Michiel van Eijck

Re-theorising the student dialogically across and between boundaries of multiple communities

Both cognitive and sociocultural traditions have customarily theorised learning in terms of processes of progression within single communities. More recently, educational scholars have started to focus on learning as a horisontal process of boundary crossing between multiple communities. A problem of this approach is that boundaries are often laid out analytically on a system level, without explaining whether and how boundaries relate to discontinuities at the level of an individual student’s learning process. The latter requires theoretical elaboration on how an individual learner can, simultaneously, be part of more than one practice. By drawing on a dialogical approach to self, we intend to theorise learners as participants in practices, and as transcendent selves. In doing so, we point out that boundaries are dynamically evolving discontinuities that mediate or obstruct potential hybridisations of school and everyday life experiences in learning.

Improving Science Education for Sustainable Development

Data from an environmental education project demonstrate how a learning framework that is consistent with contemporary ethology, and represents humans as self-determined yet integral parts of their environment, contributes both to the improvement of education and to a sustainable future.

Students' Representations of Scientific Practice during a Science Internship: Reflections from an Activity-Theoretic Perspective.

Working at scientists’ elbows is one suggestion that educators make to improve science education, because such “authentic experiences” provide students with various types of science knowledge. However, there is an ongoing debate in the literature about the assumption that authentic science activities can enhance students’ understandings of scientific practice. The purpose of the study is to further address the debate in terms of the ethnographic data collected during an internship programme for high school students right through to their public presentations at the end. Drawing on activity theory to analyse these presentations, we found that students presented scientific practice as accomplished by individual personnel without collaboration in the laboratory. However, our ethnographic data of their internship interaction show that students have had conversations about the complex collaborations within and outside the laboratory. This phenomenon leads us to claim that students experienced authentic science in their internships, but their subsequent representations of authentic science are incomplete. That is, participating in authentic science internships and reporting scientific practice are embedded activities that constitute different goals and conditions rather than unrefracted reflections of one another. The debate on the influence on students’ understanding of science practice is not simply related to situating students in authentic science contexts, but also related to students’ values and ideology of reporting their understanding of and about science. To help students see these “invisible” moments of science practice is therefore crucial. We make suggestions for how the invisible in and of authentic science may be made visible.

A Sampled Literature Review of Design-Based Learning Approaches: A Search for Key Characteristics.

Design-based learning (DBL) is an educational approach grounded in the processes of inquiry and reasoning towards generating innovative artifacts, systems and solutions. The approach is well characterized in the context of learning natural sciences in secondary education. Less is known, however, of its characteristics in the context of higher engineering education. The purpose of this review study is to identify key characteristics of DBL in higher engineering education. From the tenets of engineering design practices and higher engineering education contexts we identified four relevant dimensions for organizing these characteristics: the project characteristics, the role of the teacher, the assessment methods, and the social context. Drawing on these four dimensions, we systematically reviewed the state-of-the-art empirical literature on DBL or DBL-like educational projects in higher engineering education. Based on this review we conclude that DBL projects consist of open-ended, hands-on, authentic and multidisciplinary design tasks resembling the community of engineering professionals. Teachers facilitate both the process of gaining domain-specific knowledge and the thinking activities relevant to propose innovative solutions. Teachers scaffold students in the development from novice to expert engineers. Assessment is characterized by formative and summative of both individual and team products and processes and by the use of a variety of assessment instruments. Finally, the social context of DBL projects includes peer-to-peer collaboration in which students work in teams. The implications of these findings for further research on DBL in higher engineering education are discussed.

Place-Based (Science) Education: Something Is Happening Here

“Something is happening here” (Sobel 2004, p. 1). This heading decorates the first chapter of what is commonly considered a seminal work on place-based education. Now, more than 5 years later, this statement also holds true for the accounts of place-based education featured in this section. As well, this statement appears to be reflective of the practice of academic research on place-based education.

Professional Development for Design-Based Learning in Engineering Education: A Case Study.

Design-based learning (DBL) is an educational approach in which students gather and apply theoretical knowledge to solve design problems. In this study, we examined how critical DBL dimensions (project characteristics, design elements, the teachers role, assessment, and social context) are applied by teachers in the redesign of DBL projects. We conducted an intervention for the professional development of the DBL teachers in the Mechanical Engineering and the Electrical Engineering departments. We used the Experiential Learning Cycle as an educational model for the professionalisation programme. The findings show that the programme encouraged teachers to apply the DBL theoretical framework. However, there are some limitations with regard to specific project characteristics. Further research into supporting teachers to develop open-ended and multidisciplinary activities in the projects that support learning is recommended.

Addressing the Dynamics of Science in Curricular Reform for Scientific Literacy: The Case of Genomics.

Science education reform must anticipate the scientific literacy required by the next generation of citizens. Particularly, this counts for rapidly emerging and evolving scientific disciplines such as genomics. Taking this discipline as a case, such anticipation is becoming increasingly problematic in today’s knowledge societies in which the dynamics of the natural sciences is unprecedented. This raises the question of how scientific literacy can be defined in order to appropriate the dynamics of natural sciences such as genomics. Drawing on a contemporary sociocultural perspective on the dynamics of science, the science education research literature is briefly reviewed in this respect. It is argued that scientific literacy captures the dynamics of science once defined as an emergent feature of collective activity. This requires a form of science education to which the learners’ agency is central. The implications of this thesis will be discussed in regard to the case of embedding genomics in science curricula.Science education reform must anticipate the scientific literacy required by the next generation of citizens. Particularly, this counts for rapidly emerging and evolving scientific disciplines such as genomics. Taking this discipline as a case, such anticipation is becoming increasingly problematic in today’s knowledge societies in which the dynamics of the natural sciences is unprecedented. This raises the question of how scientific literacy can be defined in order to appropriate the dynamics of natural sciences such as genomics. Drawing on a contemporary sociocultural perspective on the dynamics of science, the science education research literature is briefly reviewed in this respect. It is argued that scientific literacy captures the dynamics of science once defined as an emergent feature of collective activity. This requires a form of science education to which the learners’ agency is central. The implications of this thesis will be discussed in regard to the case of embedding genomics in science curr...

Capturing the Dynamics of Science in Science Education

Science education reform must anticipate the scientific literacy required by the next generation of citizens. Such anticipation is becoming increasingly problematic in today’s knowledge societies in which the dynamics of science are unprecedented. This raises the question of how scientific literacy can be defined in order to appropriate the dynamics of science. Drawing on a contemporary sociocultural perspective on the dynamics of science, this study briefly reviews relevant science education literature. It is argued that scientific literacy captures the dynamics of science once it is defined as an emergent feature of collective activity. This implies a science education to which learners’ agency is central.

Conceptions and characterization : an explanation for the theory-practice gap in conceptual change theory

For more than 2 decades now, conceptual change theory has been lauded as a powerful framework for improving science teaching and learning. This has resulted in an increasingly sophisticated theory building, yielding, among other things, a comprehensive documentation of students’ (mis-, alternative, naive, etc.) conceptions across most science domains. This increasing sophistication is required to address increasingly adequate the complex phenomena of teaching and learning science. Yet, despite this sophistication, the theory is not yet practical for the practice of teaching. On the contrary, with an increasing sophistication, the gap between research output and that what is finally put into practice by teachers has increased as well. In other words, “there is the paradox that in order to adequately address teaching and learning processes research alienates the teachers and hence widens the ‘theory-practice’ gap” (Duit and Treagust 2003, p. 683).

The Heroes of Science

This chapter highlights recent work in science education research on representations of scientists in a sample of high school and college textbooks. Drawing on semiotic and cultural–historical activity theoretical frameworks, two analyses are presented. A coarse-grained, quantitative analysis of the prevalence and structure of these representations exhibited bias toward particular scientists’ representations and particular types of texts and inscriptions therein, suggesting a domain-specific rhetorical structure. A fine-grained, qualitative analysis of scientists’ representations revealed that high school and college textbooks represent (a) objects of scientific practice as projected or anticipated independently from human activity; (b) scientists’ individual actions aiming at the creation of non-tangible tools and rules by means of observation, modification, or manipulation of given, tangible objects; (c) scientific practice as isolated due to which the simultaneous belonging to different practices hardly determines the goals of scientists’ actions; and (d) scientists as part of a small community of mainly other scientists who subsequently determine each other’s individual actions. The heroic image of images of scientists emerging from our analysis is discussed in light of persistent problems that are plaguing today’s science education. This opens up a need for a different science education.