by Lim, Miyoun; Barton, Angela Calabrese
This paper offers an analysis into low-income, urban middle school children’s sense of place and what and how their sense of place matters in science learning by focusing on the following questions: In what ways is students’ sense of place leveraged in a science classroom? How does the content and context of science class shape how students leverage their sense of place? What learning opportunities emerge when sense of place is leveraged in class? Drawing from an ethnographic investigation into an environmental statistics class in a mid-sized public middle school, we examined sense of place events from their source, process, and outcome perspectives. Our findings are presented from two aspects of sense of place events, (1) characterizing students’ sense of place by exploring sources of the sense of place events, and (2) examining processes of how students’ sense of place is being leveraged in the episodes. We also examine two kinds of tensions that emerge in the class when sense of place is leveraged by students and acknowledged by the teacher: epistemological tensions (related to what the students are learning) and procedural tensions (related to how they are learning).

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-005-9002-9
Online Date: 12/27/2005
Print publication date: 1/1/2006
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by roth, wolff-michael; middleton, david
Research on knowing and learning in science commonly presupposes that knowledge, expertise, power, identity, and so on are stable features determining the outcome of interactions between individuals. In addition such individuals are conceptualized as differing in terms of the amount or types of the things in these categories. However, in a variety of disciplines including social psychology, sociology, and anthropology, the starting point for theoretical and empirical work is different: What really matters to social interaction is not the content of mind but how participants in social interaction deploy a variety of resources to constitute such things as memory, knowledge, expertise, and so on. This study was designed to investigate the local organization of interaction between research assistants, who had been hired to conduct a series of interviews (using a think-aloud protocol) about graphs, and scientists (N = 37) to better understand the person-situation interface in studies of scientific and mathematical knowing. Drawing on analytic methods from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, our analyses show how knowledgeability with respect to graphs and natural phenomena, assessment, giving and receiving of instruction, accountability, insight, and uncertainty are continuously shifting as interview participants draw on a variety of resources as means for managing the task at hand. In the process, uncertainty itself is managed by drawing on uncertainty.
DOI: 10.1007/s11422-005-9000-y
Online Date: 12/27/2005
Print publication date: 1/1/2006
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by Kozoll, Richard H.; Osborne, Margery D.
Much research in science education has focused on the conflicts that exist between individuals’ ways of knowing the world and science. We have been left without an image of the compatibility or congruency that is necessary for science to occupy a fundamental position in a person’s life. In this study we argue that Keith, a Jamaican American pre-service teacher, provides us with such an image. Using narrative, we trace the development of Keith’s relationship with science over time and space in order to understand how Keith has constructed an identity through science amid the larger structures and contexts that comprise his life. We believe Keith’s stories of practicing science in and out of the classroom illustrate how science, while taking an essential position in his lifeworld, extends and articulates Keith’s subjective stances on experience. As part of his lifeworld, Keith finds a sense of value in science that turns it into a discipline that is part of the person he both is and wants to be and the world he wants to shape as a teacher.
DOI: 10.1007/s11422-005-9004-7
Online Date: 12/27/2005
Print publication date: 1/1/2006
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by Kincheloe, Joe L.; McKinley, Elizabeth; Lim, Miyoun; Barton, Angela Calabrese

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-005-9003-8
Online Date: 12/27/2005
Print publication date: 1/1/2006
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by Lemke, Jay; Kelly, Greg; Roth, Wolff-Michael

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-005-9001-x
Online Date: 12/27/2005
Print publication date: 1/1/2006
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by Tobin, Kenneth

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-005-9006-5
Online Date: 12/27/2005
Print publication date: 1/1/2006
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by Roth, Wolff-Michael; Tobin, Kenneth

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-005-9005-6
Online Date: 12/24/2005
Print publication date: 1/1/2006
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by Taylor, Peter Charles

DOI: 10.1007/s11422-005-9007-4
Online Date: 12/24/2005
Print publication date: 1/1/2006
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