2005;55-79.

The Generative Potential of Students' Everyday Knowledge in Learning Science.

Ann S Rosebery, Beth Warren, Cindy Ballenger, Mark Ogonowski

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Abstract

We decided to explore everyday and scientific ideas and practices in relation to (a) what children actually do when they are learning science and (b) our own assumptions, rather than to continue to conceptualize everyday and scientific as distinct domains. To do this, we formed a research partnership with elementary and middle school teachers in the Cambridge and Boston (MA) Public Schools to design new pedagogical approaches to improve science education for all students, including those from groups that are historically underrepresented in the sciences. In the sections that follow, we examine three cases in which children's everyday ways of knowing and talking figured prominently in their learning. In each of the case studies presented in this chapter, we see students taking a stance of inquiry toward what they know and have experienced as well as toward new aspects of meaning that emerge as they encounter ideas and practices central to science. They were encouraged along this path by teachers who designed their classroom instruction to emphasize practices of interrogating meanings of deceptively familiar experiences, such as motion down a ramp and ideas such as "faster and faster," "speed," or "darkness" in relation to situations of use and perspective. Out of these rich and, at times, conflicting encounters with meaning, the children revealed to themselves as well as to their teachers and to us the enormous generativity that connects what children know to what we want them to learn. Conventional views of knowing value abstraction as a movement away or a detachment from the complex particulars of a situation, the extraction of a specific property or idea common to all instances of a given phenomenon. We are putting forward a different sense of knowing--one that emphasizes developing awareness of patterns of relationships fully embedded in the particulars of complex, lived and imagined situations (Arnheim, 1969). Rather than abstracting a concept like change in motion out of the many situations it is meant to describe, we see learners exploring such ideas by imaginatively inhabiting phenomena from different perspectives and actively interrogating meanings in relation to various contexts of use. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (chapter)

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