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...

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...

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...

In a number of academic disciplines, auto/biography and auto/ethnography have become central means of critiquing of the ways in which research represents individuals and their cultures. Auto/biography and auto/ethnography are genres that blend ethnographic interests with life writing and they tell about a culture at the same time they tell about an individual life. This book presents educational researchers, in exemplary form, the possibilities and constraints of both auto/biography and auto/ethnography as methods of doing educational research. The contributors to this volume explore, by...

Roth takes readers on a journey of issues in designing actual studies of knowing and learning in the classroom, exploring actual data, and putting readers face to face with problems that they have possibly encountered, and what they could have done. (Education)

Roth continues his long-standing interest in understanding how one learns science and the question of why all the changes to science education made over the past five decades have a significant impact of increasing understanding and interest in the subject. (Education/Teaching)

The Culture of Science Education: Its History in Person features the auto/biographies of the professional lives of 22 science educators from 11 countries situated in different places along the career ladder within an ongoing narrative of the cultural history of the field. Many contributors began to identify as science educators at about the time Sputnik was launched but others were not yet born. Hence the book articulates the making of a field with its twists and turns that define a career as a scholar in science education.

Through the eyes of the contributing scholars, the development of...

A recurrent trope in education is the gap that exists between theory, taught at the university, and praxis, what teachers do in classrooms. How might one bridge this inevitable gap if new teachers are asked to learn (to talk) about teaching rather than to teach? In response to this challenging question, the two authors of this book have developed coteaching and cogenerative dialoguing, two forms of praxis that allow very different stakeholders to teach and subsequently to reflect together about their teaching. The authors have developed these forms of praxis not by theorizing and then...

There are many teachers who think about doing research in their own classes and schools but who are perplexed by what appears to be involved. This book is intended for these perplexed practitioners, to provide them with an easily understandable narrative about the concrete praxis of doing research in their classrooms or in those of their teacher peers teaching next door or in the same school. The fundamental idea underlying this book is to provide an easily accessible but nevertheless intellectually honest text that allows teachers to increase their agency with respect to better understanding...