Reading Instruments: Objects, Texts and Museums

Science educators, historians of science and their students often share a curiosity about historical instruments as a tangible link between past and present practices in the sciences. We less often integrate instruments into our research and pedagogy, considering artefact study as the domain of museum specialists. We argue here that scholars and teachers new to material culture can readily use artefacts to reveal rich and complex networks of narratives. We illustrate this point by describing our own lay encounter with an artefact turned over for our analysis during a week-long workshop at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. The text explains how elements as disparate as the military appearance of the instrument, the crest stamped on its body, the manipulation of its telescopes, or a luggage tag revealed the object’s scientific and political significance in different national contexts. In this way, the presence of the instrument in the classroom vividly conveyed the nature of geophysics as a field practice and an international science, and illuminated relationships between pure and applied science for early twentieth century geologists. We conclude that artefact study can be an unexpectedly powerful and accessible tool in the study of science, making visible the connections between past and present, laboratory and field, texts and instruments.     

The role of school-based research champions in a school–university partnership

The value of teachers’ engagement in and with research is long recognised and it is acknowledged that school–university research partnerships are one way of enabling such engagement. But we know little about how research-based knowledge is negotiated into school practices. Here we draw on data from nine ‘research champions’, who are teachers in schools which are part of the Oxford Education Deanery, a research partnership with a university department. Taking a cultural/historical approach, the study examined the strategic intentions and actions in the activities of the champions as they negotiated research-based knowledge into their schools. Data comprised 59 completed templates that described what they did and why. Findings revealed differences between those with close links with senior leaders—who could take a whole-school approach—and those whose reach was restricted by their position in school practices. Nonetheless, all the champions carefully selected and targeted research in ways that reflected their knowledge of local contexts. The findings point to the need to incorporate the champion role into school systems and for universities to value the role as they develop their own research agenda.     

Making it Happen: a personal account of a teacher education aid project in the Solomon Islands

Secondary teacher education in the Solomon Islands has been non‐existent since an early attempt was abandoned a decade ago. An international aid project now has attempted to implement a carefully wrought plan. This article outlines the plan, describes what actually happened when the plan was implemented, and proposes some principles which might be useful in guiding the efforts of future project managers charged with the responsibility of making things happen in a culture other than their own.     

Social‐Emotional Competence: An Essential Factor for Promoting Positive Adjustment and Reducing Risk in School Children

Social‐emotional competence is a critical factor to target with universal preventive interventions that are conducted in schools because the construct (a) associates with social, behavioral, and academic outcomes that are important for healthy development; (b) predicts important life outcomes in adulthood; (c) can be improved with feasible and cost‐effective interventions; and (d) plays a critical role in the behavior change process. This article reviews this research and what is known about effective intervention approaches. Based on that, an intervention model is proposed for how schools should enhance the social and emotional learning of students in order to promote resilience. Suggestions are also offered for how to support implementation of this intervention model at scale.