Science educators are confronted with the challenge to accommodate in their classes an increasing cultural and linguistic diversity that results from globalization. Challenged by the call to work towards valuing and keeping this diversity in the face of the canonical nature of school science discourse, we propose a new way of thinking about and…

Cultural-historical activity theory, an outcrop of socio-psychological approaches toward human development, has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past two decades but has yet to be appropriated into science education to any large extent. In part, the difficulties Western scholars have had in adopting this framework arise from its ontology, which…

Geometry, classification, and the classification of geometrical objects are integral aspects of recent curriculum documents in mathematics education. Such curriculum documents, however, leave open how the "work" of classifying objects according to geometrical properties can be accomplished given that the knowledge of these properties is the…

Most academic science educators encourage teachers to provide their students with access to more authentic science activities. What can and do teachers say to increase students' interests in participating in opportunities to do real science? What are the discursive "resources" they draw on to introduce authentic science to students? The purpose of…

Presents a teacher's reflection on his teaching using two different perspectives. The first perspective uses the cognitive apprenticeship metaphor as a tool for analyzing and understanding teaching. The second, a methodological perspective, uses conversational analysis to arrive at microanalytic descriptions and conceptualizations of teaching. (PR)

In the past several years a number of authors have suggested that science education could benefit from insights gained by research in the social studies of science that documents and theorises science as it is actually done. There currently exist two gaps in the literature. First, most research in science studies are concerned with the practices…

Explores why students fail to learn from teacher demonstrations in a physics course. Reports that six dimensions may have prevented student learning, including lack of a theoretical framework to separate signals from noise, interference of discourses learned in other contexts, interference from other demonstrations and images, and problems in…

Reviews existing literature on gestures and teaching in anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and education and, in the context of several concrete analyses of gesture use, articulates some focal questions relevant to educational research on knowing, learning, and teaching. (SLD)

Responds to the criticism offered by M. Scriven of the call for a radical new approach to teacher evaluation made by M. Roth and K. Tobin, noting that more builders of evaluation theory are needed, especially builders of theory that can be useful as the starting point for change. (SLD)

Presents a model of collective teaching and learning as a way to build deep learning of science concepts while learning about alternative ways to teach the same subject matter. Articulates coteaching/cogenerative dialoguing in terms of activity theory and the associated first-person research methodology that has been developed as a method for…

Studied analogy generation and development and analogical reasoning with 25 German tenth graders in a physics class. Results show the advantages and disadvantages of using analogies in promoting conceptual change and as a teaching technique. (SLD)

Inscriptions are central to the practice of science. Previous studies showed, however, that preservice teachers even those with undergraduate degrees in science, generally do not spontaneously produce inscriptions that economically summarize large amounts of data. This study was designed to investigate the production of inscription while a group…

Why do the designers of environmental education do what they do towards the environment through education? More importantly, how do they account for their design decisions (plans and actions)? Using the theoretical and methodological framework of discourse analysis, we analyse environmental education designers' discourse in terms of the discursive…

When lecturing, teachers make use of both verbal and nonverbal communication. What is called teaching, therefore, involves not only the words and sentences a teacher utters and writes on the board during a lesson, but also all the hands/arms gestures, body movements, and facial expressions a teacher "performs" in the classroom. All of these…

Describes a case study of an expert teacher's questioning strategies during an open-inquiry engineering curriculum in a grade four and five classroom. Analysis provides evidence for the complexity of questioning that is characterized by the interactions of context and content of, and response and reactions to, questions. Contains 45 references.…