This study applies an “anthropological” approach to science teaching in which language minority families work with mainstream educators in a community of learners in which traditional cultural knowledge and Western scientific knowledge blend in an inter-cultural dialogue about what should be taught. The particular context in this paper is a mainstream California elementary school as it interacts with a clan of Mien refugee families from Laos using a family literacy project and a school-community garden as inter-cultural spaces in which dialogue can occur. The target subjects are science and literacy as forwarded by the Bilingual Integrated Curriculum Project (BICOMP), a Title VII Academic Excellence Project for which the author served as disseminator/trainer during the course of this research. The focus of this paper is not on curriculum development, however, but on the inter-cultural dialogue that can occur when minority and majority voices join together to develop curricula appropriate for the children they both teach. This dialogue stands in contrast to standard forms of parent involvement, which either fail to involve language minority families or involve them only as recipients rather than generators of knowledge. (Contains 16 references.) (Author/YDS)
