Innovate to Mitigate: Science Learning in an Open-Innovation Challenge for High School Students

In this exploratory study, we report results from hosting two rounds of an open innovation competition challenging young people age 13-18 to develop a method for carbon mitigation. In both challenges, teams worked within the classroom and extensively on their own time out-of-school. The challenges were structured to engage participants to work collaboratively and independently in an open-ended, goal-oriented way, yet constrained their work by the parameters of the challenge, and supported it by a suite of tools, and resources. Evidence of learning science concepts and practices, student persistence, and the enthusiasm of participants, teachers and coaches, convince us that the Challenge structure and format is highly worthy of further development and investigation. Our findings indicate that Challenges such as this have the potential to enlarge the “ecosystem” of learning environments in the formal education system

Innovate to Mitigate: Learning as Activity in a Team of High School Students Addressing a Climate Mitigation Challenge

The Innovate to Mitigate project designed and conducted a competition for students aged 13-18 to propose and test strategies for mitigating rising levels of greenhouse gases. This paper explores the scientific inquiry and interdisciplinary learning of a 12th grade high school team over 6 months of participation. We used an activity-theoretic approach as a framework for capturing and analyzing the structure of the learning system in the team, situated within a science competition. This approach provided a lens both for finding and analyzing team learning at several levels—conceptual, procedural, metacognitive—and for revealing the processes by which learning was mediated by the activity system

Trees and Tradition in Early Ireland

Old and Middle Irish nature poetry has long been appreciated for the vividness of its description of the natural world. In this paper, we will show that the inventory of trees and bushes upon which poets drew was based less upon direct observation of nature than upon a traditional taxonomy found in a completely different genre, the law tracts dating back to the seventh century, notably the tree list edited by Fergus Kelly in 1976 from Bretha Comaithchesa ‘Judgments Concerning Neighborhood Law’. Thus, the economic and aesthetic value of trees and bushes as discussed in law tracts and nature poetry were part of a single continuous tradition of taxonomy and silviculture stretching over at least 500 years. We will end by discussing the relationship between this tradition and the Ogam letter names (McManus 1997).

State testing and inquiry based science: Are they complementary or competing reforms

Abstract: The effect of district strategies for improving high-stakes test scores on science teachers' practice is explored in case studies of six middle schools in six Massachusetts districts. At each school, science teachers, curriculum coordinators, principals, and superintendents shared their strategies for raising scores, their attitudes towards the test, the changes that they were implementing in their curriculum and pedagogical approaches, and the effects that the test was having on staff and on students. Results from these case studies suggest that districts chose markedly different strategies for raising scores on high stakes tests, and that the approaches taken by districts influenced the nature of pedagogical and curriculum changes in the classroom. District strategies for raising scores that were complementary to the district's prior vision of science reform tended to cause less teacher resentment towards the test than strategies that departed from previously adopted goals. Differing effects on teachers in socioeconomically "advantaged," "middle," and "challenged" districts are discussed

Progressive Education: Educating for Democracy and the Process of Authority

This is the second of three special issues on Progressive Education, Past, Present, and Future. The articles in this issue share the powerful theme of participatory reconstruction. In the specific cases, the actual educational activity or enterprise plays different roles in the reconstructive inquiry — and in each case we see the imaginative blending of "progressive ideas" with the complex ingredients of the concrete situation. On this view, the variety of tone, setting, and method exhibited in these papers is truly thought-provoking, and the editors believe the work of the writing, as a useful growth experience and inquiry for the authors, has added value to the various fields of work in which they are engaged.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Digital Curriculum in the Classroom: Authority, Control, and Teacher Role

With greater online access and greater use of computers and tablets, educational materials are increasingly available digitally, and are soon predicted to become the standard for science classrooms. However, researchers have found that institutionalized structures and cultural factors in schools affect teacher uptake and integration of technology. Findings are sparse that detail the complexities of how teachers actually incorporate technology in their teaching as they negotiate the introduction of a new and potentially disruptive innovation. With respect to a digital curriculum in particular, teachers can be unclear about their role vis-a-vis the curriculum, as the "computer" potentially becomes an alternative source of authority in the classroom, and this can mean that the teacher is no longer in control. This paper reports on the implementation of two units of an innovative environmental science program, Biocomplexity and the Habitable Planet, as a digital curriculum. We discuss some of the lessons learned about the mix of challenges, anticipated and unanticipated, that confronted four high school teachers as they implemented the curriculum in their classrooms. We suggest that developers and users of digital curricula pay particular attention to how they envision where the authority for teaching and learning in the classroom should reside