Leah A. Bricker

Learning in Diversities of Structures of Social Practice: Accounting for How, Why and Where People Learn Science

This paper outlines a theoretical framework intended to provide a more ecological and holistic accounting of how, why and where people learn in relation to constructs of human difference – race, class, disability designation, etc. – as learners circulate across places and associated operating value systems over multiple timescales. The framework for cultural learning pathways is an application and elaboration of Ole Dreier’s theory of persons in diversities of structures of social practice with a focus on the learning of disciplinary practices and the development of discipline-related identities. We summarize relevant learning phenomena along extended cultural pathways from three team ethnographies of science learning. We outline how power-related issues associated with privilege and marginalization are attended to in relation to the social, cultural, and material circumstances of learning within and across environments and discuss future research opportunities.

Discovering and Supporting Successful Learning Pathways of Youth In and Out of School: Accounting for the Development of Everyday Expertise Across Settings

A fifth-grade girl, born in Haiti and adopted into a Seattle family, talked at home about how she wanted to be a chemist or a paleontologist when she grew up. For 6 months, she spent portions of her Saturdays mixing perfumes, as a chemist might, with her mother. But her public schoolteacher, who is a seasoned professional with sophisticated teaching expertise, thought the girl was lazy and was surprised to see her become highly excited and engaged about a science curriculum unit at the end of the year. A fourth-grade boy in the same school got moved to the back of the classroom because he was frequently “off task” and “resistant” to the school curriculum. He spent significant periods of his time in the back of the room mentally deconstructing the physical environment around him, “thinking in structures” as he put it. Unbeknownst to his teachers, the boy had been deepening his participation in a hobby—an elective vocation—since attending a summer design program at a local university in the third grade. Outside of school he engaged in sophisticated design, construction, and building projects with all manner of physical and technological objects. It would be 3 more years before he came to understand that there is such a field as engineering and that it might be a good match for his interests. By that point it would be much more difficult to make his way along the typical academic path. To simply say that these youth may be “at risk” for making their way along academic pathways ignores the depth of their academic-related interests and developing expertise. It skirts the evaluation and positioning of them that occurred in different contexts based on a partial understanding of who they were at the time and who they wanted to become, and it severely discounts the complexities associated with them productively pursuing and becoming who they might wish to become. We argue that we need to discover and then support the successful learning pathways of youth across social settings over developmental time so that we can promote the development of interests and expertise that may lead to both academic and personal success.

Argumentation and Reasoning in Life and in School: Implications for the Design of School Science Learning Environments

Many science education scholars, predominantly using Toulmin’s argumentation framework as a design template, have created learning environments to engage youth with what it means to argue scientifically. We argue, using Tilly’s framework that categorizes people’s reasons, that there is also promise in utilizing the everyday argumentative competencies of youth as a design template in argument-focused school science curricula. In this chapter, we synthesize our work on argumentation. As part of his dissertation research, Bell created an argument-mapping environment called SenseMaker and then studied middle school science students’ use of SenseMaker as part of conceptual change instruction over six classroom design experiments. As part of her dissertation research, Bricker used data from a long-term team ethnography of youth science and technology learning across settings and timescales to examine youth’s everyday argumentative practices. After explicating our research, we then describe design-based research that is needed to investigate young people’s appropriation of scientific argumentation using their everyday argumentative competencies as a springboard.