Putting the Cart Before the Horse: The Creation of Essences out of Processes in Science Education Research

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of treating generalizations of human activity as entities and structures that ultimately explain the activities from which they were initially drawn. This is problematic because it involves a circular reasoning leading to unwarranted claims explaining the originally studied activities of science teaching and learning. Unlike other fields within social science research, this problem has not been appreciated and discussed in the science education literature and the field thus needs to be reminded of it. A heuristic specifically developed for the purposes of this article is applied to two examples taken from a much‐cited research in the field. Through the examples it is argued that the practice of creating entities out of generalizations of science classroom activities leads to a number of unintended consequences. It is further argued that the stated purposes in the two example articles would actually have been better served by investigating the entire processes through which the activities develop, as well as how the activities may change through teaching. The article concludes that through the search for explanations caused by underlying entities, science education research runs a risk of alienating its results from the activities from which it initially wanted to meliorate.

Swimming against the Tide: Five Assumptions about Physics Teacher Education Sustained by the Culture of Physics Departments

“…Adopting Gee's (2005) discourse analytical tools in analysis further means we take on a discourse theoretical understanding of our data. The assumptions we identify are thus generalizations of patterns we analytically see in physicist talk, but cannot be said to be actual innate properties of the individual physicists (Lundegård & Hamza, 2014).…”

Young children’s imagination in science education and education for sustainability

“…The capability of blending has often been described as located in the mind of human beings bestowed by evolution to create new ideas through the combination of older ones (Turner 2014). However, this approach that locates blending in the cognitive domain runs the risk of transforming children's actions into mental abilities (e.g., Lundegård and Hamza 2014). Despite this fact, we consider blending as a useful concept though it helps us describing the visible solutions to problems made by children produced in an imaginational process.…”

“…A theoretical perspective is required that emphasizes the significance of the context for children's meaning making and learning that takes imagination into consideration. Instead of framing this work through cognitive theory which reifies activities into mental states (Lundegård and Hamza 2014), we have chosen a pragmatic, action-oriented framework based on John Dewey's work (1934/1980, 1938/ 1997, 1925/1958). Rather than conceptualize imagination as a fixed entity held by a detached individual, or as a romantic, mysterious, chaotic, or irrational property (Garrison 1997), we consider it as an activity in which human beings compose an integral whole within an experience (Dewey 1934(Dewey /1980).…”

Didaktik för naturvetenskap och hållbar utveckling - Fem former av demokratiskt deltagande <br/> Education for science and Sustainable Development - Four forms of Democratic Participation.

“…Väsentligt att poängtera är att det vi identifierar som former av deltagande inte ska associeras till psykologiska förmågor av generisk karaktär. Teoretiska diskussioner kring detta misstag finns utredda på flera håll (Lundegård & Hamza, 2013;Säljö, 2002). Vår ambition är alltså inte att bidra till att instrumentellt utveckla vad man i andra sammanhang skulle kunna kalla elevers demokratiska förmågor.…”