Wolff-Michael Roth

Angela Calabrese Barton

This volume proposes a new way to conceive of scientific literacy, as it has emerged from two research agendas that the authors have been pursuing independently but which have converged conceptually.

Rethinking Scientific Literacy

Jacques Désautels

Science Education as/for Sociopolitical Action is about alternative ways of looking at science education. Rather than focusing on the transfer or construction of knowledge, the authors focus on the role of science education as a starting point for engaging students in social action. Sometimes, social action is the starting point and students learn science and about science as they pursue their goals. The authors provide concrete descriptions for curriculum design, or how an alternative curriculum design has worked in practice. This book shows that science education can be radically different from current practice without losing its appeal.

Science Education As/for Sociopolitical Action

Lucy Avraamidou

Science learning that takes place between and at the intersections of formal and informal science environments has not been systematically reviewed to offer a comprehensive understanding of the existing knowledge base. Bringing together theory and research, this volume describes the various ways in which learning science in various settings has been conceptualized as well as empirical evidence to illustrate how science learning in these settings can be supported.

Intersections of Formal and Informal Science

SungWon Hwang

This book is about the sensuous, living body without which individual knowing and learning is impossible. It is the interface between the individual and culture. Recent scholarship has moved from investigated knowing and learning as something in the mind or brain to understanding these phenomena in terms of the body (embodiment literature) or culture (social constructivism). These two literatures have expanded the understanding of cognition to include the role of the body in shaping the mind and to recognize the tight relation between mind and culture. However, there are numerous problems arising from ways in which the body and culture are thought in these separate research domains. In this book, the authors present an interdisciplinary, scientific initiative that brings together the concerns for body and for culture to develop a single theory of cognition centered on the living and lived body. This book thereby contributes to bridging the gap that currently exists between theory (knowing that) and praxis (knowing how) that is apparent in the existing science and mathematics education literatures.

The Interface of Culture and Mind

Scientific & Mathematical Bodies

Kadriye Ercikan

"This book frames the major challenge facing educational researchers as one of going beyond the mindless qualitative-quantitative divide and addressing the overarching/fundamental challenge of enriching and enlarging educational inquiry. It is a signature contribution to the field." - Clifton F. Conrad, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Tackling one of the most critical issues in education research today - how research methods are related to value and meaningfulness - this frontline volume achieves two purposes. First, it presents an integrated approach to educational inquiry that works toward a continuum instead of a dichotomy of generalizability, and looks at how this continuum might be related to types of research questions asked and how these questions should determine modes of inquiry. Second, it discusses and demonstrates the contributions of different data types and modes of research to generalizability of research findings, and to limitations of research findings that utilize a single approach. International leaders in the field take the discussion of generalizing in education research to a level where claims are supported using multiple types of evidence. The volume pushes the field in a different direction, where the focus is on creating meaningful research findings that are not polarized by qualitative versus quantitative methodologies. The integrative approach allows readers to better understand possibilities and shortcomings of different types of research.

Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Polarization

Generalizing from Educational Research

Over the past two decades, the theoretical interests of mathematics educators have changed substantially—as any brief look at the titles and abstracts of articles shows. Largely through the work of Paul Cobb and his various collaborators, mathematics educators came to be attuned to the intricate relationship between individual and the social configuration of which she or he is part. That is, this body of work, running alongside more traditional constructivist and psychological approaches, showed that what happens at the collective level in a classroom both constrains and affords opportunities for what individuals do (their practices). Increasingly, researchers focused on the mediational role of sociomathematical norms and how these emerged from the enacted lessons. A second major shift in mathematical theorizing occurred during the past decade: there is an increasing focus on the embodied and bodily manifestation of mathematical knowing (e.g., Lakoff & Núñez, 2000). Mathematics educators now working from this perspective have come to their position from quite different bodies of literatures: for some, linguistic concerns and mathematics as material praxis lay at the origin for their concerns; others came to their position through the literature on the situated nature of cognition; and yet another line of thinking emerged from the work on embodiment that Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela advanced. Whatever the historical origins of their thinking, mathematics educators taking an embodiment perspective presuppose that it is of little use to think of mathematical knowing in terms of transcendental concepts somehow recorded in the brain, but rather, that we need to conceptual knowing as mediated by the human body, which, because of its senses, is at the origin of sense. One of the question seldom asked is how the two perspectives, one that focuses on the bodily, embodied nature of mathematical cognition and the other that focuses on its social nature, can be thought together. This edited volume situates itself at the intersection of theoretical and focal concerns of both of these lines of work. In all chapters, the current culture both at the classroom and at the societal level comes to be expressed and provides opportunities for expressing oneself in particular ways; and these expressions always are bodily expressions of body-minds. As a collective, the chapters focus on mathematical knowledge as an aspect or attribute of mathematical performance; that is, mathematical knowing is in the doing rather than attributable to some mental substrate structured in particular ways as conceived by conceptual change theorists or traditional cognitive psychologists. The collection as a whole shows readers important aspects of mathematical cognition that are produced and observable at the interface between the body (both human and those of [inherently material] inscriptions) and culture. Drawing on cultural-historical activity theory, the editor develops an integrative perspective that serves as a background to a narrative that runs through and pulls together the book into an integrated whole.

Mathematical Representation at the Interface of Body and Culture

Randy K. Yerrick

Establishing Scientific Classroom Discourse Communities: Multiple Voices of Teaching and Learning Research is designed to encourage discussion of issues surrounding the reform of classroom science discourse among teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. The contributors--some of the top educational researchers, linguists, and science educators in the world--represent a variety of perspectives pertaining to teaching, assessment, research, learning, and reform. As a whole the book explores the variety, complexity, and interconnectivity of issues associated with changing classroom learning communities and transforming science classroom discourse to be more representative of the discourse of scientific communities. The intent is to expand debate among educators regarding what constitutes exemplary scientific speaking, thinking, and acting. This book is unparalleled in discussing current reform issues from sociolinguistic and sociocultural perspectives. The need for a revised perspective on enduring science teaching and learning issues is established and a theoretical framework and methodology for interpreting the critique of classroom and science discourses is presented. To model and scaffold this ongoing debate, each chapter is followed by a "metalogue" in which the chapter authors and volume editors critique the issues traversed in the chapter by opening up the neatly argued issues. These "metalogues" challenge, extend, and deepen the arguments made. Central questions addressed include: *Why is a sociolinguistic interpretation essential in examining science education reform? *What are key similarities and differences between classroom and scientific communities? *How can the utility of common knowledge and existing classroom discourse be balanced toward alternative outcomes? *What curricular issues are associated with transforming classroom talk? *What other perspectives can assist in creating multiple access to science through redefining classroom discourse? Whether this volume improves readers' science teaching, assists their research, or helps them to better prepare tomorrow's science teachers, the goal is to engage them in considering the challenges faced by educators as they navigate the seas of reform and strive to improve science education for all.

Multiple Voices of Teaching and Learning Research

Establishing Scientific Classroom Discourse Communities

Swapna Mukhopadhyay

This book grew out of a public lecture series, Alternative forms of knowledge construction in mathematics, conceived and organized by the first editor, and held annually at Portland State University from 2006. Starting from the position that mathematics is a human construction, implying that it cannot be separated from its historical, cultural, social, and political contexts, the purpose of these lectures was to provide a public intellectual space to interrogate conceptions of mathematics and mathematics education, particularly by looking at mathematical practices that are not considered relevant to mainstream mathematics education. One of the main thrusts was to contemplate the fundamental question of whose mathematics is to be valorized in a multicultural world, a world in which, as Paolo Freire said, “The intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized asnon-intellectual”. To date, nineteen scholars (including the second editor) have participated in the series. All of the lectures have been streamed for global dissemination at:http://www.media.pdx.edu/dlcmedia/events/AFK/. Most of the speakers contributed a chapter to this book, based either on their original talk or on a related topic. The book is divided into four sections dealing with: • Mathematics and the politics of knowledge • Ethnomathematics • Learning to see mathematically • Mathematics education for social justice.

Celebrations of Diversity of Mathematical Practices

ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF KNOWING (IN) MATHEMATICS

This book is about language in STEM research and about how it is thought about: as something that somehow refers to something else not directly accessible, often «meaning», «mental representation», or «conception». Using the analyses of real data and analyses of the way certain concepts are used in the scientifi c literature, such as “meaning,” this book reframes the discussion about «meaning», «mental representation», and «conceptions» consistent with the pragmatic approaches that we have become familiar with through the works of K. Marx, L. S. Vygotsky, M. M. Bakhtin, V. N. Vološinov, L. Wittgenstein, F. Mikhailov, R. Rorty, and J. Derrida, to name but a few. All of these scholars, in one or another way, articulate a critique of a view of language that has been developed in a metaphysical approach from Plato through Kant and modern constructivism; this view of language, which already for Wittgenstein was an outmoded view in the middle of the last century, continuous to be alive today and dominating the way language is thought about and theorized.

A Pragmatic Approach

On Meaning and Mental Representation

In the course of his research career, much of which was based in his own classrooms, Wolff-Michael Roth explored numerous new theoretical frameworks when the old ones proved to be unable to account for the data. In this book, surrounding 11 of his publications spanning 20 years of work, the author tells a story of how science education research concretely realized and singularized itself.

A Life in Research

In Search of Meaning and Coherence

Maria Ines Mafra Goulart

Katerina Plakitsi

Children’s learning and understanding of science during their pre-school years has been a neglected topic in the education literature—something this volume aims to redress. Paradigmatic notions of science education, with their focus on biologically governed development and age-specific accession to scientific concepts, have perpetuated this state of affairs. This book offers a very different perspective, however. It has its roots in the work of cultural-historical activity theorists, who, since Vygotsky, have assumed that any higher cognitive function existed in and as a social relation first. Accepting this precept removes any lower limit we may deem appropriate on children’s cognitive engagement with science-related concepts. The authors describe and analyze the ways in which children aged from one to five grapple with scientific concepts, and also suggest ways in which pre-service and in-service teachers can be prepared to teach in ways that support children’s development in cultural and historical contexts. In doing so, the book affirms the value of cultural-historical activity theory as an appropriate framework for analyzing preschool children’s participation in science learning experiences, and shows that that the theory provides an appropriate framework for understanding learning, as well as for planning and conducting training for pre-school teachers.

A Cultural-Historical Perspective

Science Education during Early Childhood

Psychology, quantitative or qualitative, tends to conceive of the human person using metaphysical concepts and to separate the practical, affective, and intellectual aspects of participation in everyday life. Lev S. Vygotsky, however, was working towards a "concrete human psychology," a goal that he expresses in a small, unfinished text of the same name. This book articulates the foundation of and develops such a concrete human psychology according to which all higher psychological functions are relations between persons before being functions, and according to which personality is the ensemble of societal relations with others that a person has lived and experienced. Correlated with concern for the concreteness of human life and the psychology that theorizes it is the idea that to live means to change. However, none of the categories we currently have in psychology are categories of change as such. In this work of concrete human psychology, categories are developed on the basis of Vygotsky’s work that are suitable to theorize an ever-changing life, including the language humans use to take control over their conditions and to talk about the conditions in which they live.

Concrete Human Psychology

Toward the end of his life, the Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky turned away from his earlier work that he has become famous for only to sow the seeds for a new theory. In this theory, affect was to play a central role, there was to be a primacy of social relations, and anything mental (mind, thought, self, other, knowledge) was an event rather than a thing. This is essentially a transactional perspective. In this book, the author articulates a transactional psychology of education drawing on the works of G.H. Mead, J. Dewey, G. Bateson, F. Mikhailov, and E. Il’enkov. All theoretical positions are developed out of videotaped exchanges, thereby giving concrete character to every psychological concept articulated.

Toward a Strong Version of the Social

Transactional Psychology of Education

According to John Dewey, Seymour Papert, Donald Schon, and Allan Collins, school activities, to be authentic, need to share key features with those worlds about which they teach. This book documents learning and teaching in open-inquiry learning environments, designed with the precepts of these educational thinkers in mind. The book is thus a first-hand report of knowing and learning by individuals and groups in complex open-inquiry learning environments in science. As such, it contributes to the emerging literature in this field. Secondly, it exemplifies research methods for studying such complex learning environments. The reader is thus encouraged not only to take the research findings as such, but to reflect on the process of arriving at these findings. Finally, the book is also an example of knowledge constructed by a teacher-researcher, and thus a model for teacher-researcher activity.

Knowing and Learning in Open-Inquiry Science Laboratories

Authentic School Science

Alfredo Jornet

This book takes up the agenda of the late (but unknown) L. S. Vygotsky, who had turned to the philosopher Spinoza to develop a holistic approach to psychology, an approach that no longer dichotomized the body and mind, intellect and affect, or the individual and the social. In this approach, there is only one substance, which manifests itself in different ways in the thinking body, including as biology and culture. The manifestation as culture is premised on the existence of the social. In much of current educational psychology, there are unresolved contradictions that have their origin in the opposition between body and mind, individual and collective, and structure and process—including the different nature of intellect and affect or the difference between knowledge and its application. Many of the same contradictions are repeated in constructivist approaches, which do not overcome dichotomies but rather acerbate them by individualizing and intellectualizing our knowledgeable participation in recognizably exhibiting and producing the everyday cultural world. Interestingly enough, L. S. Vygotsky, who is often used as a referent for making arguments about inter- and intrasubjective “mental” “constructions,” developed, towards the end of his life, a Spinozist approach according to which there is only one substance. This one substance manifests itself in two radically different ways: body (material, biology) and mind (society, culture). But there are not two substances that are combined into a unit; there is only one substance. Once such an approach is adopted, the classical question of cognitive scientists about how symbols are grounded in the world comes to be recognized as an artefact of the theory. Drawing on empirical materials from different learning settings—including parent-child, school, and workplace settings—this book explores the opportunities and implications that this non-dualist approach has for educational research and practice.

A Late Vygotskian, Spinozist Approach

Understanding Educational Psychology

Domenico Masciotra

Denise Morel

This book is addressed to all those in the field of education or related fields, including teachers, teacher-trainers, consultants, and researchers, who are interested in exploring the question, “What does it mean to know, to learn and to teach?”

Toward a Zen Mind in Learning and Teaching

Enaction

Examines the importance of talking about science in classrooms and argues that the ways instructors describe science and scientific writings influence learner outcomes the most.

Language and Learning in Science Classrooms

Talking Science

The study described in this book arose in the contextof a three-year collective effort to bring about change in science teaching at Mountain Elementary School. 1 This opportunity emerged after I contacted the school with the idea to help teachers implement student-centered science teaching. At the same time, the teachers collectively had come to realize that their science teaching was not as exciting to children as it could be. They had recognized their own teaching as textbook-based with little use of the "hands-on" approaches prescribed by the provincial curriculum. At this point, the teachers and I decided that a joint project would serve our mutual goals: they wanted assistance in changing from textbook-based approaches to student-centered activities; I wanted to collect data on learning in student-centered knowledge producing classroom communities. I brought to this school my new understandings about classroom communi ties from several earlier studies conducted in a private high school (e. g. , Roth & Bowen, 1995; Roth & Roychoudhury, 1992). I wanted to help teachers create science learning environments in which children took charge of their learning, where children learned from more competent others by participating with them in ongoing activities, and teachers were responsible for setting up and maintaining a classroom community rather than for dissem inating information. After I had completed the data collection for the present study, I watched a documentary about an elementary school in the small French village of Moussac (Envoye Special, TV5, September 14, 1994).

Designing Communities

In qualitative research, one can often hear the statement that research results are just (social) constructions. In criminal cases and in court hearings, we tend to expect that the true sequence of events has to be found rather than just any story. Here the author shows that qualitative social research can be conducted in the manner of police work or court proceedings. He does so by exhibiting how short pieces of transcriptions can be approached to uncover who, when, where, and how participated, what kind of social situation produced the transcription, and so on without any background knowledge other than that talk itself. Commenting on transcriptions of a researcher in the course of doing rigorous data analysis, readers learn doing ethnographically adequate accounts and critical institutional ethnography “at the elbow” of an experienced practitioners. Further topics include the role of turn sequences, the ethnomethods of knowledge-power and institutional relations, the documentary method of interpretation, and time-sensitive social analysis.

Wolff-Michael Roth

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