Abstract
Science education can be alienating for students, as it is apart from the mundane world with which they are familiar. Science education research has approached the gap between everyday understandings and science learning largely as a challenge arising while learning about science concepts and the kinds of instructional approaches that may support this. However, the forms of everyday ways of relating to the world fundamentally expand beyond conceptual understandings. In this study, we use data from an outdoor science learning setting to examine a range of non-conceptual but culturally possible and intelligible ways in which students actually connect science learning processes to their everyday world and its characteristic commonsense understandings. Our study shows how students’ (a) spontaneous embodied explorations, (b) humor in all of its bodily and grotesque forms, and (c) narrative representation and interpretation of the world are used to contextualize science learning, namely its environment and content, within their familiar world. We show how students draw on these fundamental cultural forms of understanding the world even without particular instructional support while, at the same time, completing their science tasks according to the goals set by their teachers. Our findings suggest that the ways in which students connect their everyday world with science learning do not have to be explicitly related to the particular conceptual learning goals but can parallel conceptual learning while contextualizing it in affectively meaningful ways.
Highlights
Students’ experiences during learning— how they connect to prior experiences—have been a persistent topic of science educational research
The present study expands the scope of everyday experiences and their role in learning beyond the conceptual, cognitive, and linguistic dimensions through three non-conceptual dimensions of everyday understandings that are based on the works of mathematician and phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl, pragmatist psychologist and philosopher William James, philosopher and literature critic Mikhail Bakhtin, and philosophers and educators on the functions of narrative in the construction of cultural reality
In the following three subsections, we show how the students spontaneously connect the learning process with their everyday experiences in ways that draw on fundamental bodily and cultural forms of relating to the world: (a) how students explore the physical environment through embodied interactions, (b) how grotesque and bodily humor is used to relativize the seriousness of science learning into a more relatable level, and (c) how narratives serve as a way to contextualize learning tasks within the familiar cultural resources
Summary
We investigate the ways through which students connect their everyday experiences with science learning processes. Students were accompanied on field trips during which they worked on biology learning tasks independently and out of the earshot of the teacher, which allowed for relatively free interaction and for the cultural phenomena to become visible, thereby enabling them to be studied
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