Sutopo

The Implications of Culture for Teachers’ Use of Representations

This chapter explores how teachers utilize representations in their teaching. It illustrates this use through examples drawn largely from three regions of the world – Australia, Indonesia and Melanesia. They describes the value that these teachers perceived in utilizing these and how their use impacted on teaching and learning strategies. It explains representational attempts by teachers to enable student learning as they work with students to negotiate effectively between everyday discourse, culture, and values and those of the science community and to sustain connections between students community beliefs and canonical science in these settings. Some of the issues explored include the impact of status and gender, ownership and relationships, uniqueness of teaching approaches, societal and life experiences, need to link to student lives, impact of expert and student-generated representations on teaching and learning. It concludes through a discussion on how these representations are constrained by the assessment process and how they can be utilized to explore the development of understanding in each of these regions.