Dominician Republic Project

Culturally-Relevant Curricula

If one of the central principles of science education can be stated simply: "Know your students and teach them accordingly", it follows that our science curricula should be consistent with this mantra. It refers to not only the science ideas that students bring into the classroom, but their cultures and worldviews as well (Cobern, 1994).In accordance with this idea is the perspective that science faculty and science teachers need to recognize and value the unique cultures and viewpoints that students bring with them into their classes. Successful science teachers connect science with students' day to day lives, cultures, and worldviews rather than ignoring them (National Research Council, 2004).

Unfortunately, this is very different from the way in which most science classes have been and continue to be taught. This is due, in part, to the fact that many teachers working in New York City schools have little knowledge, experience, or understanding of the students with which they work. As a result, they lack important resources that appear to be necessary to achieve substantial change.

While student culture was once viewed as a barrier to science learning, or even as a deficit (Trueba and Bartolome, 1997), new research is challenging this notion and is revealing that worldview and culture can be powerful sources of capital (sensu Bourdieu, 1986). If employed in the science classroom, this capital can be used to leverage both knowledge gains and student engagement (Roth and Barton, 2004; NRC, 2004). Even more important is the idea that ignoring student worldviews may be a fundamental reason for why so many students are disconnected from both schooling and science (Cobern, 1994).

In Digest 2: Mining Funds of Knowledge, we presented the anticipation guide as an effective tool for helping science teachers uncover their student’s beliefs and knowledge regarding central topics, concepts or issues related to targeted scientific subject matter. The following section outlines two instructional activities that advance scientific learning by leveraging the knowledge that Dominican American students have acquired through their uniquely transnational status.

Activity 1: Dominican American Ambassadors to the Natural Disaster Youth Summit (NDYS)

NDYS was organized in May 2004 and held its first meeting in Hyojo, Japan in September 2004 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake. In addition to annual summits, participating schools conduct a variety of network based collaborative projects and on-line forums to promote awareness of the devastation caused by natural disasters and how to cope with the effects of Earthquakes, Volcanic Eruptions, Wildfires, Floods, Hurricanes, Landslides, Tsunamis, Droughts and so on.

The lives of all Dominicans and Dominican American have been directly or indirectly touched by the great earthquake of 1532, which destroyed the city of Santiago (the Dominican Republic’s second largest city) and the more recent devastating earthquake of August, 1946. Despite the historical connection Dominicans have with earthquakes, there are currently no schools in the Dominican Republic (or schools in the USA with large Dominican American populations) that belong to the NDYS network of 32 countries.

The NDYS represents an ideal forum for Dominican-Americans to develop and share knowledge on a topic of cultural relevance, and then share what they know and have learned with other youth from cultures that have a vested interest in understanding and coping with natural disasters. Through interviewing relatives in the States and the DR, sharing and writing about personal stories that they have heard or read about related to DR earthquakes, and studying its natural history, plate tectonics, climate change, biodiversity and ecosystems, students can educate themselves and their peers on an breadth of science related topics including:

  1. Why are their more frequent and destructive earthquakes in the DR than in New York?
  2. How has its location in a major earthquake zone impacted the individual lives of Dominicans, its natural history, and its ecology?
  3. What can we learn from older generations of Dominicans about how to prepare and respond to earthquakes and other natural disasters?
  4. What is the current state of disaster preparation and response on the DR and how adequate is it?

Activity 2: DR Field Explorers

Students who regularly visit or spend parts of the year in the DR are ideal candidates to undertake scientific field expeditions and return to their classrooms with artifacts from natural world. During their time abroad, they can collect digital photographs, drawings, maps, and journal entries that identify different habitats, species, and ecosystems in the DR. They can also make small collections of seashells or other common artifacts from the natural environment. At the same time, their classmates can conduct expeditions in comparable environments in NYC for comparative studies of biodiversity in the two locations. As students become “field” experts in their respective locations of scientific inquiry, they can produce reports, digests, and multi-media presentations for the purpose of sharing their acquired knowledge with classmates as well as teachers.

In addition to collecting physical artifacts from the Dominican Republic, transnational students can use their time abroad to collect citizen science perspectives related to a variety of scientific concerns. For example, they can conduct interviews and surveys that reveal attitudes and beliefs of the Dominican population in regard to issues ranging from conservation, endangered species, ecosystem health, global warming, and eco-tourism. Again, the information they collect can be compared to related data that classmates have obtained from similar studies of Dominican-American populations.

Many of your students view science as something practiced by individuals wearing white coats peering through microscopes in distant laboratories. They may assume that the concerns of these individuals have little in common with Dominican and Dominican American populations; they may also assume that scientists do their work in far away locations like NASA and the Amazon River Basin, not the neighborhoods of Washington Heights or Santiago. When Dominican-American students travel to the DR, you can prepare them to employ scientific methods in order to investigate how the transnational experience impacts the ecology of Dominican-Americans. Through guided inquiry projects, students can explore what the natural sciences can teach us about the following topics:

  1. The immigration patterns of Dominicans;
  2. The eating habits of Dominicans;
  3. The occupations that Dominicans pursue in NYC vs. the Dominican Republic;
  4. The attitudes and habits of Dominicans and Dominican American in regard to exercise and other physical activity.
  5. The attitudes and habits of Dominicans and Dominican American in regard to resource conservation and the treatment of animals.

By immersing themselves in these paths of inquiry as they travel between the DR and USA, Dominican-American students will begin to see that science and the work of scientists is central to everyone’s lives.