Making the case for a material-dialogic approach to science education

ABSTRACT

Science is concerned with understanding the world. As such, engaging with the materiality of that world is integral to both empirical experimentation and theorising within science. However, it has been recognised for some time that the way scientists learn about the world and the way that young people learn about science cannot be simply equated. This difference has been pronounced in recent decades by the dominance of constructivist and social-constructivist theories of learning, which focus on the development of concepts in the minds of people. Whilst these theories have yielded insight into the complexity of learning, the role of the material remains undertheorised, not only within practical science inquiry, but also in relation to the broader materiality of classrooms. Through a detailed critical literature review, this paper demonstrates the need for a stronger theoretical frame through which to understand the role of the material in the learning and pedagogy of science. Building upon the gaps and possibilities that this review reveals, we outline a new material-dialogic theory via a synthesis of Barad’s Agential Realism and Bakhtinian dialogic theory. The significance of this paper lies in offering a theoretical basis for more effective practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialogic pedagogy
• new materialism
• Barad
• science education
• practical work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A note on terms, since ‘pedagogy’ and ‘didactics’ are used distinctively in European literature but less so in the United Kingdom and the United States: we use ‘pedagogy’ to indicate a theoretical basis for practice rather than a practice in itself.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lindsay Hetherington

Lindsay Hetherington (@lindsayhether, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9811-7666) is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Education. Her research interests are in relational, creative and material approaches to science education and teacher education. She uses a range of methods as relevant to these questions, from survey studies to new materialist diffractive analysis. Lindsay co-leads Initial Teacher Education at the University of Exeter and is a member of the Centre for Research in STEM Education.

Mark Hardman

Mark Hardman (@MAHardman, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5920-3150) is Associate Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London, where he leads the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research. He is fascinated by the processes involved in learning and use insights from complexity theory, neuroscience and conceptual change research to better understand these. He is also interested in how teachers engage with educational research.

Jill Noakes

Jill Noakes is an Associate Lecturer and ESRC-funded PhD student at the University of Exeter. Previously a Physics teacher, she is now involved in science initial teacher education. Her PhD study combines cultural-historical activity theory with the notion of agency to explore schools’ engagement (or otherwise) with STEM project-based learning. She is also involved in a project exploring factors affecting the success of initial teacher education students.

Rupert Wegerif

Rupert Wegerif (@rupertwegerif, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2278-224) is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge where he mostly teaches educational psychology. His research focuses on education for dialogue in the context of the Internet Age. He researches dialogic theory in education and ways of teaching through dialogue and teaching for dialogue in classrooms with and without technology. He is co-lead with Sara Hennessy of the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research group (CEDiR) and founder and co-convenor of the Educational Theory Special Interest Group (SIG) of the European Association of Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI).