MISciPLN Friends!
Your ISD administrator / GELN representative might ask you about the Moving Science and Literacy Forward in Elementary Classrooms Symposium. They received the news at noon yesterday when the website went live. Check it out at, ElemScienceMatters.org and share it with all the other education leader friends in your life.
This is the conference that we talked about, and you gave feedback on, in the last two MISciPLN meetings last year. I’m sorry for not keeping you posted on the progress between meetings and for not informing you before your administrators received it. In the blurry madness of Aug-ember, we felt the pressure of time running short and our goal was to get it out there ASAP.
Much of the information shared here will not be entirely new to those of you that have been members of the MISciPLN community for a while. We regularly lament the declining time for science in the elementary school day, that science is treated as optional, that access to high-quality, standards-aligned science is inequitable – it is unjust!, that the accountability system prioritizes ELA and math, so science is neglected, etc., etc., etc. To be fair, we also share possible solutions. While all these statements are right, the audience for the conversation has been wrong. It hasn’t made it outside our science bubble!
This is why we need to begin having this conversation with everyone that will listen, in particular, people with influence like education leaders of all stripes, and even your ELA colleagues that they listen to. This is the reason for the symposium, to bring others into the conversation. But we can’t just talk at them, we need to begin from where they are, in the world of literacy improvement.
The magic lies in the synergy between the two subjects. Literacy is a subject in need of context, and science is a subject in need of communication. Forrest Gump might say, “They go together like peas and carrots.” Put simply, the context of science motivates the need for literacy and provides knowledge that supports reading comprehension. And it works both ways! Many of the science and engineering practices are disciplinary literacy that require communication such as, explanations, argumentation, communication, etc. They provide students with the tools to make sense of phenomena and build new knowledge to attach to their prior knowledge while providing opportunities to engage with literacy skills in an authentic way. And so it goes, reading comprehension grows with standards aligned science learning and science learning improves when students communicate about it. That’s why it needs to begin in the earliest grades, for all children.
To sum up my diatribe, let’s keep children at the center – not the accountability system. It’s not about science, or ELA for that matter, it’s about the children entrusted in our care. To give them the greatest chance of achieving their life dreams, they need to be able to read, they need the knowledge to understand it, and they need science from the earliest grades to build it. If some children are given these opportunities and some are not, this is a social justice issue, one that is in our collect purview to change. That we will change! But we never will until we bring everyone into the conversation.
I will leave you with this little treat. It says everything I just said, but better. And it even includes the research to support it. It’s a podcast episode called, “The symbiotic relationship between literacy and science with Jacquey Barber”. It really is excellent! If you listen carefully, Jacquey, a science education researcher, mentions her literacy colleague, Gina Cervetti, in this work. Peas and carrots. By the way, Gina will be sharing a message at the symposium.
So, when your administrator asks, why are science and literacy together in this symposium, tell them, “because they go together like peas and carrots.”
Happy chatting!
James
[See attachments, Sci and Lit Flyer and Informational Sci and Lit Flyer]
MMSLN News 