Constructing and reviewing dioramas: Supporting beginning teachers to think about their use to help children understand the work of natural history scientists

This chapter will explore beginning teachers’ views of the use of dioramas to teach young children about scientists who have contributed to our understandings about Natural History. Recent changes to the English National Curriculum have resulted in re-focusing learners to consider not only what do we know about an area of science today, but also, how did we come to know (and whom was responsible) for discovering theories we learn about in school. Hypotheses (and evidence) that enabled scientists to recognise the process of survival of the fittest; the ways that fossils representative of different geological eras have helped us consider (and understand) why the form and function of plants and animals has changed over time and how pollutants, too, have caused changes in survival rates of particular animals are all contributory to appreciating Natural History. The scientific work that people, such as David Attenborough, Charles Darwin, Mary Anning, Rachel Carson and Jane Goodall have carried out will be considered through the ways that learners could use dioramas to convey aspects of their ‘stories’. Constructing dioramas can help beginning teachers appreciate how a more concrete, direct, ‘hands-on’ approach using everyday materials, can offer affordance to make complex ideas easier for younger children to understand. This chapter also describes, what they, as beginning teachers, reflected on through making a series of dioramas to depict the ways that the different scientists have contributed to our understanding of Natural History in some way. They also considered how it was a useful approach for young children, not only to make the dioramas, but also review each others’ and create a class collection of ‘models’ to help understand what we know (and how) about Natural History. This chapter, therefore, is written about a piece of evaluative action research undertaken to explore what beginning teachers learn (and think) about the use of dioramas to help children understand natural history

Stories from history : more authentic ways of thinking through acting and talking about science

This chapter will discuss and demonstrate how it is possible to introduce young people to scientists’ life stories and draw on particular events or incidents that can inspire them to think more deeply about science. Noteworthy moments from historical scientific stories are dramatised in various ways to engage learners to consider these scientific happenings from different perspectives. The learning activities, adopted and adapted from established theatrical strategies, purposely oriented learners to think about the lives and work of scientists from varied viewpoints. Immersed and positioned differently in a range of historical contexts to work in-role enabled learners to consider science from alternate positions. This provided not only an historical dimension to learning about science, but many of the narratives the learners were introduced to offered insights about socio-cultural influences determining what and how scientists investigated in the past. Learners working in-role, in participatory ways, considering issues that faced scientists in the past, can inform and shape age-appropriate inquiry tasks. Drawn from a series of action research projects carried out in schools across the UK, ways that different theatrical strategies have been developed and trialled in classrooms to engage young people with stories form history are carefully described so that others might apply these approache

Detecting Key Structural Features within Highly Recombined Genes

Many microorganisms exhibit high levels of intragenic recombination following horizontal gene transfer events. Furthermore, many microbial genes are subject to strong diversifying selection as part of the pathogenic process. A multiple sequence alignment is an essential starting point for many of the tools that provide fundamental insights on gene structure and evolution, such as phylogenetics; however, an accurate alignment is not always possible to attain. In this study, a new analytic approach was developed in order to better quantify the genetic organization of highly diversified genes whose alleles do not align. This BLAST-based method, denoted BLAST Miner, employs an iterative process that places short segments of highly similar sequence into discrete datasets that are designated “modules.” The relative positions of modules along the length of the genes, and their frequency of occurrence, are used to identify sequence duplications, insertions, and rearrangements. Partial alleles of sof from Streptococcus pyogenes, encoding a surface protein under host immune selection, were analyzed for module content. High-frequency Modules 6 and 13 were identified and examined in depth. Nucleotide sequences corresponding to both modules contain numerous duplications and inverted repeats, whereby many codons form palindromic pairs. Combined with evidence for a strong codon usage bias, data suggest that Module 6 and 13 sequences are under selection to preserve their nucleic acid secondary structure. The concentration of overlapping tandem and inverted repeats within a small region of DNA is highly suggestive of a mechanistic role for Module 6 and 13 sequences in promoting aberrant recombination. Analysis of pbp2X alleles from Streptococcus pneumoniae, encoding cell wall enzymes that confer antibiotic resistance, supports the broad applicability of this tool in deciphering the genetic organization of highly recombined genes. BLAST Miner shares with phylogenetics the important predictive quality that leads to the generation of testable hypotheses based on sequence data