Cult Stud of Sci Educ (2015) 10:991997

DOI 10.1007/s11422-015-9674-8

FORUM

Listening to the third voices of Pangasinan students:

designing and enacting culturally sensitive curriculum

Phillip Wilder1

Received: 21 April 2015 / Accepted: 12 May 2015 / Published online: 22 October 2015
 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract This response builds upon Marie Paz Morales Influence of culture and lan-
guage sensitive physics on science attitude achievement by exploring how an expanded
understanding of the ubiquitous nature of adolescent literacy practices and identities
challenge traditional notions of in school and out of school cultural spaces. Listening
to the third voices of adolescents can promote a deeper understanding of the complex
literate lives of Pangasinan students and inform both the official and the enacted culturally
sensitive curriculum. To hear the literate lives of adolescents is to push back against
politically dehumanizing and de-literacizing neo-liberal educational policies and prac-
tices which privilege a singular, whitewashed view of literacy in order to standardize
curriculum and instruction, preserve power in the hands of the powerful, and exacerbate
socio-economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic divisions.

Keywords Culturally sensitive curriculum
Literate lives
Third voices
Enacted

curriculum

As Marie Paz Morales noted in her study of the use of culturally and linguistically sensitive
physics curriculum to improve adolescent attitudes towards science, the cultural identities
of students matter in the classroom. Not only did the students in her study express high
rates of attitudinal shifts towards learning science in school, self-concept in science,

Lead Editor: C. Quigley.

Forum response to Marie Paz Morales (2015). Influence of culture and language sensitive physics on science
attitude achievement. doi:10.1007/s11422-015-9669-5.

& Phillip Wilder

pwilder@clemson.edu
1
Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

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992 P. Wilder

science outside of school, and the importance of science and future participation in science,
but students repeatedly noted a preference for their native language as a medium of
instruction and for teachers who were familiar with the culture, practices, and traditions of
their home communities. In essence, these students desired to be seen, and to have their
culture and identities valued and understood within school. When schools undervalue,
ignore or even institutionally discriminate towards students according to their cultural or
linguistic identities, schools and teachers should not be surprised when adolescents convey
a lack of faith in schooling. Almost two decades ago, Frederick Erickson (1987) cautioned
against assuming students, especially those who are historically marginalized in schools,
are not learning. As he stated,
Students in school, like other humans, learn constantly. When we say they are not
learning what we mean is that they are not learning what school authorities,
teachers, and administrators intend for them to learn as a result of intentional
instructional. Learning what is deliberately taught can be seen as a form of political
assent. Not learning can be seen as a form of political resistance.
Erickson, like Luis Moll, Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff and Norma Gonzalez (1992),
Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) and Geneve Gay (2002), argued educational achievement
and school success rests upon creating classroom spaces where culturally sensitive peda-
gogy ameliorates the political, cultural, and linguistic marginalization of students. Mora-
less design of culturally and linguistically sensitive curriculum ensured the cultural
practices of students were valued in secondary science classrooms. In the middle of current
Filipino reform efforts and accountability measures, disciplinary teachers and culturally
and linguistically diverse students interact daily around subject matter and materials
enacting the curriculum within diverse classroom ecologies. In this sense, curriculum is
made through this daily teacher and student dialogue as both teacher and student attempt to
make sense of each other and of disciplinary content. As David Cohen and Deborah Ball
argued (1999), curricular enactment becomes partly a function of what teachers know
students are capable of doing and what teachers know they are capable of doing with
students (p. 7). In order to support scientifically literate Filipino adolescents who employ
scientific knowledge and literate practicesincluding indigenous technologiesto criti-
cally problem solve, innovate, and act decisively upon complex global, social, environ-
mental, and political issues, a more expansive understanding of the literate lives and
scientific knowledge of Pangasinan (and all Filipino) students can inform both the official
and the enacted curriculum.

Recognizing the literate lives of adolescents

Filipino scientific curricula reforms prioritize the development of adolescent ability to

make judgments and decisions on applying scientific knowledge that may have social,
health, and environmental impacts. As Paz Morales noted, creating scientifically literate
Filipinos who learn according to cultural backgrounds is not just a national policy artic-
ulated by the Science Education Institute in the Philippines, but can be a matter of life and
death given recent natural environmental disasters in the country. Suzanne Plaut (2009)
argued adolescents have a right to active engagement and thinking with content worthy of
sustained attention; deep understanding of key disciplinary concept; increased indepen-
dence with disciplinary skills used to make meaning in current and future contexts; access

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to relevant disciplinary knowledge, and the power to participate in a democracy that

transforms their world. Engagement, thinking, understanding, independence, access and
power become the cornerstones of empowering literacy assimilating the cultural capital of
students with a school currency that matters. Scientific literacy can provide students with
the liberating literacy envisioned when Paulo Freire (1972) stated: Knowledge emerges
only through intervention and re-intervention, through the restless, impatient, continuing,
hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world and with each other (p.
72). Literacy becomes a civil right providing adolescents liberation from deficit views of
their cultural practices and from unresponsive pedagogies which standardize literacy and
learning while ignoring the power and potential of culturally situated literacy practices.
This study attempted to understand how a culturally and linguistically sensitive physics
curriculum could build from the cultural practices of secondary students and enhance the
attitude of Pangasinan learners to science. Through a determination of the cultural profile
of Pangasinan learners, the physics curriculum represented a powerful means of valuing
the daily cultural traditions, customs, and practices of Pangasinan students. The use of
Hofstededs 2008 Value Survey Module (VSM 08) does provide generalized student views
on student centered learning preference (teacher centered to student centered), preferred
level of student autonomy in learning (individualism to collaboration), and student expe-
rience with gendered norms in the classroom. To this end, the cultural profiles illuminated
cultural norms related to the educational expectations Pangasinan students brought into the
Physics classrooms. The curriculum included culturally sensitive scientific scenarios,
practices, and experiences to frame scientific inquiry with a community lens, thus valuing
Pangasinan culture. Furthermore, use of their native language allowed students to focus
less on constructing language in English and more on constructing conceptual knowledge
in science. Its no surprise students reported a higher attitudinal shift towards science and
science learning outside of school.
A deeper understanding of the literacy lives and identities of students within Pangasi-
nan-speaking communities must inform both the official curriculum designed for secondary
science classes and the enacted pedagogy. Brian Street (1984) argued literacy is social
practice reflecting norms of power, language, and discourse which determining how and
with whom students construct knowledge and identify. When literacy is viewed as socially
constructed and culturally situated as Lev Vygotsky (1978) asserted, literacy practices
function differently based on the shared value sets and dispositions of people in that
community. Over two decades after Luis Moll, Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff and Norma
Gonzalez (1992) introduced funds of knowledge as knowledge and practices constructed
across multiple cultural and social networks, Moises Esteban-Guitar and Moll (2014)
propose adolescents, like those in this study, also own funds of identity or the histori-
cally accumulated, culturally developed, and socially distributed resources that are
essential for a persons self-definition, self-expression, and self-understanding (p. 31).
Donna Alvermanns research (2001) reminded the conceptions of literacy adolescents
confront in school impact what they learn, what counts as evidence of learning, the type of
instruction they are provided and the positioning and labeling of students. James Gee and
Vince Crawford (1998) argued when the literacy practices and cultural values of com-
munity conflict with the sanctioned literacy practices in secondary schools, students soon
find that being a successful student requires identity workadopting and affiliating with
multiple new ways of talking, listening, acting, feeling, responding, interacting, and
valuing, as well as writing and reading (p. 225). To fully understand Pangasinan students,
curriculum designers and educators must attend to the unique literate lives and identities of
students.

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Pangasinan literate practices are more than an in school versus out of school
dichotomy needing a single bridge. As Donna Alvermann and Kathleen Hinchman
reminded (2012), multiple bridges connect texts, purposes, tasks, identities, social affil-
iations, media, and settings, blurring simple demarcations to form myriad new literacies
(p. xiii). This study, and the efforts of Filipino Science Education Institute, attempted to
bridge these everyday cultural divides by building scientific literacy according to cultural
background. Alvermann (2011) suggested literate contexts should not be seen as struc-
tured, impermeable containers but as sieves through which social, cultural, economic, and
political discourses animate one another (p. 7). Literacy practices are prolific, inevitably
overlapping multiple spaces including those created by a teacher or a curriculum. Ado-
lescents, in fact, according to Alvermann, naturally fold literate practices into academic
contexts, motivated by their daily work of being across multiple literate communities.
By viewing literate practices through Alvermanns sieve metaphor, we de-silo tradi-
tional school practices and out of school practices and recognize adolescent literate
lives as burgeoning and ubiquitous. Literacy learning within science classrooms and within
communities is inevitably entwined by the mere fact that adolescents perpetually trans-
verse social worlds. Margaret Finders (1997) illustrated the ubiquitous nature of adolescent
literacy when her ethnographic study of the literate lives of middle school girls demon-
strated the ways in which adolescent social worlds and literate underlives remain unseen
by the classroom teacher. Therefore, adolescents use literacies and identities to coalesce
information and act upon their multiple literate worlds.
Through his ethnographic research chronicling the social worlds and literate lives of six
African-American urban males, David Kirkland (2013) not only illuminated the ways in
which these youth use language and social texts to construct and deconstruct identities, but
demonstrated how one adolescent, Shawn, blended academic and non-academic dis-
courses uniquely and creatively into a third voice where this third voiceneither official
or unofficialrepresented stews of soundpop culture marinated in the traditions (p.
143). In producing, consuming and deconstructing lyrical texts and freestyle rap to socially
narrate and critique daily life and injustice, their literacy practices served as a social
memory which indexed particular moments in the history of the young mens lives (p.
144). Their literacy practices also reflected their cultural ideologiestheir particular and
situated understandings of self and community (p. 145). While much researchincluding
within science educationhas given attention to the pedagogical design of third spaces as
a means of bridging the in-school academic world and the out-of-school cultural worlds of
adolescents, Kirklands metaphor of third voice enunciates a more reticent starting point
for culturally sensitive curriculum and pedagogies. To hear the literate lives of adolescents
is to push back against politically dehumanizing and de-literacizing neo-liberal edu-
cational policies and practices which privilege a singular, whitewashed view of literacy in
order to standardize curriculum and instruction, preserve power in the hands of the pow-
erful, and exacerbate socio-economic, racial, ethnic, and linguistic divisions. Without
attention to adolescent literate voices, traditional print literacy practices and or the sanc-
tioned knowledge of select disciplinary experts becomes the marginalizing force in
classrooms. To this end, how is language used amongst Pangasinan students? What counts
as literacy and critique across multiple networks among those who identify as Pangasinan?
And, perhaps most importantly, how does power influence who controls the means for
using literate practices for personal and communal benefit? Only then can we design and
enact culturally sensitive curriculum where the third voices of Pangasinan students not just
inform the curriculum but become the physics curriculum.

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Enacting culturally sensitive teaching

The curriculum developers in this study followed the Understanding by Design framework by
Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2004) to design opportunities for students to explore
scientific issues important to Pangasinan culture. As demonstrated in the exploration of the
impact of light on the fisher folks in the Lingayen Gulf activity shown in Fig. 1 of Paz
Morales paper, this curricular design infused daily Pangasinan experiences and practices into
scientific inquiry while building adolescent scientific conceptual knowledge through their
native language. Even reflective logs (shown in figure 2 of her paper) represented a linguistic
bridge between Pangasinan and the mandated language of instruction and assessment-Eng-
lish. Whether the presence of bagoong, bangus, bucayo, or the use of the scientific method to
understand power plants in nearby towns, the curricular modules in this study reflected a
desire to build from the assumed prior scientific and linguistic knowledge of students. By
using the Epistemological Beliefs Assessment in Physical Sciences (EBAPS) this study
acknowledged the complexity involved with culturally sensitive curriculum. However, when
enacted, does the teacher perceive the discipline to be full of questions to be explored by
anyone through the construction of scientific knowledge applicable to daily life? Does the
teacher view Pangasinan learners as holding funds of knowledge and identities garnered
through daily participation in complex social networks involving multiple languages, cul-
tures and identities? And, to what extent does the teacher view herself as a co-participant in
local scientific inquiry who creates a space where all learners are apprenticed into the con-
cepts, discourse, and practices valued in the discipline? The enacted curriculumcreated
daily through culturally sensitive interactionsprovides an avenue for scientific literacy.
Even when provided with official curricula, the cultural sensitivity lies not in the
module, but in the daily enactment by science teachers and students. In their review of
research on out of school literacy practices, David Kirkland and Glynda Hull (2011) noted
the community literacy offered to adolescents in formal out of school, community-
based, after-school, and extra-school programs often offer opportunities for intercultural
communication, social action, and activism (p. 714). While all adolescents need access to
mainstream scientific content in the form of crosscutting concepts, core ideas and disci-
plinary practices as articulated in the Next Generation Science Standards (2013), science
teaching, as Elizabeth Moje suggested (2007), can become socially just pedagogy which
provides access to dominant ways of knowing while offering opportunities for adolescents
to critique the mainstream scientific knowledge. How might the science teacher frame
scientific inquiry regarding Pangasinan fishing and local ecological footprints? What do
Pangasinan students already understand about how local fisherman identify and negotiate
these tensions through discourse? How could students use scientific claims and inquiry to
construct knowledge of human ecological concepts and advocate for more socially just
fishing laws? Culturally sensitive teaching frames essential questions and understandings
in light of the literate practices, experiences, and social injustices of Pangasinan students.
The voices of students as shown in the Cultural Profile of Pangasinan Learners (Table 3)
demonstrated student desire to be heard and valued. As practitioners take on the increasingly
complex task of assessing student growth in scientific concepts and literate practices, the
students in this study articulated a desire to be included in analyzing the influence of
instructional decisions upon their own scientific learning. Through inclusion in assessments
of learning, for learning and as learning, and through the use of L1 as the primary language of
instruction, Pangasinan students can be positioned as knowledgeable. As Eli Tucker-Ray-
mond, Daisy Torres-Petrovich, Keith Dumbleton, and Ellen Damlich (2012) contend, the

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naturally occurring tensions in these third spaces between school and out of school literacy
practices create opportunities for humanizing pedagogies where teachers, students, and
sociopolitical worlds are entailed in one another as they work towards liberation (p. 239).
Within these boundary crossings, students can become co-constructors and co-assessors of
local scientific knowledge where the assessment of individual knowledge and demonstration
of scientific practices is accompanied by the collective assessment of the impact of scientific
knowledge where the literate practices, experiences, and social injustices within Pangasinan-
speaking communities. Responsive disciplinary literacy teaching designs authentic scientific
inquiry in light of the literate practices, experiences, and social injustices of Pangasinan
students while also positioning students as assessment partners.
Finally, culturally sensitive curricula and teaching can jointly address the uniqueness within
cultural groups. While this research study used systematic tools to construct a thorough cultural
profile of Pangasinan students, culturally responsive provides intentional literacy scaffolding
based on the unique needs of students. As this study reported, given their individual funds of
cultural knowledge, Pangasinan students desired to be included in instructional decision-
making. Not only did students prefer a teacher familiar with their culture, practices, and
traditions, fluent in their mother tongue, and familiar with the misconceptions often brought
about by their cultural backgrounds, but students valued instructional flexibility in order to
support their meaningful learning (see Table 3 of the original paper). For example, while their
collective cultural profile suggested they preferred instruction to be structured collaboratively,
generalizing instructional practices based upon this cultural profile might prompt their science
teacher to overlook the unique learning needs of specific students. Identifying best practice
instruction based on a generalized profile of cultural learning preferences is illusive since the
actions of teachers, like those of everyone else, are constantly responsive to the vast and largely
unarticulated network of shared understandings that comprise much of what people mean when
they talk of common sense. Or, as Hlebowitsh (2012) argued, there is a fallacy in assuming that
individual members of a group necessarily carry the average characteristics of the aggregate
group (p. 4). Inherently, the mere notion of best practice is largely a convergent exercise
a delimiting of different approaches in the interests of finding a single, undifferentiated pro-
cess (p. 5). Therefore, while this study designed curricula based on a thorough cultural profile
of a student population, culturally sensitive teaching considers the third voices within cultural
populations when enacting instruction.

Concluding thoughts

The integration of Pangasinan cultural experiences, epistemological stances, and language

into curriculum materials enhanced student attitudes towards and appreciation of science.
With just 2 % of the Filipino population identifying as Pangasinan speaking, student par-
ticipation in scientific learning requires a leap of faith in the legitimacy of the authority, and
in the good intentions of those exercising it. For historically marginalized students, resistance
to formal schooling, as Erickson (1987) suggested, may also represent a form of resistance
to a stigmatized ethnic or social class identity that is being assigned by the school (p. 350).
However, the findings in this study revealed the students took the leap of faith and recog-
nized the good intentions of policy makers who valued indigenous culture as scientific
bridge, researches who sought further knowledge of culturally sensitive curriculum and
pedagogy, and teachers who prioritized the cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge owned
by Pangasinan students. A deeper understanding of the complex literate lives of Pangasinan

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students can inform culturally sensitive curriculum (and teaching) and deepen student atti-
tudes and scientific literacy situated within Pangasinan communities.

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Phillip Wilder is an Assistant Professor in Literacy at Clemson University. His research partners with
schools to create pedagogies, curricula and policies leading to more equitable literate spaces for adolescents.

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