New Directions in Mathematics and Science Education – serie

In this book the editors consider the resistance to change among teachers and learners despite all the evidence that science participation brings benefits for both individuals and nations. Beginning with biology, Stability and Change in Science Education: Meeting Basic Learning Needs explores this balance in teaching and learning science. The authors reflect upon this equilibrium as they each present their work and its contribution.The book provides a wide range of examples using the change/stability lens. Authors from the Netherlands, Israel, Spain, Canada and the USA discuss how they observe and consider both homeostasis and novelty in theory, projects and other work. The book contains examples from science educators in schools and in other science rich settings.Contributors are: Lucy Avraamidou, Ayelet Baram-Tsabari, Michelle Crowl, Marilynne Eichinger, Lars Guenther, Maria Heras, Phyllis Katz, Joy Kubarek, Lucy R. McClain, Patricia Patrick, Wolff-Michael Roth, Isabel Ruiz-Mallen, Lara Smetana, Hani Swirski, Heather Toomey Zimmerman, and Bart Van de Laar.

In this book the editors consider the resistance to change among teachers and learners despite all the evidence that science participation brings benefits for both individuals and nations. Beginning with biology, Stability and Change in Science Education: Meeting Basic Learning Needs explores this balance in teaching and learning science. The authors reflect upon this equilibrium as they each present their work and its contribution.The book provides a wide range of examples using the change/stability lens. Authors from the Netherlands, Israel, Spain, Canada and the USA discuss how they observe and consider both homeostasis and novelty in theory, projects and other work. The book contains examples from science educators in schools and in other science rich settings.Contributors are: Lucy Avraamidou, Ayelet Baram-Tsabari, Michelle Crowl, Marilynne Eichinger, Lars Guenther, Maria Heras, Phyllis Katz, Joy Kubarek, Lucy R. McClain, Patricia Patrick, Wolff-Michael Roth, Isabel Ruiz-Mallen, Lara Smetana, Hani Swirski, Heather Toomey Zimmerman, and Bart Van de Laar.

Science educators have come to recognize children’s reasoning and problem solving skills as crucial ingredients of scientific literacy. As a consequence, there has been a concurrent, widespread emphasis on argumentation as a way of developing critical and creative minds. Argumentation has been of increasing interest in science education as a means of actively involving students in science and, thereby, as a means of promoting their learning, reasoning, and problem solving. Many approaches to teaching argumentation place primacy on teaching the structure of the argumentative genre prior to and at the beginning of participating in argumentation. Such an approach, however, is unlikely to succeed because to meaningfully learn the structure (grammar) of argumentation, one already needs to be competent in argumentation. This book offers a different approach to children’s argumentation and reasoning based on dialogical relations, as the origin of internal dialogue (inner speech) and higher psychological functions. In this approach, argumentation first exists as dialogical relation, for participants who are in a dialogical relation with others, and who employ argumentation for the purpose of the dialogical relation. With the multimodality of dialogue, this approach expands argumentation into another level of physicality of thinking, reasoning, and problem solving in classrooms. By using empirical data from elementary classrooms, this book explains how argumentation emerges and develops in and from classroom interactions by focusing on thinking and reasoning through/in relations with others and the learning environment.

Science educators have come to recognize children’s reasoning and problem solving skills as crucial ingredients of scientific literacy. As a consequence, there has been a concurrent, widespread emphasis on argumentation as a way of developing critical and creative minds. Argumentation has been of increasing interest in science education as a means of actively involving students in science and, thereby, as a means of promoting their learning, reasoning, and problem solving. Many approaches to teaching argumentation place primacy on teaching the structure of the argumentative genre prior to and at the beginning of participating in argumentation. Such an approach, however, is unlikely to succeed because to meaningfully learn the structure (grammar) of argumentation, one already needs to be competent in argumentation. This book offers a different approach to children’s argumentation and reasoning based on dialogical relations, as the origin of internal dialogue (inner speech) and higher psychological functions. In this approach, argumentation first exists as dialogical relation, for participants who are in a dialogical relation with others, and who employ argumentation for the purpose of the dialogical relation. With the multimodality of dialogue, this approach expands argumentation into another level of physicality of thinking, reasoning, and problem solving in classrooms. By using empirical data from elementary classrooms, this book explains how argumentation emerges and develops in and from classroom interactions by focusing on thinking and reasoning through/in relations with others and the learning environment.

There is no shortage of urgent, complex problems that mathematics education can and should engage with. Pandemics, forest fires, pollution, Black Lives Matter protests, and fake news all involve mathematics, are matters of life and death, have a clear political dimension, and are interdisciplinary in nature. They demand a critical approach. The authors in this volume showcase new insights, teaching ideas and new and unique ways of applying critical mathematics education, in areas as diverse as climate change, obesity, decolonisation and ethnomathematics. This book demonstrates that there is plenty to be done with critical mathematics education. Contributors are: Annica Andersson, Tonya Gau Bartell, Richard Barwell, Lisa Lunney Borden, Sunghwan Byun, Anna Chronaki, Brian Greer, Jennifer Hall, Victoria Hand, Kjellrun Hiis Hauge, Beth Herbel-Eisenmann, Rune Herheim, Courtney Koestler, Kate le Roux, Swapna Mukhopadhyay, Aldo Parra, Anita Rampal, Sheena Rughubar-Reddy, Toril Eskeland Rangnes, Ulrika Ryan, Lisa Steffensen, Paola Valero and David Wagner.