School Visits to Science Museums: A Framework for Analyzing Teacher Practices

ABSTRACT

School visits to science museums are recognized educational resources that provide students with unique learning experiences, if teachers intentionally plan these. Surprisingly one finds that investigations analyzing teachers adopted practices by systematic monitoring, without researcher intervention, are almost non-existent in the literature. We developed the School Visits Articulated Framework (SVAF) to identify and classify (through levels’ scale) the school visits planning practices. The mainly objective was to reach a characterization of teachers’ practices in a perspective of articulations formal education and non-formal education contexts may then be defined. In this article, we describe how we applied the SVAF on five case studies configured as school visits to a science museum, simultaneously we test the framework efficiency. The analysis of the visit plan from the perspective of the SVAF allowed us to identify moments in which the teachers’ practices did not meet expectations according to the literature in the area. Likewise, it revealed the predominance of activities carried out in the steps before the visit to the museum and emphasized the lack of activities carried out in the museum and on returning to school after the visit. These results allow us to better outline the objectives and needs to be met in the initial and continuous training courses for teachers and museum educators, aiming at the best use of this resource for student learning. The SVAF is a framework capable of to identify and classify the teachers’ practices, since the instruments it integrates provided important and detailed information.

KEYWORDS:

• formal education and non-formal education contexts
• school visits
• school visits framework
• science museums
• teacher practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ According to UNESCO (2019), formal education is the modality of institutionalized education, intentional and planned by public organizations or recognized private entities that, in its entirety, make up the formal education system of a country. Examples of formal educational contexts are schools and universities (Eurostat, 2016). Regarding non-formal education, although institutionalized, intentional, and planned by an education provider, it is considered an addition, alternative and/or complement to formal education in the lifelong learning process of individuals. Examples of non-formal education contexts are museums and science centers, botanical gardens, zoos, among others (McManus, 1992).

² Instruments used were not included in the Appendices due to their size. Authors will provide them if so requested.

Additional information

Funding

This work is financially supported by the National Funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under the project number UID/CED/00194/2013; and Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel - Capes Brazil, under the process number 99999.001441/2015-09.