PROMOTING SECONDARY STUDENTS' IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT IN GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION

The presentation will introduce a perspective on secondary geoscience teachers' professional development that emphasizes the significance of adolescent identity formation to enhancing students' academic achievement and interest in geoscience. Identity action theory (Author, 2008) is the basis for this perspective, and the theory asserts two relevant propositions. First, teachers' attention to students' identity development is a fruitful avenue for promoting interest and enhancing academic achievement in geoscience and is likely to yield greater returns than teacher efforts at increasing students' academic motivation. Second, geoscience teachers can establish classroom conditions and devise science learning tasks that encourage, support, sustain, and validate adolescents' identities.

In our NSF-sponsored teacher professional development program, we are working with 10 middle and high school science teachers to introduce identity action theory and help them devise ways to attend to their students' identity development, and create instructional activities in geoscience that support identity explorations. In doing so, geoscience teachers engage in “identity work” with students (Author, 2008). Particularly salient is an emphasis on students' possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1987), which are individuals' ideas about what they desire becoming (i.e., scientist), wish to avoid becoming (i.e., school dropout), and realistically expect to become (i.e., “good” student). Possible selves are significant because they compel action toward accomplishing goals. The teachers work in schools with significant numbers of Hispanic students, a subgroup that is particularly at-risk for academic failure and school dropout – and which is under-represented in geoscience.

We are documenting the teachers' responses to the identity work model and gathering information on their efforts to incorporate identity action theory principles into geoscience instruction and classroom activities. The presentation will summarize what we have learned about the relevance of identity work to geoscience achievement for secondary grades' students. We will describe planned follow-up work, and will suggest tentative implications of our work for promoting students' interest and achievement in geoscience.