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This presentation explores how race, culture and language intersect to create the condition of contemporary learning. For years, research on the language of classrooms explored how they way we say things impacts students’ sense of belonging. Despite this research, Science and Technology Education have failed to adequately explore how issues of race, language, and culture shape the outcomes of teaching and learning in science. Through a sequence of research, this presentation explores the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of this dilemma. From a theoretical perspective, the talk will explore the Language-Identity dilemma. As students learn, the way academic language is taught to them can present a cognitive and cultural conflict. From a cognitive perspective, if science is taught without respect to the implications of how language is learned students can be misunderstood and misunderstand the teacher’s complex discourse. From a cultural conflict perspective, students’ may feel they are cultural outsiders when the language of the classroom positions them as outsiders. The presentation provides an overview of a series of qualitative and quantitative experiments that document the realities of this complex interaction.

Bryan A. Brown is a professor of science education at Stanford University. He is the former  Associate Dean of Student Affairs in Stanford’s graduate school of education. His work focuses on improving urban science education. He explores how language and identity impact urban students’ learning. Dr. Brown is a former high school science teacher who earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from Hampton University, a Master’s degree in Educational Psychology from the University of California, and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His 2009 research project on “Disaggregating Science Instruction” was awarded the Journal of Research in Science Teaching’s award as the top research manuscript of 2009. He was the 2007 winner of the National Association for Research in Science Education’s (N.A.R.S.T.) award for outstanding early career scholarship. His was named as a prestigious National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation Fellow for 2005. Dr. Brown’s research in urban schools examines how urban science education has underserved minority students by its failure to adequately design instruction that is sensitive to the language and cultural needs of urban populations. His early research projects lead to the development of an instructional approach, known as Disaggregate Teaching, that is designed to improve learning for underserved populations. Dr. Brown’s current research explores the similarities, or Conceptual Continuities, that exist between students’ conceptual understandings in informal learning environments and those valued by science.