Designing Communities / Edition 1

by Wolff-Michael Roth

Overview

The study described in this book arose in the contextof a three-year collective effort to bring about change in science teaching at Mountain Elementary School. 1 This opportunity emerged after I contacted the school with the idea to help teachers implement student-centered science teaching. At the same time, the teachers collectively had come to realize that their science teaching was not as exciting to children as it could be. They had recognized their own teaching as textbook-based with little use of the "hands-on" approaches prescribed by the provincial curriculum. At this point, the teachers and I decided that a joint project would serve our mutual goals: they wanted assistance in changing from textbook-based approaches to student-centered activities; I wanted to collect data on learning in student-centered knowledge­ producing classroom communities. I brought to this school my new understandings about classroom communi­ ties from several earlier studies conducted in a private high school (e. g. , Roth & Bowen, 1995; Roth & Roychoudhury, 1992). I wanted to help teachers create science learning environments in which children took charge of their learning, where children learned from more competent others by participating with them in ongoing activities, and teachers were responsible for setting up and maintaining a classroom community rather than for dissem­ inating information. After I had completed the data collection for the present study, I watched a documentary about an elementary school in the small French village of Moussac (Envoye Special, TV5, September 14, 1994).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780792347040
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	12/31/1997
Series:	Contemporary Trends and Issues in Science Education , #3
Edition description:	1998
Pages:	313
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.45(h) x 0.36(d)

Table of Contents

I Foundations.- 1. Theoretical Foundations.- 2. Empirical Foundations.- 3. Engineering for Children Curriculum.- 4. Knowing Engineering Design.- II Transformations of a Community: The Emergence of Shared Resources and Practices.- 5. Circulating Resources.- 6. Circulating Material Practices.- 7. Emergence and Circulation of Discourse Practices.- III Networking Across Interstices.- 8. Networking Humans and Non-Humans.- 9. Networking Individuals and Groups.- IV Conclusions.- 10. Designing Knowledge-Building Communities.- 11. Epilogue.- References.

Editorial Reviews

Roth (education, U. of Victoria, Canada) constructs a set of theoretical frames within which he presents research findings about teaching science that might be of interest to educational researchers, policy makers, teacher educators, and K-12 teachers. Envisioning an ideal science classroom with creative and inquisitive students working together to solve problems that interest them, he finds that more learning occurs at centers of high pupil density, that students who participate most are not necessarily those who contribute or learn the most, that there are weakness in assessment based on products only and recommends using videotapes, and that student learning is not only a result of individual sense-making efforts but involves interactions between living and artifactual components of a community of participants. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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