Relational Ecologies: Examining Community-Based Science Learning in a Community School

Symone Gyles

Justice-centered, community-based science (CBS) has the potential to foster critical, consequential learning experiences by connecting classroom inquiry to students' lived experiences and community knowledge. Yet, dominant schooling structures often constrain teachers' ability to engage in these ambitious pedagogies. Community Schools (CSs), with explicit commitments to community connection, offer a promising context for CBS to thrive. Despite research emphasizing the importance of integrating CS structures into daily teaching, current scholarship largely focuses on how its core pillars are enacted in out-of-classroom supports, with limited attention to how these structures shape everyday instructional practice. This study theorizes the relational ecologies, or symbiotic relationship, between CBS and CSs by examining how CSs might sustain justice-centered CBS amid the challenges of enacting such practices, and how CBS can, in turn, concretize the promises of CSs within classroom learning. Through an ethnographic case study of an elementary CS engaging in CBS across grade levels, this project illuminates (1) how CS contexts (e.g. values, commitments, and infrastructures) can advance justice-centered CBS classroom learning, and (2) how CBS can serve as a mechanism for actualizing the pedagogical potentials of community schooling. By conceptualizing CBS as a mechanism for enacting the core commitments of CS, this project advances a curricular and pedagogical framework for integrating CBS in CS classroom practice. In doing so, this work contributes to broader efforts to reimagine science education as a site of equity, relationality, and community connection, and advances the field's understanding of CS as sites of transformative science learning.

About Symone Gyles

Symone Gyles is an assistant professor of Science Education at the University of California, Irvine where she investigates the co-design, implementation, and impact of community-based, culturally sustaining, and justice-centered science curriculum and instruction. Informed by her experiences as a marine scientist and middle school science teacher, her scholarship examines how science education can contextualize learning in its community, social, cultural and historical contexts, and how students, families, and communities can be positioned as legitimate and valued knowledge holders. Dr. Gyles' work across the K-16 spectrum broadly works to challenge traditional notions of power and expertise in science by reimagining of who holds scientific knowledge, where scientific knowledge is derived from, and who is recognized as a science expert, while also redefining the purpose of science toward positioning science education as a part of broader justice movements. Her work has been published in Teachers College Record, the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, and Cultural Studies of Science Education. Her article, Exploring science teachers' efforts to frame phenomena in the community, received the 2024 National Science Teacher Association (NSTA) /National Association of Research in Science Teaching (NARST) Research Worth Reading Award. Beyond her research, she serves as the Associate Faculty Director of the Organizing Collaboration for Educational Advancement Network (OCEAN), where she supports research-practice partnerships that center community needs and priorities and engage in actionable research that translates findings into improvements in teaching and learning. Dr. Gyles earned her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).