Using the Schoolyard as a Setting for Learning Chemistry: A Sociocultural Analysis of Pre-service Teachers’ Talk about Redox Chemistry

Abstract

The schoolyard as a setting for teaching and learning is rarely the focus of chemistry education research. Therefore, a chemistry unit combining activities in the classroom and the schoolyard was designed to support preservice teachers' (PSTs) learning of redox chemistry. This study was conducted to investigate the PSTs' talk about redox chemistry as they identified, photographed, and explained phenomena in the schoolyard (i.e., university campus). Video data were collected from six groups of PSTs from two different teacher education institutions in Norway. Videos from two groups were selected for deeper analyses: one with PSTs who had specialized in chemistry during their secondary education and one with PSTs who had not. The groups' talk was analyzed with respect to (1) the types of talk, (2) the levels of chemistry displayed in the talk, and (3) the schoolyard phenomena that triggered the content-related talk.The talk was mostly exploratory, and the PSTs connected sub-micro-level redox chemistry to macro-level phenomena. Moreover, the PSTs noticed several phenomena in the schoolyard that triggered chemistry-related talk. Although the talk that developed occurred differently in the two groups, this study indicates that the schoolyard can provide opportunities for learning chemistry for learners with different formal backgrounds in chemistry.

Investigating the mangle of teaching oxidation–reduction with the VisChem approach: problematising symbolic traditions that undermine chemistry concept development

“…Teacher 106's micro-teaching: description and mnemonics Teacher 106's micro-teaching in Room 1 was engaging, enthusiastic, and humorous. Teacher 106's fluid interactions with the other VCI-2 teachers in the student role demonstrated experience with not only the topic of redox but also its valuable connections to everyday examples such as batteries (Jegstad et al, 2022). Despite the positive reception, we noticed chemistry symbols had affected 106's accommodation of the learning outcome.…”

“…For example, pre-and inservice German teachers delineated electron transfer as a key learning outcome but recalled more student difficulties with writing and balancing redox equations (Goes et al, 2020). Norwegian pre-service teachers' use of the particulate level was primarily descriptive, limited to the loss and gain of electrons akin to what the written equation would indicate (Jegstad et al, 2022). Aydin et al (2014) showed that Turkish, Indian, and American textbooks most frequently use written equations when presenting different types of chemical reactions-many of which are fundamentally redox.…”