The body of research work presented in this dissertation integrates critical ethnography with video and conversation analyses in order to provide ways to articulate and understand the complexities associated with social life enactment as it unfolds during cogenerative dialogues and in the science classroom as the teacher and her students engage in science teaching and learning. The primary goal is to improve the teaching and learning of science in an urban science classroom at a public high school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In order to understand what is going on in the classroom and why, I worked with a female science teacher who identify as an African-American and her culturally diversified students in a biology class to examine teacher’s and students’ conscious and unconscious patterned actions, (i.e., classroom practices, that structure teaching and learning in the classroom. It is my belief that to improve science teaching and learning in the classroom, it is salient to improve science teacher’s practices as a precursor to transforming students’ practices. In order to ameliorate breaches in the fluency of encounters in the classroom, the teacher and her students need to establish and sustain critical, collaborative and collective conversations through cogen.

I employ theoretical lenses of cultural sociology that I triangulate with sociology of emotions and critical pedagogy. I focus on culture as schemas and associated practices layered with the triple dialectics of agency, passivity and structure as new or hybridized/interstitial cultures that are produced get enacted in the science classroom to transform teacher’s and her students’ encounters with each other. The salient implication is that since encounters are imbued with emotions, teacher and her students learn to generate positive emotional energy during cogen that gets reproduced and transformed in the science classroom. Positive emotional energy creates resources that help to initiate and sustain interaction ritual chains that support synchrony, solidarity, sense of affiliation and identity that are necessary for the teacher to be successful as a science teacher and her students to be successful as science learners.

Salient to the findings in this study is the need for teachers to envision teaching and learning as a collaborative and collective endeavor with their students. Teachers need the perspectives of others; and students are in the best position to provide the teacher with the authentic perspectives she needs to improve her practice. By being with and working with their teacher, students and teacher share their classroom experiences with each other, in an environment void of hegemony, in order to achieve their individual goals and collective motives in the urban science classroom. Teacher and her students get to know more about each other socially and culturally and are able to work through their differences to achieve success.