The resurgence of everyday experiences in school science learning activities

Abstract

Science education can be alienating for students, as it is apart from the mundane world with which they are familiar. Science education research has approached the gap between everyday understandings and science learning largely as a challenge arising while learning about science concepts and the kinds of instructional approaches that may support this. However, the forms of everyday ways of relating to the world fundamentally expand beyond conceptual understandings. In this study, we use data from an outdoor science learning setting to examine a range of non-conceptual but culturally possible and intelligible ways in which students actually connect science learning processes to their everyday world and its characteristic commonsense understandings. Our study shows how students' (a) spontaneous embodied explorations, (b) humor in all of its bodily and grotesque forms, and (c) narrative representation and interpretation of the world are used to contextualize science learning, namely its environment and content, within their familiar world. We show how students draw on these fundamental cultural forms of understanding the world even without particular instructional support while, at the same time, completing their science tasks according to the goals set by their teachers. Our findings suggest that the ways in which students connect their everyday world with science learning do not have to be explicitly related to the particular conceptual learning goals but can parallel conceptual learning while contextualizing it in affectively meaningful ways.

Smart training technology in the teaching of history at Kazan State University of Architecture and Engineering

“…Therefore, it is very important to find out the attitude of students to these events in order to connect the student's daily personal experience with historical science through them. This approach has repeatedly become the subject of research by specialists in various fields of scientific knowledge [8]. Researchers focus not only on personally significant events for the student in the study of the subject, but in the interaction of the teacher, student and parents [14].…”

“…Secondly, this is the ability to work with information that comes through Internet resources. In modern society, young people are the most receptive social audience to the values, opinions, views expressed by the Internet space [7][8][9][10][11]. Even viewing of publications, blogs of science-dubious content is fraught with the danger of accepting these values, breaking the social and cultural identity, and the birth of extremist sentiments.…”

Teachers’ Choices of Teaching Methods for Environmental Education: A case study of Life Skills teachers at a primary school in South Africa

“…Despite challenges, the participating teachers tried to be innovative within their contexts. Teacher M was an advocate for using real-life situations as a platform for learning and understanding concepts (as also described by Kervinen et al, 2020). He used local newspapers, the television news and family discussions about present environmental situations to reinforce teaching: It's very important that learners are not passive within the class, they need to be active.…”

How do secondary school students handle epistemic uncertainty during an ecological citizen science inquiry?

“…Thus, connecting the scientific inquiry with the everyday forms of relating to the world could allow the students to students engage in doing science in ways that are meaningful in their everyday lives (cf. Kervinen et al, 2020b;Ko, 2021).…”

“…The findings of this study also show how students reframed the uncertainty through the integration of their everyday experience in the inquiry processes. Integration of everyday forms of knowing in science teaching is essential to make it meaningful for the students (e.g., Archer et al, 2010;Ko, 2021), and it has been shown that the absence of a teacher in particular can enable such connections particularly well (Kervinen et al, 2020b). The present study extends the previous work by showing how the students used their everyday experiences and understandings of urban life as a resource to manage uncertainty that is meaningful not only for themselves but also regarding the production of new knowledge of the world.…”