Disciplinary Norms Research Articles

A vision that focuses on diversity and broader impact

The Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST) has made an easy transition from one editorial team to the next. We thank the outgoing editorial team, led by Coeditors Fouad Abd-El-Khalick and Dana L. Zeidler and Managing Editor Elizabeth C. Niswander, for its exemplary work and dedication to JRST. You can read their Editors' report in Issue 58, Volume 2, which summarizes their tenure. From their 5-year editorship, we have inherited a strong journal in terms of infrastructure and good standing as an international journal focused on cutting-edge science education research. In our editorial as incoming coeditors, Volume 57, Issue 2, we communicated our vision for the journal where we outlined three strategic foci: (1) promoting equity and diversity of the JRST community; (2) leading efforts to establish disciplinary norms, criteria, and expectations relative to the evolving landscape of open access and open science across the publishing industry; and (3) building a stronger presence for JRST within the modern media environment such that JRST-published research achieves broader reach and impact for the improvement of science education practice and policy. Over the next few months, we will expand upon these areas while also updating you on what is happening in the publishing world that will have an impact on the decisions we make as Coeditors and your work as scholars. First, we are focused on advancing equity and diversity in the peer review process, which starts with the composition of our editorial team. We introduced our Managing Editor and Editorial Assistants in our first editorial. Here, we introduce the Associate Editors (Table 1). Collectively, they have a vast knowledge base relevant to contemporary issues in science education. With theoretical, methodological, epistemological, and philosophical diversity, their expertise and standing in the field represent a multiplicity of perspectives to support the vision we have for promoting diverse scholarship, which comes from having a diverse editorial team. As a group, we represent the most diverse group of Editors and Associate Editors who have served JRST. This is critically important because we believe the cultural diversity of our team communicates an important message to the global science education community about our commitments to diversity, inclusivity, and representation; a more diverse editorial team also denotes the increasingly diverse membership of NARST and the JRST readership. We know the process of publishing can be challenging, not only for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty but also for seasoned scholars in submitting their work to the journal. We have been working closely with our Wiley team to update and provide information for submitting your manuscripts. We found many places where the criteria were not consistent, and we thank our community for pointing out some of these places. There is a checklist for authors to review before and upon submitting their manuscript to ScholarOne Manuscripts™. Preparing your manuscript according to these guidelines is an equity issue for us. This means that formatting your manuscript according to the 10-item checklist allows for equitable formatting requirements, which also helps later in the management and production processes to prepare manuscripts promptly for early view. We encourage all authors to view the Author Guidelines before submission of their manuscripts. JRST is a world-class research journal, and our goal is to improve upon the journal's excellence. In doing so, we intend to maintain its very strong reputation; improve readership; increase its impact factor; and broaden the community of scholars who conduct research, read, and review for JRST. We are committed to preserving JRST as a venue that values a range of important and forward-thinking scholarship related to the teaching and learning of science, including scholarship with diverse and critical theoretical frameworks, methodologies, commitments, and perspectives. As an example of meeting our goal of broader access, we are piloting Visual Abstracts and Research Briefs to share on our social media outlets. These resources are short bits of information for educational stakeholders outside of the immediate research community and are written with an educated layperson in mind. Freely share this information to educators, policymakers, and organizations you feel will benefit from these highlights of recent publications in the journal. We are appreciative of those who review for the journal, and we invite a broader community of reviewers to participate in the peer-review process. We welcome you to nominate yourself and others to be reviewers, to accept invitations to review and to engage with us in challenging our collective work as a worldwide organization for improving science teaching and learning through research with the ultimate goal to help all learners achieve science literacy. You can reach us through the journal's new email address: [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @JRSTpub.

Experts’ reasoning about the replication crisis: Apt epistemic performance and actor-oriented transfer

ABSTRACT Background: The modern world is rife with complex challenges that require citizens to weigh multiple, conflicting claims and competing methods for discerning truth from falsehood. Such evaluations depend highly upon prior knowledge. Therefore, the goal of epistemic education is the cultivation of apt epistemic performance: successfully achieving valuable epistemic aims (e.g., evaluating conflicting claims, discerning truth from falsehood) through competent use of ideals and reliable processes across a range of contexts. However, educators cannot prepare people for every contentious claim they will encounter over their lifetime. Therefore, we investigated if and how apt epistemic performance developed in one discipline could be adapted or transferred for use in another discipline. Methods: We analyzed think-aloud protocol data gathered as experts from psychology, other social sciences (i.e., near transfer), and natural sciences (i.e., far transfer) grappled with a complex problem: psychology’s replication crisis. Findings: An actor-oriented approach best captured how experts outside of psychology were able to near transfer or adapt epistemic performance; far transfer was more difficult. Contribution: Our findings suggest epistemic education for an informed citizenry should prioritize teaching disciplinary norms and practices as well as their scope and limitations, along with self-awareness of when transfer is and is not appropriate.

ADAPTASI SOSIAL SISWA BARU DALAM MEMATUHI NORMA KEDISIPLINAN DI SEKOLAH USAHA PERIKANAN MENENGAH NEGERI PONTIANAK

AbstractThe purpose of this research is to know the disciplinary norms in the Pontianak State Fisheries Business Middle School. Qualitative phenomenological research methods. The source of research data from grade I students consisted of four female students and two male students and two BK teachers. With the acquisition of observation data and student activity interviews during school. The results showed that the student's social adaptation process was going well, the students were able to overcome obstacles and were able to participate in activities well according to the school discipline manual. The inhibiting factors for the social adaptation of new students are seniority, loss of indigenous culture, feeling the difference between a house and a dormitory, and the inability to respond to rules effectively. The supporting factors for social adaptation of new students are a sense of peace and interaction between students, flexibility and openness with the teacher so that they have tolerance and solidarity to maintain the applicable rules to survive through a period of mutual adaptation. It can be concluded that the social adaptation of new students with semi-military school discipline rules, minority and punishment does not affect the quality and mental improvement of students.Keywords: Social Adaptation, Norm Discipline, SUPM, Pontianak

Decolonizing knowledge within and beyond the classroom

This introduction to the second installment of a two-part special issue focuses on actors and spaces that facilitate different forms of progress or push-back in decolonizing African Studies. We map how student activists have served as agents of decolonial change on campuses over time, and argue that intersectional and feminist leadership characterize the current generation of activism. We then explore how classrooms and curricula serve as sites of synthesis between student and faculty activists, and conservative professional and disciplinary norms. Drawing on activist campaigns and articles in the special issue, we present five questions that serve as a starting point for decolonizing courses. Finally, we acknowledge the ways that academic disciplines enforce parochial professional norms and epistemic standards in academia, while also linking academic knowledge production to global marketplaces and intellectual property regimes. We contend that the interplay of these three categories of agents shapes cycles of transformation and patterns of re-consolidation.

Design Collaboration and Exaptation in a Habitat Restoration Project

This paper reports on a collaborative, practice-based design research project focused on habitat restoration. An architect, a conservation biologist, and a digital designer worked together to develop an artificial habitat structure for an urban nature reserve in Canberra, Australia. Through a process of reflective analysis, we characterize this collaboration as a productive alliance of diverse skills and divergent perspectives that required responsiveness, improvisation, and a willingness to work outside disciplinary norms. We observe the importance of divergent but overlapping frames within the collaboration and design outcomes, which appropriated resources across contexts to serve multiple functions. In response, we propose a conceptual frame that draws on the concept of exaptation—an evolutionary process in which existing forms acquire new adaptive functions—to account for this tendency. We argue that an exaptive perspective has value beyond this case study, offering a useful way to reframe contemporary design expertise and authorship while also enabling us to better address a more-than-human world.

Composing Literary Arguments in an 11th Grade International Baccalaureate Classroom: How Classroom Instructional Conversations Shape Modes of Participation

In U.S. secondary schools there is an overriding emphasis on formulaic approaches to argumentative writing instruction in English language arts that tends to trivialize disciplinary norms of argument and evidence because of institutional pressure to bolster students’ test performances.  This paper seeks to provide an ethnographically-informed framework for understanding for whom, how, when, and to what extent it is possible for students to participate, through writing, in the study of literature as the central disciplinary content of English language arts. The corpus of data used in this study of an 11th grade International Baccalaureate (IB) classroom (26 students) consisted of classroom instruction (video-recordings and field notes) that occurred across an initial instructional unit (September 8th to November 3rd). Of particular importance is a summative writing assignment, teacher interviews and collaborative data analysis (with video clips), student interviews about instruction and their writing, samples of student writing, and related documents. We also analyzed two essays written by the two case study students in response to a writing assignment that the teacher, described as an IB “literary commentary with an unspecified topic” that she reframed as a literary argument. Discourse analysis of a series of events within instructional conversations revealed that rather than prescribed forms, the teacher offered “possible” writerly moves for her students’ arguing to learn. Consequently, her students enacted their writerly moves in a variety of patterns suggestive of disciplinary ways of knowing in English language arts rather than in a pre-set formula that they had learned in previous grades. In order to trace how the students enacted modes of participation (procedural display and deep participation) in disciplinary activity (literary argumentation) as writing practices and shifting writer identities  we also conducted a multi-phased and multi-layered analysis using procedures based off of previous intertextual analysis scholarship and backward mapping processes.

Toku toa, he toa rangatira: Fearlessness and Indigenous Scholarship

A well-known whakataukī (aphorism, proverb) tells us toku toa, he toa rangatira, quite literally ‘my courage is inherited’. Wairaka is known as an impressive young wahine from pre-colonial times who, in the face of a life or death situation, stood up to adversity to supersede an important, long held tikanga Māori (protocol) to save the Ngāti Awa iwi. She is my whāea tipuna (ancestress) and because of her bravery, I like to carry her with me in my academic career as a screen studies scholar. Ensuring academic disciplines endure and are relevant throughout the generations requires consistently robust research, dynamic teaching, and leadership; but challenging academia with Indigenous knowledge goes beyond this. As Indigenous academic scholars, we must commit to satiating the academy with our research and teaching to appeal to the discipline’s status quo, at the same time as upholding the values, expectations and ideals of our communities, those to whom we return once projects are complete. Therefore, Indigenous research is never truly over. The marriage between the discipline and our respective cultures however is never straightforward. Indigenous scholarship takes a much greater level of fearlessness because we must combat potential exclusion from the discipline that we are carving the outlines of our culture into. Thus, we must choose to either blend into the grooves of the existing disciplinary carvings, or to accept that we are a new adze. This is often met with obstructions. Primarily relying on critical Kaupapa Māori analysis comparing the existing and prospective fields of knowledge, this paper considers the potential of Indigenous research as a collective of holistic research strategies. It underlines some of the challenges associated with implementing Indigenous knowledge and diverting from disciplinary norms. In the way that our whāea tipuna Wairaka did, we can challenge the long held tikanga - the rules and strictures - that have sustained and satiated our disciplines for generations, to save or evolve our disciplines into the future. Like Wairaka, and many of your brave ancestors before you, we must be prepared to stand alone, and to be courageous as per our inheritance.

Clio and Computers in Canada and Beyond: Contested Past, Promising Present, Uncertain Future

Historians began using computers in the 1950s and 1960s when their possibilities seemed unlimited in the private, public, and non-profit sectors of wealthier countries. In this societal context, Clio met computers. In the following decades, a few historians would predict, from time to time, that digitally-enabled scholarship was on track to become the disciplinary norm. They emphasized the impact of specific initiatives enabled by changing technologies, from the mainframe era to microcomputers, the web, the tsunami of “born-digital” and digitized data, mobile devices, and new computational approaches such as machine learning. However, their predictions routinely failed to materialize and, while all historians might use digital tools at least to some extent, a claim that “we-are-all-digital-now” downplays substantive questions about History’s past and current relationship with new technologies. This article re-interprets the changing meaning of digital technologies within the disciplinary culture and institutional conditions of History. The evidence thus far reveals good reasons for both optimism and pessimism about digitally-enabled History at various times since the 1950s. By examining the complex and often surprising past and present, we can better determine and take the needed next steps in Digital History.

Discipline and methodological paradigm

Abstract In contemporary academia, multilingual scholars using English as an additional language (EAL) are actively engaged in knowledge construction producing more research texts in English than native speakers (Hyland, 2016). Having a more general purpose to gain insights into the factors that influence multilingual scholars’ research writing practices in English, this case study seeks to explore how EAL users perceive disciplinary norms of epistemic stance expression in political science. It is based on interviews with 5 Russian political scientists and on the analysis of their research texts. The findings suggest that the participants do not seem to have a shared understanding of disciplinary norms regarding epistemic stance expression; however, their narratives highlight the importance of the methodological paradigm the texts belong to for their writing practices. The study is a contribution to the discussion of the role of the discipline in EAL scholars’ research writing practices and linguistic and rhetorical variability of research texts within one discipline. The results of this study have pedagogical implications for ERPP course designers and practitioners.

Who Counts? Gender, Gatekeeping, and Quantitative Human Geography

How academic disciplines are represented and reproduced is a charged issue. In geography in particular, the challenge is not only who counts, especially with regard to gender and other factors, but also how the boundaries of the discipline are drawn and which subfields are acknowledged. This article contributes to both aspects of the discussion by extending recent research on gender, internationalization, and academic gatekeeping to additional subfields of human geography. In particular, we focus on the demographic structure and international diversity of the editorial teams of flagship quantitative geography journals. We find that women are underrepresented in our sample, with shares ranging from 23.1 to 43.5 percent—numbers unfortunately comparable to many other geography journals. We also find that career stage is an important factor and that our sample is more international and less Anglophone than the disciplinary norm. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of attending to issues of inclusive gatekeeping in geography and elsewhere.

A Systematic Review of Corpus-Based Studies on Academic Writing in the Turkish Context

Academic writing is rested on a view of academic negotiation between writers and readers in which writers ultimately aim to gain credibility in their academic discipline. In doing so, they utilize a wide range of linguistic devices based on cultural and disciplinary norms to communicate with readers and convince the readers about the truth of their claims. Based on a review of corpus-based studies about linguistic devices in academic writing conducted by Turkish scholars in the field of English Language Teaching and Linguistics, the present systematic review aims to show a general understanding of these devices in the lens of Turkish scholars in these fields. The systematic review has been carried out by postgraduate dissertations, MA theses and research articles in the past decade. Based on the results, it is found that Turkish academic writers had a different style of taking stance in their L1 and they mostly attempt to follow the linguistic conventions of both global and cultural communities in their discipline while writing academic genres in English.

New Approaches to Understanding Judicial Ethics in the Information

Introduction. The article is devoted to the problems of the essence and content of judicial ethics in the new conditions of the technical revolution and with other social needs for legal regulation. Theoretical Basis. Methods. The work used a systematic, activity-personal approach to the study of moral and ethical standards of the conduct of judges. This made it possible to reveal a new and broader view on judicial ethics, which is not simply a set of moral restrictions and obligations imposed on a judge. Results. The work has identified and analysed the signs of judicial ethics at the current stage of development. It is argued that ethical regulation is precautionary in relation to the legal regulation of the independence of judges, for they complement ethical rules and reinforce legal norms. The ethical conduct of judges is an instrument guaranteeing judicial independence in all of its manifestations, including in organisational and judicial relations. The new realities of our time recognise the expansion of boundaries and the subject area itself of ethical regulation. A broader view on judicial ethics, which differs from the traditional one, is hereby justified. The latter is defined in two ways – namely both as a system of professional values, as well as a means of judicial administration based on the principle of self-regulation. By its very nature, judicial ethics is the result (and the way) of judicial self-governance, developed on the basis of the experience of functioning bodies of the judicial community. Discussion and Conclusion. Conclusions are drawn on both the instrumental and the managerial impact of the categories of ethics. The subject of judicial ethics has been defined, which constitutes the rules of conduct of judges in the performance of their professional duties and beyond – namely the set of general principles of work of a judge, as well as the personal qualities of a judge personifying the judicial power. Proposals on the optimisation of the mechanism of ethical influence, differentiation of ethical and disciplinary norms have also been substantiated.

Integrating Integrity: The Organizational Translation of Policies on Research Integrity.

Responsible conduct of research and research integrity has become a key concern in both research policy and public media resulting in a number of soft law documents, such as codes of conduct at national and supranational levels. This article zooms in on the institutions that are supposed to translate these overall policies and guidelines into workable and recognizable structures for researchers, that is, the mediating layer between the policy articulations and the individual researchers and research groups; a perspective which has been notably lacking in the literature on research integrity. Document analysis demonstrated how research organizations translated and integrated demands for research integrity measures differently, and interviews explored how department heads made sense of these organizational efforts. Results show that department heads did not seem to use organizational policies in their sensemaking around research integrity. To a much larger degree, they used disciplinary norms, systemic pressures and other cues to construct the meaning of integrity. The heads of department articulated integrity as a "non-problem" in their own local context, rather, it was other departments and other countries that experienced lack of research integrity. This meant that the origin of the problem of integrity is located in the system, but to a large extent the department heads describe the solution of the problem to be in the culture of research. The implications of this dis-location and externalizing of integrity are discussed.

Discipline lessons from American faith-based autonomous schools: a narrative of power and ‘mini-public’ ideology

ABSTRACT Widespread neoliberal approaches to education consider schools increasingly accountable for self-management and ‘client’ recruitment, encapsulating economic ideologies that assume privatisation is essential for social progress. With an ever-shifting landscape of market-driven policies and the increasing growth of private education settings, more research is needed to cast light on emerging or under-researched aspects of autonomous schools. Located within a U.S. state that has strict constraints on tax subsidies for religious K-12 education, this paper investigates how an extensive form of decentralisation corresponds with schools’ discipline and ethical environment. It analyses teacher interviews and web documents from faith-based, autonomous schools in a state that has devolved power and authority for decision-making to parents and other independent ‘agents’, having a distanced relationship with its non-state ‘actors’. The paper follows Foucault’s use of the metaphor of the panopticon and adopts his power analysis to examine the nature of parental control and its influence on disciplinary and ethical practices. Evidence suggests that these autonomous schools are driven by a ‘mini-public’ ideology that constrains educators’ autonomy and generates particular disciplinary norms; entangling ethical, educational, and social ramifications, including teacher resistance and teacher demoralisation. Implications for policy are discussed in this context of control.

Creative Action Under Two Copyright Regimes: Filmmaking and Visual Arts in Australia and the United States

AbstractA comparison of the behaviors of two creative populations operating within cross-media environments in the United States and Australia tests the comparative effect of the two nations' legal environments on the range of creative expression and on costs of production in increasingly digitized production processes. The U.S. creators have access to the flexible and expansive exception of fair use, while Australian creators' ability to use third-party copyrighted content are far more constrained. While availability of copyright exceptions plays a crucial role, other factors including demographics, disciplinary norms, and social inequality may also be important in creative practices and professions.

Oversee and Punish: Understanding the Fight Against Corruption Involving Government Workers in Brazil

This exploratory study leverages a major dataset of official penalties against Brazilian bureaucrats enforced between January 2003 and November 2014, when 5,005 expulsive sanctions were enforced, 68.5% of which concerned acts of corruption. The analysis and discussion also integrate qualitative data gathered through 24 semi-structured interviews with civil servants who were integrity enforcers. Despite the rapid increase in the number of penalties enforced over the years, the creation of a robust set of disciplinary norms and an anti-corruption agency have not secured a fully operational horizontal accountability system within the executive. A great variance of corruption control was observed across agencies, manifested through disproportionate enforcement, not only of overall sanctions but also of corruption and non-corruption-related penalties. In light of the self‐protective behaviour of civil servants, who openly say they do not feel comfortable in the role of corruption fighters, the article advances an argument on ‘convenient accountability’—a kind of institutional abdication combined with a reluctance for peer monitoring, with outcomes that can be described as satisficing for integrity agents. This institutional aspect poses a risk to internal disciplinary systems and increases dependence upon external actors of accountability, compromising the efficiency of both.

A critical social perspective on deep sea mining: Lessons from the emergent industry in Japan

In 2017 the Japanese government reported that its state-owned mining company had successfully extracted zinc from the seabed off the coast of Okinawa. This piloting of technology is currently the world's only example of large-scale extractive activity operating at such depths. Alongside Japan's innovations, the global deep sea mining (DSM) industry is moving towards commercial viability. This paper draws upon critical theoretical perspectives to better understand the complex debates being provoked. While there has been an increasing range of scholarship focusing on DSM from both the natural and social sciences, this paper cautions that the social sciences are not merely tools for assessing public and stakeholder acceptability. They require and deserve a central role in defining the purpose, nature and scope of commercial DSM. This paper therefore develops an approach that seeks to diversify and broaden engagements with DSM and that is well-placed to navigate the political questions that emerge from mining on the seabed. These perspectives also enable us to interrogate claims that DSM offers greater ‘sustainability’ than terrestrial mining does. This paper's interdisciplinary approach draws on empirical reference to, and examples from, the Japanese context, highlighting four main areas of concern for DSM: geography, geopolitics, law and political economy. These areas of critical enquiry reveal DSM's complexities and caution against perceiving DSM as a singular phenomenon. The emergent complex and multi-scalar questions from seabed mining therefore require a more holistic approach. Mining the seabed produces, and is underpinned by, a multitude of social, cultural and political dimensions and the potential consequences of DSM will not be experienced evenly. As this paper demonstrates, DSM is an interdisciplinary issue. The confines of disciplinary norms must therefore be exceeded to facilitate a deeper understanding of both the practices of DSM and their consequences.

Negotiating status hierarchies in middle school inquiry science: implications for marginal non-participation

While previous classroom studies of status hierarchies tell us who has low status and how to increase those learners’ participation in small group contexts via teacher-led interventions, we know little about how one becomes low status, or the role peers play in legitimating or delegitimating inequitable relations. This study used the sociocultural concept of marginal non-participation to describe interactional moves learners use to navigate status hierarchies in an inquiry science context where student authority may permit learners to obstruct peers’ participation. Participants were three collaborative groups of 3–4 learners in 7th grade science classrooms where a series of inquiry curriculum units were being implemented. Interviews were used alongside a microgenetic analysis of video-recorded group work observations to identify interactions that legitimated and delegitimated status hierarchies. Legitimation involved communicating acceptance of differential belonging and competence while delegitimation involved challenging differential reward by fostering widespread participation. Low- and high-status group members were active in both processes. Results suggest that diffuse status characteristics and science capital inform how status hierarchies are negotiated and that learners adapt disciplinary norms for status legitimating and delegitimating ends. Implications for learners’ participation in scientific practices and identification with science are discussed.

The figure of the independent learner: on governing by personalization and debt

ABSTRACT Taking the European Credit and Transfer System as its departure point, this article describes the (mis)fortunes of the figure of the independent learner. This figure is conceptualized by analyzing the expectations of the European learning space that is enacted in discourses, instruments and practices. The independent learner is a de-institutionalized learner who is permanently in need of qualifications, calculations and mobility, and what takes shape is a ‘governing by personalization and debt'. Key components of today’s European learning space are no longer disciplinary norms (with inspection) and administrative rules (with sanctions), but personalizing profiles (with feedback). Understanding current forms of governing is of importance in order to perceive that what is appreciated today in terms of liberation and independence is in fact the inscription of the student in new forms of governing. The analysis concludes by raising the question of where university pedagogy begins and governing education should hold off.

(Un)Disciplining the Graduate Student, and a Queer Otherwise

This essay reflects on the walkout during the 2019 National Communication Association Organizational Communication Division's Top Paper Panel. I draw upon queer theory to discuss the impacts of disciplinary norms and whiteness in organizational communication.