OPERATIONALIZING AUTHENTIC AND RELEVANT DISCIPLINARY ENGAGEMENT

We discuss the nature of authenticity and relevance from an interactional perspective motivated by our conviction that the implicit tension between accountability to the discipline on the one hand and the fostering of student agency and authority on the other needs to be recognized and resolved in science education. We argue that the dichotomy between authenticity and relevance is artificial. Drawing on the work of the late Randi Engle on social framing in classrooms (i.e., productive disciplinary engagement and expansive framing), we suggest that authenticity and relevance can be characterized by one holistic construct: Authentic and Relevant Disciplinary Engagement (ARDE). We operationalize ARDE into markers that can be traced in students\u2019 discourse, and illustrate this operationalization with two examples from physics education. The examples show that by shifting attention from what students learn to how they engage in their learning, we can better articulate the implicit tension between accountability to the discipline and the fostering of student agency and authority. Once this tension has been articulated, we can begin seriously pursuing ways to resolve it

Disciplinary authenticity and personal relevance in school science

Pursuing both disciplinary authenticity and personal relevance in the teaching and learning of science in school generates tensions that should be acknowledged and resolved. This paper problematizes and explores the conceptualizations of these tensions by considering personal relevance, disciplinary authenticity, and common school science as three perspectives that entail different educational goals. Based on an analysis of the literature, we identify five facets of the tensions: content fidelity, content coverage, language and discursive norms, epistemic structure and standards, and significance. We then explore the manifestations of these facets in two different examples of the instruction and learning of physics at the advanced high school level in Israel and Italy. Our analysis suggests that (1) the manifestations of these tensions and their resolution are highly contextual. (2) While maintaining personal relevance and disciplinary authenticity requires some negotiation, the main tension that needs to be resolved is between personal relevance and common school science. (3) Disciplinary authenticity, when considered in terms of its full depth and scope, can be equipped to resolve this tension within the discipline. (4) To achieve resolution, teachers\u2019 expertise should include not only pedagogical expertise but also a deep and broad disciplinary understanding

Utilizing public scientific web lectures to teach contemporary physics at the high school level: A case study of learning

This paper describes a teaching experiment designed to examine the learning (i.e., retention of content and conceptual development) that takes place when public scientific web lectures delivered by scientists are utilized to present advanced ideas in physics to students with a high school background in physics. The students watched an exemplary public physics web lecture that was followed by a collaborative generic activity session. The collaborative session involved a guided critical reconstruction of the main arguments in the lecture, and a processing of the key analogical explanations. Then the students watched another exemplary web lecture on a different topic. The participants (N=14) were divided into two groups differing only in the order in which the lectures were presented. The students’ discussions during the activities show that they were able to reason and demonstrate conceptual progress, although the physics ideas in the lectures were far beyond their level in physics. The discussions during the collaborative session contributed significantly to the students’ understanding. We illustrate this point through an analysis of one of these discussions between two students on an analogical explanation of the Aharonov-Bohm effect that was presented in one of the lectures. The results from the tests that were administered to the participants several times during the intervention further support this contention