Abstract
In this chapter, I articulate some of the possible consequences for school mathematics and science that arise from the findings reported and theorized in PART II. This includes, for example, the role of uncertainty in STEM literacy, graphicacy, and contradictions. I propose some possibilities for what we might want to foster in student inquiry such that they actually learn something that is useful in the world outside of schools. Here, I focus on the difference between laboratory communication and written science, the temporality of scientific praxis, on learning something not yet known, and on learning about the nature of the STEM fields. I end this chapter with an argument to foster the development of bricoleurs, who cope with just about any challenge that life offers on a daily basis.
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- 1.
Ontology – from the Greek ὄν [on], present particle of εἶναι [einai] to be, + λόγος [logos], word, science – is the science that constitutes what things are. In the information sciences, an ontology is a framework for organizing the available knowledge and things in a domain.
- 2.
This statement is typical: “Try this [vitamin B preparation] and when it does not work come back in 2 weeks and we try another one.” I realized that I was paying the doctor to learn, in a trial-and-error fashion: what is behind the kind of symptoms I displayed and how you can treat them (cf. Roth 2014).
- 3.
While conducting an early study on graphs and graphing in physics lectures for elementary education majors, Ken Tobin and I analyzed how the professor, during his demonstration-based lecture, moved from showing Galileo ’s experiment of balls rolling on an inclined plane to lists of numbers and graphical representations : position-time, velocity-time, and acceleration-time graphs (Roth et al. 1997c). During a subsequent lecture, the professor referred back to the earlier one making a hand gesture . In our analyses, we first reproduced the gesture as a way of making it present again for our discussions in the absence of the video. We also had evidence that the students did not know what he was talking about or referring to. Thus, we soon used the hand/arm movement as a way to signify students’ lack of understanding in lectures.
- 4.
I use the indefinite “any” rather than the definite “the” to show that I do not assume that one actually exists.
- 5.
Having had a background in neo-Piagetian developmental theory , I was using at the time (radical) constructivist theory to understand learning. However, it was precisely out of this research that I evolved one of the first social constructivist accounts of learning in school science classrooms (e.g. Roth and Roychoudhury 1992, 1993).
- 6.
- 7.
There are no reasons other than administrative ones that make the beginning of the school day the same for all students in a class or school. But this does not have to be. For example, I repeatedly described and theorized the practices of several French schools, at the elementary and secondary levels, where students themselves decide when it is time to come to school (e.g. Roth and Lee 2006).
- 8.
I would not be able to write books or research articles if I were jerked from my desk every 60 min to do something else.
- 9.
This is not unlike a world emerges for the person who finds herself in an unknown place and, by groping about, comes to be familiar with, and give shape to, the new lifeworld that she comes to inhabit.
- 10.
Wagenschein uses the term Bildung for which there is no exact equivalent in English, which often remains untranslated in the English scholarly literature (Elmose and Roth 2005). “Education” heard in opposition to “schooling” perhaps best translates the German word.
- 11.
Tachions are hypothetical particles traveling faster than the speed of light, which is the limiting speed for the movement and transmission of information .
- 12.
I once had the opportunity to review a book on metacognition – with examples from science and mathematics education – which had as much as 40 errors per page (Roth 2004). I concluded that these researchers of metacognition displayed very little evidence of metacognition.
- 13.
It should be noted that many of those implicated in the oftentimes acrimonious science education debate over realist or constructivist conceptions of the nature of science never have had scientific training, done scientific research, or done ethnographic studies of science.
- 14.
We study not for school but for life.
- 15.
For very large batches of fishes – such as we required for laboratory experiments – we rented a truck with large water tanks to transport about 1,000 coho from the hatchery to the university.
- 16.
Ten years later, during a renovation project, the track was replaced after opening up the wall. The screws still were very tight, a situation that certainly would have outlasted the owners of the house given the length of the screws and the tightness of their fit at the instant of removal.
- 17.
I do admit that the chemistry teacher in the school found my classroom “messy” and did not find it inspiring although the students really liked it and although the provincial inspector of private schools recognized exemplary teaching and learning going on and recommended visiting my classroom to science teachers of other private schools in my geographical area.
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Roth, WM. (2014). Uncertainty, Inquiry, Bricolage. In: Uncertainty and Graphing in Discovery Work. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7009-6_11
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