Practitioner Learning in the Intersections Between Science and Language

Abstract

A recent panel celebrating the 10th anniversary of the University of Chile’s Institute of Advanced Research in Education featured one of the awardees of the Global Teacher Prize (Varkey Foundation 2019). In his presentation, he recognized that, in seeking to enhance his own teaching, he became an “improvised researcher”, and came to acknowledge the importance of connecting research to practice. What sorts of knowledge would become accessible to our field if we organized the efforts of all of those doing this “improvised” research? What kinds of new avenues, new questions, new approaches for understanding practice, new ways of circulating knowledge, and new commitments for science education would open up? How would these differ qualitatively from the questions we have now about learning, about teaching, about science? It might be time to engage those questions. Educational researchers around the globe seem to be eager to engage in questions with the potential to make new sense of the present and future. This year, 2019, marks the 50th anniversary of the Australasian Science Education Research Association. Reflecting on half a century of science education research might spark motivation to review the field’s achievements and future directions. The 2019 conference of NARST—a worldwide organization for improving science teaching and learning through research—chose the theme “Creating and sustaining collective activism through science education research”. The Chilean Society of Science Education has called its 2019 conference “Science Education for Social Justice”. The American Educational Research Association 2019 annual conference theme was “Leveraging Education Research in a “Post-Truth” Era: Multimodal Narratives to Democratize Evidence”. These themes illustrate trends in efforts of researchers as they question our present historical moment, its conditions and assumptions. In focusing on activism, on social justice, on democratization as concerns for educational researchers, what are we doing in the science education field? What directions are these efforts showing in our field? We wanted to engage in these sorts of questions from a particular place: science education research from the perspectives of those who are engaging it in classrooms.