Education

ABSTRACT In this forum we discuss three aspects designed to clarify and extend Kelly and Kassing’s paper. These are the roles of improvable objects, contradiction and object/tool reciprocity. In each case we cite relevant literature and pose questions to the field. Our goal is to seed ideas for future discussions concerning the role of activity theory in our current and future research in informal learning settings.

ABSTRACT This article discusses the theory I have come to rely on most consistently to collect and analyze data, interpret interactions at exhibits, and understand power dynamics within museums at many levels of analysis. Activity Theory has, for me, demonstrated the greatest versatility in informing, supporting, and reciprocally intertwining practice and theory. I describe my own evolutionary process here in the context of Activity Theory in order to demonstrate how I have come to see the theory reflected in my research design and analysis.

Models are simplified representations of more complex systems that help scientists structure the knowledge they acquire. As such, they are ubiquitous and invaluable in scientific research and communication. Because science education strives to make classroom activities more closely reflect science in practice, models have become integral teaching and learning tools woven throughout the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Although model-based learning and curriculum are not novel in educational theory, only recently has modeling taken center stage in K–12 national standards for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classes. We present a variety of examples to outline the importance of various types of models and the practice of modeling in biological research, as well as the emphasis of NGSS on their use in both classroom learning and assessment. We then suggest best practices for creating and modifying models in the context of student-driven inquiry and demo...

The impetus for the REFLECTS research project, funded by the National Science Foundation over a period of six years (2006-2011) rested on two key needs in the field. The first was the dearth of research-based models for educator professional development in informal settings. Although more recently researchers have been analyzing the roots and practices of professional development (Tran, 2007, 2009) in informal settings, this field is just now expanding (Patrick, 2017) to fill the need. In the past there was little theoretical grounding for the strategies educators were being asked to use. Some approaches seemed to reflect classroom pedagogical strategies and concerns that were not as appropriate for informal settings. Often the people teaching in informal science institutions were not part of the design of these manuals.

Reculturing Museums takes a unified sociocultural theoretical approach to analyze the many conflicts museums experience in the 21st century. Embracing conflict, Ash asks: What can practitioners and researchers do to create the change they want to see when old systems remain stubbornly in place? Using a unified sociocultural, cultural-historical, activity-theoretical approach to analyzing historically bound conflicts that plague museums, each chapter is organized around a central contradiction, including finances ("Who will pay for museums?"), demographic shifts ("Who will come to museums?"), the roles of narratives ("Whose story is it?"), ownership of objects ("Who owns the artifact?"), and learning and teaching ("What is learning and how can we teach equitably?").

The reculturing stance taken by Ash promotes social justice and equity, 'making change' first, within museums, called inreach, rather than outside the museum, called outreach; challenges existing norms; is sensitive to neoliberal and deficit ideologies; and pays attention to the structure agency dialectic. Reculturing Museums will be essential reading for academics, students, museum practitioners, educational researchers, and others who care about museums and want to ensure that all people have equal access to the activities, objects, and ideas residing in them.

Models are simplified representations of more complex systems that help scientists structure the knowledge they acquire. As such, they are ubiquitous and invaluable in scientific research and communication. Because science education strives to make classroom activities more closely reflect science in practice, models have become integral teaching and learning tools woven throughout the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Although model-based learning and curriculum are not novel in educational theory, only recently has modeling taken center stage in K–12 national standards for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classes. We present a variety of examples to outline the importance of various types of models and the practice of modeling in biological research, as well as the emphasis of NGSS on their use in both classroom learning and assessment. We then suggest best practices for creating and modifying models in the context of student-driven inquiry and demo...

This chapter focuses on recognizing humor as a powerful resource for visitors from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds who are new to learning contexts, such as museums and aquariums. By using humor, visitors negotiate hybrid learning spaces, as well as gain authority in informal settings. Humor… serves a number of functions—social cohesion or rupture, the cementing of relationships… persuasion through the distraction of entertainment, and the simultaneous challenge and reinforcement of the status quo. (Moreau & Enahoro, 2012, p. 1)

This paper illuminates the tensions between the rhetoric and presumed rewards of an “expanded” conception of teachers’ work and the work demands and strains introduced by such a conception. Specifically, this paper draws on multi-day, 24-hour time and task diaries recorded by case study teachers, together with ethnographic interviews and observations, to illuminate the disjuncture between reform rhetoric and work place demands. I use these data to assess the usefulness of existing theories of overwork as they may apply to teachers and teaching. This paper suggests that teacher overwork is, in part, a result of the expansion of teacher work roles. The argument unfolds in three parts. First, teachers work roles have been expanded but structural supports for the expansion have been uneven. Second, the nature and extent of organizational support influences teacher experience of role expansion, and finally, teachers who embrace the expanded role conception strive to sustain it even in th...