Preservice teachers' views of the nature of science using Black heritage, lived experiences, and science capital as a context for inquiry.

This research is part of a larger project to situate Black lived experiences and narratives in the science curricula. This work provides further analyses and conceptualization of a portion of prior work. In this study, Black science capital serves as a context for inquiry explorations into scientific, science-related, and non-science inquiries, depending on preservice teachers' interests. Participants were undergraduate elementary education majors enrolled in a second-semester science methods course at an Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Pre- and post-surveys consisted of two types of questions. Selected questions from the widely used, already-vetted Lederman et al. views of the nature of science, version C, were combined with new questions about including Black representation in the science curricula. An amalgamation of frameworks was used to facilitate connections with science, the nature of science and knowledge, and preservice teachers' cultural and cognitive predispositions for science, within a context that focuses on Black assets. The family resemblance approach provided surface connections between the nature of science and outcomes related to the lived experiences and science capital of Black heritage in science, while schema theory attended to nuances and connections that emerged from different types of knowledge. The significance of this work lies in the inclusion and use of data for inquiry, which captures the science capital of Black African heritage. Recommendations for future directions and improvements are provided for continued discussions, with implications for connections between scientific ways of knowing, practices, and approaches that meaningfully include the practices and experiences of Black with Indigenous people, to provide a more accurate and comprehensive view of science.