From School Program to Science Lesson: Developing the Cultural Competence of Biology, Chemistry and Physics Teachers in a Multilingual School
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15294/jpii.v15i3.49539Keywords:
cultural competence, science, ethnoscienceAbstract
In multi-ethnic, multilingual classrooms, the science teacher must move students between the subculture of canonical science and the cultural repertoires they bring to the laboratory bench, and Target 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals makes that movement an explicit obligation of science education. How a school builds this capacity in its own biology, chemistry, and physics teachers is thinly documented outside Anglophone and Southeast Asian settings. This study asks how a multi-ethnic secondary school converts a national infrastructure program into a working routine for developing its science teachers' cultural competence, and how far that routine reaches the science lesson itself. A single-case insider action research design was used in a state secondary school in Astana, Kazakhstan, with municipal experimental-site status. The authors analyzed seven categories of documentary evidence through qualitative content analysis with two independent coders. The routine runs through three stacked layers rather than by individual initiative: a regulatory layer that authorizes the work, an operational layer that distributes it across a nine-month thematic cycle, and a reflexive layer that converts it into evidence. Its instructional output is a subject-specific didactics cleared by the city Expert Council, in which four chemistry cases invert the concept-culture relation - equilibrium, catalysis, and collision theory become instruments for reading cultural situations - while the biology and geography examples follow the Ethnoscience direction. The evidence equally shows the limits: no record of any case reaching a lesson, nineteen of sixty-six student events carrying natural-science content, and monitoring instruments that measure school climate rather than science teaching. Schools pursuing SDG 4.7 through a whole-school route should install a lesson-facing instrument from the outset.
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