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Barry J. Fraser, Kenneth G. Tobin and Campbell J. McRobbie (eds): Second International Handbook of Science Education

Springer, Dordrecht, 2012, ISBN: 978-1-4020-9040-0, 1564 pp, £449.50

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Notes

  1. The notion of public knowledge is problematic for anyone (such as the present reviewer) adopting a personal constructivist perspective on learning, as from such a stance knowledge cannot be directly shared but rather an individual’s personal knowledge can only be represented in the public space (by utterances, producing texts etc) to provide accessible representations that then have to be interpreted by another individual in a process of personal meaning-making. This certainly undermines a simplistic notion that public knowledge exists in places such as library shelves or the world-wide web. However the notion of there being canonical knowledge is a core assumption for much work in science education, and is at least a convenient fiction which does useful work as a ideal referent. A social constructivist perspective might consider knowledge as distributed over a social network rather than residing in individual minds (Collins, 2010), but this approach does not offer a clear notion of how there can be canonical knowledge that can be accessed within the collective. This issue is addressed in more detail in Chapter 10 (‘Relating the learner’s knowledge to public knowledge’) of Taber (2013b).

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  1. Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Keith S. Taber

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Taber, K.S. Barry J. Fraser, Kenneth G. Tobin and Campbell J. McRobbie (eds): Second International Handbook of Science Education . Sci & Educ 24, 319–337 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-014-9725-7

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