Scholarship

This textbook provides a series of on-the-ground reflections from college music instructors working in a wide variety of institutional settings about their approaches to inclusive, supportive pedagogy in the music classroom. The teaching reflections examine difficult themes that fall into three primary categories: subjects that instructors sense to be controversial or emotionally challenging to discuss, those that derive from or intersect with real-world events that are difficult to process, and bigger-picture discussions of how music studies often focuses on dominant narratives while overlooking other perspectives. Some chapters offer practical guidance, lesson plans, and teaching materials, while others take a more global view, reflecting on the importance and relevance of teaching these difficult topics.

In this paper, we argue that a set of pedagogies hold the key to unlocking what has been a significant challenge in education: how to provide equitable access to deeper-learning opportunities for each and every student. We turn to the potential of project-based learning PBL and equity-centered instruction can be mutually enhancing and provide transformative learning environments supportive of student learning and educational change. We conclude with considerations for the kinds of local and systemic shifts that are needed to support educators, school leaders, and district leaders as they strive to foster the vision of equity-centered PBL.

In this article, we use organizational theory’s concept of sensemaking to examine teachers’ responses to professional development related to the Next Generation Science Standards within two schools in the United States. Our study shows that teachers’ perceptions of coherence emerge from interactions within professional development, associated curriculum materials, and with colleagues and leaders in their schools. Some teachers, we found, were able to manage ambiguity, uncertainty, and perceived incoherence productively, while others foreclosed deep and sustained sensemaking. Our findings suggest the need for professional development to engage teachers in sustained sensemaking activity around issues of perceived incoherence to bolster teachers’ emergent understandings of standards and improve the likelihood of implementing instructional practices aligned to standards.

In this paper, we review prior literature on the relationship between teachers’ organizational contexts and their learning and implementation of reform in science and other disciplines. We then present a conceptual framework rooted in organizational theory that can support nuanced understandings of teacher learning and implementation and guide the development of teacher-learning contexts. We argue that using a lens of organizational sensemaking complicates the teacher–context relationship for learning and implementation of reform and recasts teachers’ contexts and local expertise as important levers for learning. We conclude with a set of practices to guide the design of professional learning contexts that reflects this framing and that may enable deeper engagement and learning of science teachers in the context of reform.

In this special issue, we feature scholarship focused on understanding the organizational context of science teacher learning. The 14 original empirical and conceptual pieces that compose the special issue examine the ways teacher learning is shaped by the sociocultural and historical institutions of schooling that teachers work within and navigate as part of their daily practice. Teachers are positioned, not solely as conduits of reform nor as constrained actors within their organizational environment, but rather as agentive learners situated in complex contexts.

This paper explores the collective organizational sensemaking processes of middle school science teachers engaged in a design‐based research project focused on supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) identity and interest development of middle school youth with the design of a STEM ecosystem. Our findings suggest that teachers understood the out‐of‐school environment vis‐à‐vis their organizational contexts—such as, how valued outcomes of school, like teaching vocabulary, were being addressed. Over time, teachers came to value out‐of‐school learning as distinct from their classroom and as a space that is “not school” that provided necessary learning opportunities for students. The teachers recognized the unique ways the out‐of‐school STEM setting surfaced students’ strengths in ways not always afforded by school.

This article utilized sensemaking theory to explore decision-making dynamics for eight middle school science teachers adopting instructional practices associated with the Framework for K–12 Science Education and Next Generation Science Standards. Using a multiple case study approach, I examine patterns of teachers’ sensemaking and their connection to instructional decision making over a 2-year period, with particular attention to the sources of ambiguity and uncertainty that initiated sensemaking and how teachers navigated them. I describe teachers’ navigational strategies to resolve ambiguity, moments of stuckness, and how such experiences shaped the ways reform ideas became integrated into practice.