Contextualising Learning through the Participatory Construction of an Environmental Education Programme     

Isabel Ruiz‐Mallen  Laura Barraza  Barbara Bodenhorn  Maria de la Paz Ceja‐Adame  Victoria Reyes‐García 《International Journal of Science Education》2013,35(13):1755-1770

Strengthening links between school and community is critical for improving people’s participation in environmental issues. However, Mexican education programmes are generally unrelated to rural students’ life experience and are planned without considering either teachers’ or students’ opinions. This article describes the participatory construction of a preparatory school environmental education (EE) programme in Ixtlan de Juarez, a Mexican indigenous community internationally recognised for sustainable forest management. The qualitative research methods used are based on the action research methodology. Results from interviews conducted with the preparatory school’s headmaster, the coordinator, and nine teachers provided the needed documentation of the school site for contextualising learning activities. Feedback during focus groups with six students, three teachers, five local communal authorities, and two researchers highlighted that all participants perceived the need for creating an educational programme focused on local forest management. The contents and activities of the programme were designed by the focus group’s participants. The programme has been continuously taught by teachers and forest workers since 2005 and was officially integrated with the preparatory school science curriculum in 2006. This participative educational experience has thus transformed the mandatory school curriculum in Ixtlan.  相似文献   

Religious Beliefs: Their dynamics in two groups of life scientists     

Eliane Brígida Morais Falcão 《International Journal of Science Education》2013,35(9):1249-1264

The assumption that scientific knowledge would bring an end to religious belief has challenged many scholars, particularly since such a belief persists even among those devoted to scientific activities. In this paper the occurrence and nature of religious belief in groups of life scientists working in the UK and Brazil is discussed in the context of their degree of training. Data obtained through one‐to‐one interviews went beyond mere yes/no answers to questions on belonging to a religion or believing in God. Categories were created to assess how open these scientists were with regard to the possibility of the supernatural. The results suggest that scientific training affected their religious belief and reduced the number of believers. Nevertheless there were scientists in both groups whose beliefs persisted.  相似文献   

Matching Society Values: Students’ views of biotechnology     

María J. Sáez  Angela Gómez Niño  Antonio Carretero 《International Journal of Science Education》2013,35(2):167-183

The rapid growth of biotechnology knowledge during the past decades has made it necessary to rethink the contents of the school curriculum and has provoked a consideration of the ethical and social issues related to the use of biotechnological applications. With the financial assistance of the European Union, the European Initiative for Biotechnology Education was set up to develop units for use in the member the countries, organize the translations of these between the many languages involved, organize in‐service courses for teachers, implement the materials in schools, as well as carrying out related research.

This paper gives some findings of Spanish researchers when identifying and exploring the different cultural contexts in which biotechnology teaching and learning is embedded, being mainly concerned with the emerging attitudes and values of the students regarding such issues. After gathering information through case studies during the implementation phase, a questionnaire was developed in an interactive way by teachers and researchers in various stages, based on what students said.

The results identify four main values: the “principle of the natural”, the “principle of the welfare”, the “principle of the technological solution” and the “principle of the individual decisions”. Their interaction and dichotomy are discussed, as well as the problems teachers face when having to deal with topics beyond those immediately related to science  相似文献   

Reflecting on Scientists’ Activity Based on Science Fiction Stories Written by Secondary Students     

Pedro Reis  Cecília Galvão 《International Journal of Science Education》2013,35(10):1245-1260

In this article the authors resort to a qualitative analysis of the plot of science fiction stories about a group of scientists, written by two 11th‐grade Earth and Life Science students (aged 17), and to semi‐structured interviews, with the double purpose of diagnosing their conceptions of the nature of science (namely, as regards scientists’ activity), and discussing the potentialities of this methodology in terms of research and education in science. The adopted methodology proved particularly effective in diagnosing the students’ conceptions of scientists’ characteristics, scientific activity, and science–technology–society interactions. The limited content of certain conceptions and a certain lack of knowledge on the part of the students concerning the processes and the epistemology of science highlight the need to pay explicit attention in science classes to the nature of scientific activity. Some of the ideas brought up by the students clearly show the influence of stereotypes and catastrophic scenarios depicted in films, television programs, and books, revealing media’s limitations when divulging scientific and technological themes to the general public and stressing the need for the school to promote a critical debate about science and technology images conveyed by the media.  相似文献   

Prospective Teachers’ Difficulties in Interpreting Elementary Phenomena of Electrostatic Interactions: Indicators of the status of their intuitive ideas     

Ana María Criado  Antonio García‐Carmona 《International Journal of Science Education》2013,35(6):769-805

Student teachers were tested before and after a teaching unit on electrostatic interactions in an attempt to consider their intuitive ideas and concept development. A study was made of students’ explanations of basic interactions: those between two charged bodies, and those between a charged body and a neutral body. Two indicators of the cognitive status of the explanations were investigated: “context dependence” and “certainty or confidence index”. This allowed cognitive comparisons to be established between the explanations of different electrostatic interactions, and between the degrees of difficulty they represent for satisfactory conceptual evolution. The greatest difficulties were found with explanations of the phenomena of electrostatic induction. The sample consisted of 52 students in primary school teacher education who participated in a teaching unit designed to overcome these obstacles.  相似文献   

The transformative power of Chicana/o Studies: social justice and education     

Aída Hurtado 《International journal of qualitative studies in education》2013,26(2):185-197

This essay responds to Professor Aguirre’s article in this issue that explores through personal narrative the trials and tribulations of being a faculty member with an expertise in Chicana/o Studies. The author joins his exploration by introducing the structural disadvantages that Chicana/o Studies suffers as a field. She then expounds on what we have gained by developing a new field with an explicitly political focus that includes putting student interests at the center of its development while fighting for economic and social justice as an integral part of its intellectual agenda. Her conclusion explores the challenges that the field of Chicana/o Studies faces as we confront changing demographic and societal conditions.  相似文献   

Mexican parents’ and teachers’ literacy perspectives and practices: construction of cultural capital     

Leslie Reese  Rebeca Mejía Arauz  Antonio Ray Bazán 《International journal of qualitative studies in education》2013,26(8):983-1003

This article examines the relationships among the literacy practices engaged in by first-grade children and parents at home and the ways in which these practices are communicated, shaped, and fostered by teachers and administrators in two different sociocultural environments in urban Mexico. The differences observed between the home literacy experiences of children in a working-class and a middle-class community included transgenerational communication of assumptions regarding literacy and schooling, as well as attitudes associated with the parents’ own school experiences. Class-based expectations on the part of teachers not only shaped interactions with parents, but were also reflected in the way the national curriculum was delivered, with a greater emphasis on rote skills and traditional reading instruction in the working-class community. The authors argue that the school plays a role in the co-production of cultural capital in the home through its shaping of some of the literacy practices that children and families undertake.  相似文献   

Language curriculum transformation and motivation through action research     

Darío Luis Banegas 《Curriculum Journal》2013,24(4):422-440

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The Scheme Game: How DACA Recipients Navigate Barriers to Higher Education     

Luis Fernando Macías 《Educational Studies A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association》2013,49(6):609-628

College-bound recipients of DACA—a 2012?US administrative policy officially titled Consideration for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—face a series of administrative and financial barriers in pursuing postsecondary education. These barriers often include a complicated process for in-state tuition consideration, as well as exclusion from the majority of educational subsidies. This research sheds new light on DACA students’ own understanding of their financial exclusions and the often ingenious methods they use to finance higher education. The research employs critical race theory/LatCrit frameworks to examine the structural systems of exclusion within educational policies and the corresponding measures taken by DACA recipient students in Ohio to overcome them. Participants’ testimonios highlight their own resilience in the face of multiple obstacles, dispel notions of meritocracy in higher education, and educate institutional agents about funding inequities in an effort to rectify them. This work finds, in response to the barriers they face, many DACA recipients in Ohio find a variety of unconventional ways to navigate a complex admissions process and secure a means of paying entirely out of pocket for their tuition. Participants in this longitudinal, qualitative research refer to these navigational strategies as participating in “the scheme game.” The scheme game consists of 3 overlapping practices: “grindin’,” “hustlin’,” and “schemin’.” Rooted in hip-hop, these terms originally refer to the ways Black, Brown, and immigrant communities navigate the barriers of a formal economy and participate in an informal economy to financially sustain themselves. Additionally, the research introduces the scheme game as a new epistemological perspective from which to understand the measures some DACA students take to afford a higher education.  相似文献   

An analytical framework for analyzing student teachers’ verbal interaction in learning situations     

Victoria Sánchez  Mercedes García  Isabel Escudero 《Instructional Science》2013,41(2):247-269

This paper focuses on the study of student teachers’ verbal interaction in learning situations generated in a classroom corresponding to a mathematics methods course. In our work, we incorporate two ‘ways of seeing’ a group: as an entity or as a set composed of individualities. We present an analytical framework that considers two dimensions connected with these ways of seeing the group and four variables corresponding to these dimensions, through which the verbal interaction between student teachers in a group can be considered. As regards the first dimension, the variables included are specific language, cognitive processing, social processing; the second dimension considers the relational variable. We describe each of the different variables that form the framework, and how this framework allows us to analyse the verbal interaction in three groups of student teachers. We believe that building analytic frameworks that allow the study of verbal interaction in detail is worthwhile in the educational field due to their important role in the analysis of learning-teaching processes.  相似文献