Teaching is … opening up spaces to explore academic work in fluid and volatile times

Universities are built upon the collaborative work of academic staff and students, yet the nature of this work has been undergoing profound and rapid change. Pressures within Australia’s higher education sector have led to a fracturing of traditional academic roles and growing feelings of disconnection. While there have been many narrative, ethnographic and autoethnographic explorations of academic work, few studies have employed visual arts-informed methodologies to interrogate the ways in which academics represent their teaching, research and community engagement work. In this article we outline findings about academics’ views of their teaching work. These findings surfaced from an arts-informed participatory research project, that sought to open up a space for (re)presentations of academic work. With a focus on teaching, three through lines emerged during the analysis: voicing absences and resistances; initiating layers of reflexive moments and expressing complexity through collage. We argue that the academics’ responses allow us to trace the emotional terrain of contemporary academic work. They also open up ways to unpack, express and make visible academics’ complex thoughts, feelings and ideas about teaching practices.     

Interanimation: repositioning possibilities in educational contexts

Changing discursive practices is necessary for educational social justice and is made possible through the interanimation of diverse ways of knowing that create dynamic tensions and challenge reliance on narrow views of what counts as legitimate knowledge. In this article, we accept the challenge that Reid and Valle put forth in creating new discourses of possibility through the animation of sociocultural and critical theory as they might apply to the interrogation of two aspects of the meaning-making process: (a) the interanimation of voices across systems as a condition of reculturing institutions and communities of practice, and (b) instructional activity settings in educational contexts (e.g., disciplinary apprenticeships). We conclude this article by examining possibilities for collaborative research activity.     

Publishing a Better Homiletical Textbook

Preaching, homiletics, sermon preparation, and effective church communication is an oft published topic by religious publishing houses and by academic publishing houses. This study, based on all three major branches of Christianity, found that preaching practitioners considered preaching textbooks to be woefully inadequate in teaching homiletical skills. Only by incorporating new sections on needed skills will the homiletical textbook once again become an effective tool of education.     

“I Won't Last Three Weeks”: Preservice Science Teachers Reflect on Their Student-Teaching Experiences

In many teacher preparation programs, student teaching serves as a culminating event that bridges academic coursework and the realities of classroom teaching. Therefore, it represents a significant aspect of preservice teacher education. This study explored student teaching as it was experienced by 13 middle and secondary science preservice teachers. Qualitative techniques were used to analyze individual interviews, group seminar sessions, and written reflections to construct a phenomenological account of student teaching as experienced by the preservice teachers. The aim was to construct a picture of the shared experiences of these student teachers to help understand how they struggled, succeeded, and learned as a part of their classroom practica. These findings are then used to draw implications for science teacher education.     

Identifying and developing crosscutting environmental education outcomes for adolescents in the twenty-first century (EE21)

Abstract

While multiple valid measures exist for assessing outcomes of environmental education (EE) programs, the field lacks a comprehensive and logistically feasible common instrument that can apply across diverse programs. We describe a participatory effort for identifying and developing crosscutting outcomes for Environmental Education in the twenty-first Century (EE21). Following extensive input and debate from a wide range of EE providers and researchers, we developed, tested and statistically validated crosscutting scales for measuring consensus-based outcomes for individual participants in youth EE programs using confirmatory factor analysis across six unique sites, including two single-day field trip locations, four multiday residential programs and one science museum in the United States. The results suggest that the scales are valid and reliable for measuring outcomes that many EE programs in the United States can aspire to influence in adolescent participants, ages 10–14.     

High School Student Participation in Scientific Research Apprenticeships: Variation in and Relationships Among Student Experiences and Outcomes

Research apprenticeships for secondary students provide authentic contexts for learning science in which students engage in scientific investigations with practicing scientists in working laboratory groups. Student experiences in these research apprenticeships vary depending on the individual nature of the laboratory in which students have been placed. This study explores potential relationships among student experiences in apprenticeship contexts and desired student outcomes (e.g. science content knowledge, understandings of nature of science, and aspirations for science oriented career plans). The following two research questions guided the study: How do participant experiences in and outcomes resulting from an authentic research program for high school students vary? How does variation in participant experiences in an authentic research program relate to participant outcomes? Primary data sources were student and mentor interviews in addition to student generated concept maps. Results indicated that the greatest variance in student experiences existed in the categories of collaboration, epistemic involvement, and understandings of the significance of research results. The greatest variation in desired student outcomes was observed in student understandings of nature of science and in students’ future science plans. Results suggested that collaboration and interest in the project were experience aspects most likely to be related to desired outcomes. Implications for the design of research apprenticeships for secondary students are discussed.     

Assessing the Life Science Knowledge of Students and Teachers Represented by the K–8 National Science Standards

We report on the development of an item test bank and associated instruments based on the National Research Council (NRC) K–8 life sciences content standards. Utilizing hundreds of studies in the science education research literature on student misconceptions, we constructed 476 unique multiple-choice items that measure the degree to which test takers hold either a misconception or an accepted scientific view. Tested nationally with 30,594 students, following their study of life science, and their 353 teachers, these items reveal a range of interesting results, particularly student difficulties in mastering the NRC standards. Teachers also answered test items and demonstrated a high level of subject matter knowledge reflecting the standards of the grade level at which they teach, but exhibiting few misconceptions of their own. In addition, teachers predicted the difficulty of each item for their students and which of the wrong answers would be the most popular. Teachers were found to generally overestimate their own students’ performance and to have a high level of awareness of the particular misconceptions that their students hold on the K–4 standards, but a low level of awareness of misconceptions related to the 5–8 standards.     

Moral Sensitivity in the Context of Socioscientific Issues in High School Science Students

This study is a part of a larger study that examined using socioscientific issues (SSI) as a form of effective science teaching. The purpose was to investigate how teaching a year‐long curriculum using SSI affects science learning outcomes. In this report, we examine the effects of a SSI‐driven curriculum on the development of students’ moral sensitivity. Our results indicate that development of moral sensitivity can be promoted through science learning experiences embedded in SSI. Results also suggest that moral sensitivity is contextually dependent. Implications for teaching are discussed.     

Preservice Science Teachers’ Informal Reasoning about Socioscientific Issues: The influence of issue context

The purpose of the current study is to explicitly test the extent to which issue contexts affect the informal reasoning processes engaged in by individuals. In order to address the research question framing this study, we engaged 39 Turkish preservice science teachers (PSTs) in interviews designed to elicit argumentation related to multiple socioscientific scenarios. Three scenarios related to gene therapy, another three related to human cloning, and the final scenario related to global warming. The data were analyzed using an interpretive qualitative research approach. Our work builds on a framework initially proposed by Toulmin in 1958 Toulmin, S. 1958. The uses of argument, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  [Google Scholar]. This study has provided new evidence related to informal reasoning in the context of socioscientific issues (SSI). At the sample level, there was strong consistency in informal reasoning quality among varying socioscientific scenarios. However, finer‐grained analyses indicated a greater level of variability in the informal reasoning practices of individual PSTs. These results support previous conclusions that suggest context dependence for informal reasoning related to SSI. This study provides an initial picture of the reasoning practices of preservice teachers as opposed to science learners. The results indicate that teachers, at least those in this Turkish setting, would benefit from learning experiences that support their own informal reasoning practices as well as their ability to foster development of these practices among their students. We encourage the field to continue the investigation of SSI as contexts for education particularly as it relates to the education of teachers.