Recomendaciones Finales

science learning steers him to create a learning environment in which practice-based learning is emphasised. In Section-2.3, I narrated how in the last decades, both researchers and educators

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have recommended a shift away from teaching science as-a-body-of-established-knowledge – science-as-knowledge– towards experiencing science as a method of generating, validating, and applying such knowledge –science-as-practice– (Pickering, 1993; Soler et al., 2014). From this perspective, to be proficient in science, students should not only acquire a set of science concepts, methods, and skills but to become legitimate participants in different epistemic practices and discourses (Duschl et al., 2007). Reframing students’ learning expectations around engagement in discursive and epistemic practices has important consequences for the classroom, in terms of (i) the students and teacher’s role, (ii) the social organisation, and (ii) the kind of discourse used.

i) Role changing. When students’ engagement goes beyond solving drill activities whose purpose is to confirm canonical knowledge, and beyond being merely exposed to definitions of what a scientific practice is (Stroupe, 2015), they need to take on a new role as epistemic agents. Epistemic agents have ideas, interests, and intentions, and should, then, share the responsibility of constructing knowledge. I witnessed many situations in which Christian acted as a guide for the students while engaging in an epistemic practice. Christian strived to provide support and scaffolding to students, whose ideas and beliefs were elicited, commented, and considered for the development of the activity. In the episodes of explanations production, the students answered Christian’s questions but also posed their own questions; they provided keywords to explain the phenomenon; they discussed with each other; they sometimes disagreed; they justified their answers and reasons; and they developed their own explanatory accounts. In short, they acted as individual epistemic agents within a community. In this sense, then, the roles played by Christian and his students fit in with a practice-based approach to science. Something very characteristic of the practices in which Christian’s students were involved is that they could experience phenomena directly. Given that the selected phenomena were always related to some aspect of the curriculum and content, we can say that Christian advocated for what Svinicki and McKeachie (2011) call ‘experiential learning’.

ii) Social organisation. One of the aspects scholars agree about is that discipline-based epistemic practices are always performed by communities within particular contexts with their particular cultural norms (Osborne et al., 2003; Kelly & Licona, 2018, Chang, 2011), which are supported by a network of social and institutional frameworks (Moura & Guerra, 2016). Duschl (2008) insisted on the need to find a harmonious balance between the conceptual dimension, the epistemic dimension and the social dimension that each practice possesses. Regarding the social dimension, what should be sought in the classroom is for students to participate in the consensual elaboration of the norms that define each practice, their implementation, and the

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success criteria, in addition to getting involved in the practice as a community. For all this to be satisfied, classrooms should become real communities of practice where students work towards shared goals (Kaartinen & Kumpulainen, 2004). This requires teachers to create and sustain learning environments in which dialogue is promoted, which, in turn, requires students to feel confident and respected.

In Christian’s lessons, the social dimension of practices like explanation-building is implicitly introduced. Although Christian takes for granted what makes a good explanation without telling the students, they do participate in the process of selecting the keywords and concepts necessary to build the explanation. On the other hand, the elaboration of the explanation is a conjoint process where dialogue plays an essential role. Finally, students often share their explanations so that group members may provide with some ideas and comments on how they could improve them. That is, there is some negotiation on the construction of knowledge through practices in the classroom, although students do not decide what an explanation is and what its quality criteria are. This can be done because Christian sustains an environment in which students know their interventions will be welcomed with respect, valued, and considered. I was positively surprised to see students who had serious difficulties with English (because they were not native-speakers and had spent little time in the UK) participating in the activities voluntarily; in some cases, their classmates helped them express an idea, reinforcing the image of a community that learns together.

iii) Patterns of discourse. A widely supported idea is that classroom discourse is decisive in how students understand and conceptualise science (Christodoulou & Osborne, 2014) and learning (Plakitsi et al., 2017). Thus, if teachers aim for their students to become familiar with science as a set of practices, they must carefully select the type of discourse used, since not all them reflect “the specialized ways of participating in science and (…) how ideas are validated and communicated within the scientific community” (Harris et al., 2012. p.771). Dialogic teaching environments are those in which teachers and students interact to elicit and coordinate their different ideas and perspectives (Alexander, 2008) to develop some collective thinking (Mercer, 2004). According to Mortimer and Scott (2003), “(t)he very act of conducting dialogic interactions in class serves to (…) demonstrate to students that it is perfectly legitimate for them to ‘talk science’ in this kind of way (questioning and discussing findings and ideas, rather than just accepting them)” (p.70). Therefore, teaching science-as-practice suggests using a classroom discourse with a predominance of dialogic interactions.

Despite the relevance of dialogic discourse for promoting students’ engagement in epistemic practices, many studies show that dialogic interactions are usually absent from

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science classrooms (Wells, 1999; Harris et al., 2012). Kumpulainen and Lipponen (2009) propose that this might be because managing the diversity of students’ ideas is a highly demanding task for teachers. Harris, Phillips, and Penuel (2012) detail the reasons that make dialogic interaction challenging for teachers, highlighting that it requires i) deciding what use to make of students’ ideas; ii) encouraging students to share their thinking; iii) knowing how to get students to listen to their classmates and respect their ideas; iv) being able to improvise and respond to students’ ideas; v) integrate effectively students’ everyday knowledge and practices, with the norms, scientific content and practices of science; and vi) knowing how to deal with students with different cultural experiences.

Christian manages to create a learning environment in which students have numerous opportunities to participate in genuine epistemic practices, such as the construction of explanations. Christian’s classes are indeed very small, and this could facilitate the foundation of a climate of trust in which dialogue is always present. However, it does not mean that Christian does not also have some skills and strategies that help him in this task. For example, he has developed a teaching strategy to support students in the production of explanations. This strategy is composed of a series of phases. In the first one, Christian works in conjunction with his students to select a group of keywords and to recall some pertinent content knowledge. In the second phase, students must work individually to write their explanation. Finally, they share their product with a peer who will help them to enhance the quality of their explanation. Thus, we witness different interaction patterns in the same activity, two of them of dialogic nature. On the other hand, the analysis of the intervention sequences used by Christian reveals that these are varied and complex since they aim to elicit, develop, and connect the ideas of many participants. That Christian had a specific instructional strategy for the elaboration of explanations in the classroom makes him a very valuable case for my research.

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