Christopher Emdin has developed and tested strategies to engage urban students that can be used by any teacher to reach students “who don’t feel a part of science,” he says. This month, Emdin, an assistant professor of science education at New York City’s Teachers College, Columbia University, was honored with Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) International’s 2007 International Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for his “three-year ethnographic study of physics and chemistry classrooms” in a Bronx high school, where he explored “the culture and context of the urban classroom.”

Many researchers have studied urban science education, but Emdin says his research is unique for these reasons:

• He brings his perspective—as an urban student of color who had difficulty engaging with science in middle and high school—to his work.
• He made his dissertation “personal, scholarly, and practical,” merging his viewpoints as a teacher and a researcher and uniting the fields of science, social science, and education.
• He focuses on urban students’ strengths and doesn’t “take a deficit-based perspective” that students of color can’t achieve in science.

Emdin believes “students are researchers—the best researchers of their own practice.” He values their comments about “what they see is going on in the classroom,” and he focuses on the “nuances of the ways students act and see science.” This “socio-cultural framework,” he explains, provides a deeper insight into the science classroom, unlike a strict pedagogical content knowledge view that “doesn’t capture what’s going on with students.”

In his dissertation, Emdin identifies why urban students struggle with learning science: He argues that using traditional methods of teaching the subject can “instill distaste for science and compel students to display an illusion of disinterest in school.” His methods for reaching students employ a set of research tools that he calls “the three Cs”—cogenerative dialogues, talks in which “teachers and students can critically deconstruct their experiences within classrooms”; coteaching, which traditionally involves two teachers working with one group of students, but in Emdin’s version features students and teachers sharing the teaching role; and cosmopolitanism, “the idea that despite their evident differences, humans share an ethical responsibility for one another.”

Cosmopolitanism “is a term rarely heard in discussions of science education,” writes Emdin in “The Three C’s for Urban Science Education,” an article to be published in the June 2008 issue of Phi Delta Kappan, PDK’s journal. In urban science education, it means that students and teachers become responsible “for teaching one another what they do not know—about science, teaching science, and each other.” Initially, achieving cosmopolitanism can be difficult for teachers, he says, because “teachers think they have to be really strong…it takes a while to get teachers to let go” of the power inherent in their role. Once teachers and students “shed these masks that we place on each other,” then everyone has the same goal—to learn science—“and science becomes fun.”

So in Emdin’s version of cogenerative dialogues, or “cogens,” teachers invite students to share their opinions about their experiences in the science classroom and identify problems. Teachers also discuss their frustrations in trying to reach seemingly unresponsive students and explain their instructional approaches. Together the cogen participants devise plans to improve teaching and learning.

When students are given this opportunity to be heard and realize their voices matter, their true desire to achieve in science emerges, says Emdin. “Students who were once not interested in anything the teacher had to say began to ask questions, participate in classroom activities and projects, and score higher on classroom exams,” he writes. Students also videotaped lessons and cogens, and the videos inspired after-class discussions of the subject matter.

The second C, Coteaching, not only allows students to both learn science and teach it to their classmates, but also enables teachers “to learn about student culture and then use what they learn” to improve their instruction, explains Emdin in his article. Students’ positive experiences in the cogens sparked them to view themselves “as teachers with a responsibility for the quality of instruction in the class.” Emdin’s dissertation relates several instances when one student walked to the front of the classroom and successfully explained a science concept to classmates, often using analogies from their social lives. The teachers benefited because they discovered ways to teach the concepts by integrating activities from students’ lives outside school.

“These tools produce results no matter where they are used,” notes Emdin. With the growing immigrant population in the United States, he suggests teachers use the three Cs to increase immigrant students’ science achievement and help them become acclimated to U.S. schools. If the nation wants “to be scientifically viable, we need to get these people involved,” he observes.

Emdin’s desire to involve students extended to his PDK award ceremony: He invited his high school students to present their research at the event, held earlier this month. He plans to use some of his $5,000 award to return to their school and continue his efforts “to get students from underserved populations active in science.” He also plans to work with teachers and students from other New York City schools.

Click here to read Emdin’s article and dissertation and listen to a podcast about his work.