Where Did Dinosaurs Come From? Teachers Encountering Religious Oppositions in Diversity-Rich Science Classrooms

This paper reports on K–12 teachers' perspectives about their experiences of facing religious oppositions while teaching science in elementary and secondary classrooms in a large urban city in western Canada. The study stems from a larger doctoral research, which drew on the principles of a qualitative case study approach and employed phenomenographic methods to investigate teachers' perspectives. A comprehensive (transmulti)culturally responsive education framework, which amalgamates transformational and critical multicultural education perspectives and notions of culturally responsive teaching, served as a guiding lens for analyzing and interpreting the collected data. Key findings include teachers' experiences of encountering religious oppositions in their science classrooms and teachers' acknowledgement of teaching science as an uncontroversial knowledge. Teachers' voices illustrate the issues that complicate the teaching of science to their culturally diverse students. These findings echo the need for creating spaces for increased teacher-parental collaboration and increased teacher training and support to promote (trans-multi)culturally responsive science education in cultural diversity-rich Canadian classrooms.