Teacher Learning and Informal Science Education

About the author

Jennifer D. Adams is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair and Professor at the University of Calgary and an NSF Early CAREER awardee. Prior to joining the faculty at the UofC, she had appointments at the City University of New York (Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center), the American Museum of Natural History, New York City Outward Bound and as a high school science teacher with the (then) New York City Board of Education.

Brooklyn in da House!

About the book

Teacher Learning and Informal Science Education chronicles Jennifer D. Adams’ teaching and research journey in informal science education. While the primary focus of the book is research on teacher learning and identity in informal science education, it contains bursts of refl ections of Adams’ navigation of learning spaces from childhood visits to the museum, class trips as a high school teacher, designing and facilitating learning as a museum and teacher educator, and researcher. These learning interactions inspired research to learn how teachers’ identities and corresponding practices were infl uenced by informal science learning. What emerged was the ways that teachers transformed meanings, pedagogies, and enactments of informal science in ways that both resonated with their identities as social agents vis-à-vis the identities and needs of their students. Recognising the importance of historical context in current and ongoing educational inequities, this book offers a chapter that unpacks the colonial history of the museum and discusses the relevance for science teaching and learning today. With New York City as the backdrop, this book emphasizes the teaching and learning in an urban context with creative teachers who are passionate about their practice and their brilliant and diverse middle and high school students. This book offers theoretical considerations for designing learning experiences, with a researchto- practice emphasis, for teachers across formal and informal settings in ways that are attentive to and affi rming of students’ and teachers’ identities and desires to utilize science education as a tool to create fl ourishing futures.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.