Steve Ritchie – författare

Re/Constructing Elementary Science seeks to improve the way science is taught in the elementary school. There are three main contradictions that make it difficult for teachers and students to engage in meaningful activities from which understandings result. The central issues in this book are framed in terms of three dichotomies that lead to tensions arising from the dialectic of opposing aspects of teaching and learning. First, there is a tension between learning as an individual process (cultural production) and as a cultural process (cultural reproduction). Second, there is a tension between science and technology (applied science). Finally, there exists a tension between children’s interaction with nature and their language for describing and explaining nature. Exemplary case studies are featured that show the tremendous capabilities of elementary students to talk about technology and, in the process, to learn to talk science. These case studies are couched in an ongoing professional dialogue among the authors and the requirements to make such exemplary science happen in other classrooms.

When Maggie Buckner is captured by a gang of outlaws an unlikely old man known as 'The Dutchman' is the only one who can set her free. Outnumbered eight to one, the Dutchman sits perched on a bench near Savage Peak, watching the fugitives as they ride out onto the open prairie. He adjusts the sights of his Remington No. 1 Rifle and waits as the first rider comes into range. When he stops shooting, three of the captors lay sprawled on the prairie...dead.After striking the first deadly blows, the Dutchman trails the group across South Pass through the unpredictable Wyoming springtime weather, like the fourth horseman of the apocalypse…and surely Hell goes with him.