current research

Classroom Research

Currently, the Chèche Konnen Center is investigating ways that teachers in urban classrooms can harness the variety in children's ideas and ways of expressing them for learning and teaching science. Our goal is to design pedagogical contexts and practices that will enable all children, regardless of their personal educational history or their family's education background or income level, to 1) develop command over a repertoire of ideas and sense-making practices relevant to scientific thinking, acting, and knowing; 2) appreciate the power of these ideas and practices; and: 3) understand what part(s) of this repertoire it is useful to call on when and for what purposes. We are currently addressing the following questions:

What might a pedagogy that takes up children's diverse ideas and ways of conceptualizing, representing and evaluating them as an "explicit" theme of discussion and inquiry in the science classroom look like? What forms does it take?
What do children learn from each other, their teacher, and other sources of scientific knowledge about the uses and power of different ways of conceptualizing, representing, and evaluating meaning in the sciences?
What do children learn -- about scientific ideas, about ways of using language and other symbol systems, and about themselves as learners and thinkers -- as a result of their participation in such practices?

In partnership with local teacher researchers, Center staff are conducting a series of classroom design experiments to

identify and characterize occasions when children and teachers generate a range of ideas, experiences and ways of expressing them in relation to specific scientific phenomena in the domains of physics and biology (e.g., motion, plant growth and development);
design and study classroom practices that support children in populating the meanings, forms and functions of varied ways of accounting for scientific phenomena; and
document, using a repertoire of assessment strategies, what children learn about scientific ideas, sense-making practices, and themselves as learners and thinkers from their participation in these classroom practices.

Our research is a collaborative undertaking. Center staff and teacher-researchers meet in a biweekly seminar to examine classroom discourse and activity through videotapes and transcipts, design pedagogical contexts and practices, study the scientific ideas with which children are grappling, and develop the overarching themes of the research through specification of classroom design studies. Together, staff and teachers give specific shape to the design studies, document them through videography, transcripts and field notes, and design and administer wide-ranging assessments of students' learning.

This research is addressing a critical but oversimplified debate within education today between "progressive" (i.e., "inquiry" and "immersion") pedagogies, which emphasize the centrality of children's ideas and questions, and "post-progressive" (e.g., "explicit instruction") pedagogies, which emphasize the importance of explicit teaching about the forms and functions of language and symbol use in academic disciplines. We argue that framing the debate in dichotomous terms deflects attention away from deeper issues relating to diversity and equity in learning and teaching. Through this research, we seek to re-frame this debate and contribute to a new conceptualization of the issues: on the theoretical side, what it might mean "to be explicit," and on the practical side, when, how, and about what to be explicit as well as who makes what explicit to whom. For more information, see our list of Publications.