Teachers’ perspectives on culturally diverse classrooms and responsive science and mathematics teaching
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study focused on investigating Kindergarten to Grade12 (K-12) teachers’ perspectives about the effects of students’ cultural diversity on their science and mathematics teaching and their perspectives and understandings of culturally responsive teaching. Largely informed by the principles of qualitative case study approach, this investigation employed phenomenographic methods including individual teacher interviews and informal observations of select science and mathematics classrooms for data collection and analysis. Participants included ten teachers from Vancouver, a major urban city in Western Canada. A synthesized theoretical framework of (trans-multi)culturally responsive education comprising of critical and transformational multicultural education perspectives and complementing notions of culturally responsive teaching served as a guiding lens to analyze and interpret the data. Two research questions were addressed: 1) What are K-12 teachers’ perspectives about the effect of cultural diversity on their science and mathematics teaching? 2) What are the teachers’ understandings of and perspectives on culturally responsive teaching as a viable strategy for teaching science and mathematics in their cultural diversity-rich classrooms? Key findings illustrate that: 1) teachers described students’ cultural diversity as a mosaic as well as a strength and a challenge; 2) teachers recognized the level of English language competency as one of the key systemic factors compounding the challenges associated with students’ cultural diversity; 3) lack of culturally relevant resources, support and training serve as an impediment to teachers’ successful integration of Indigenous knowledges in their science and mathematics classrooms; 4) teachers’ perspectives of science and mathematics, cultural diversity, and Canadian culture were full of contradictions; and 5) teachers’ understandings of culturally responsive teaching and its manifestation in their classrooms were diverse and full of conundrums. The findings have implications for future research on how teachers’ perspectives of students’ cultural diversity influence their expectations of culturally diverse students’ engagement and achievements, and their assessment practices in science and mathematics classrooms. The findings also demand further research focusing on whether teaching the content of science and mathematics limits teachers’ pedagogical responsiveness where they may merely “talk the walk” of multicultural education without realizing the actual potential of students’ and communal funds of knowledges in their diversity-rich classrooms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".