Teaching with difference: A response to Angela Calabrese Barton: Teaching science with homeless children: Pedagogy, representation, and identity

This article poses a vital question: Of whom are we thinking when we dream of an education for “all?” What does education for “all” really entail? Would an education for “all” look fundamentally different from the education we are now trying to enact? Many schemes for educating “all” are little more than translations of the current curriculum and modal pedagogy. “All” children are somehow benignly the same. “All” is not a word that carries heterogeneity: It suggests instead likeness and similarity. It implies children who are “different” slowly becoming more like all of us (whoever we are). Barton’s article (Barton, 1998) about her work with homeless children suggests that educating all students entails going beyond seeking ways to enable marginalized students to engage in present educational forms. Rather, an education for homeless and minority children involves rethinking foundational assumptions about the nature of the disciplines, the purposes of education, and our roles as teachers. It does not mean remaking those children into our own images. For Barton, it meant remaking science in the children’s image. Other writers have suggested such rethinking about education in general and in fields other than science (for example, Delpit, 1988; 1992; Gates, 1992; hooks, 1994; McIntosh, 1983; West, 1993; Weller, 1988). Barton, though, provides a vivid image of what it might mean to do this remaking in science. Science can be shaped and responsive to our experiences of the phenomena of our surrounding world—whether in puzzling about pollution and its effects on our surroundings or in inventive cooking. Barton and the girls with whom she is exploring this creative remaking of science are not coincidentally exploring the territory of habitat and food, essentials in the reality of homeless children. Their investigations are neither sentimental nor trivial. Situated in the surrounding realities of their lives, the inquiries are authentically interdisciplinary: The exploration of how pollution affects the lived experience of the neighborhood is an inquiry permeated with sociology and psychology; the experimentation with food, a play of chemistry threaded with the aesthetics of taste and appearance. These are real projects. They JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 35, NO. 4, PP. 395–397 (1998)