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First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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.
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.
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. That is, rather than taking sole credit for the work that ultimately came to bear his name, Roth develops a historical narrative in which his work came to realize cultural-historical possibilities inherent in the field of science education. But perhaps because some types of this work came to be realized for a first time, Roth’s research also came to be characterized by others in the community as “cutting edge.” This work, therefore presents as much an auto/biographical narrative as it presents a cultural-historical recollection of science education as it unfolded over the past two decades.
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.
In the history of psychology, ?rst-person methods, such as introspection, have come into disrepute in favor of the experimental approach. Yet the results of ?rst-person research – such as the famous studies provided by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception – have indeed produced knowledge subsequently ascertained by neuroscienti?c research. The purpose of this book is to assist readers in developing ?rst-person methods as a rigorous approach. It is designed to assist researchers in the ?eld of education to develop their competencies in the ?rst-person approach. Concrete examples, descriptions, precepts, and possible ?ndings are provided to guide readers in their inquiries. Surrounding the inquiries, re?ective commentaries assist readers to become re?exively aware of what they are doing and thereby come to bring into discourse the methods they have used. That is, readers are assisted in developing research praxis by experiencing ?rst-person methods ?rst hand and then to become re?exively aware of the method as method.
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 changi...
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.
Contributing to the social justice agenda of redefining what science is and what it means in the everyday lives of people, this book introduces science educators to various dimensions of viewing science and scientific literacy from the standpoint of the learner, engaged with real everyday concerns within or outside school; develops a new form of scholarship based on the dialogic nature of science as process and product; and achieves these two objectives in a readable but scholarly way. Opposing the tendency to teach and do research as if science, science education, and scientific literacy could be imposed from the outside, the authors want science education to be for people rather than stric...
Debriefing is a major component of the job in many high-risk industries where errors can have considerable, often deadly consequences, including combat, surgery, and aviation. Although there exists considerable literature on debriefing, recent reviews of the literature suggest (a) shortcomings in the topics researched, (b) paucity of related theory, (c) limitations in the number of empirical studies, and (d) problems in research design. There are also recent suggestions that "there are surprisingly studies in the scholarly literature that show how to debrief, how to teach or learn to debrief, what methods of debriefing exists and how effective they are at achieving learning objectives and go...