chechekonnen.terc.edu. For more asset-based perspectives on teaching Science to ELLs, see Teaching Science for English Language Learners: Building on Students’ Strengths, edited by the authors of this Perspective piece, National Science Teachers Association Press, Arlington, VA (2008).