Bridging communities and preservice science teacher education through community immersion: A collaborative action ethnography

Abstract

This study was an attempt to answer the call for culturally relevant and community-centered pedagogies in the preparation of prospective science teachers through student and faculty immersion in a rural farming and fishing village in the Philippines Using the methodology of collaborative action ethnography ten prospective chemistry teachers and two teacher educators formed a research team to examine the participants experience of community immersion Drawing from multiple data sources, findings of the study were presented as specific individual narratives of three case students and as schematic group narratives of participants collective experience of community immersion Analysis of narratives revealed the following: (a) a discrepancy between participants notions and experiences of community: (b) an evolution of participants belief set from naive to complex-about the purposes, values and goals of community immersion through direct exposure and experience in the village: (c) five categories of knowledge and learning themes brought about by participants' experience of community immersion; (d) five roadblocks to successful implementation of social justice service learning: (e) a trend from bifurcated to complimentary use of research data and traditional evaluation tools to assess students learning through community immersion; and ( a cyclical model of a transformative community-based science teacher education that emphasizes "giving back" through service learning as an antidote to "mining" from community funds of knowledge. The study generated two important theoretical contributions: (a) the Theory of Negotiated Meanings, which attempts to explain learning in a collaborative context through simultaneous and complimentary negotiations of personal, shared. and group meanings of a common experience in a collaborative context; and (b) the Framework for Community-based Science Teacher Education, which is envisioned to guide science teacher education practitioners and policy makers in planning and implementing of community-based science and science teacher education related endeavours.