A Cartesian conception of material space views each part as external to every other part: "partes extra partes." Because two material things cannot occupy the same space, each of it exists in itself, separated by a boundary from everything else, including other things. This ontology is the origin of thinking the world in terms of…

The link between science education and early childhood education is still blurred. This is so because many science education researchers apparently, but mistakenly, believe that the way young children interrogate and investigate the world around them is not appropriate for their understanding of scientific concepts. Although there is an effort…

The core epistemologies underlying science education have changed little over the past 40 years: whereas science educators tend to take constructivist stances, many or most teachers tend to be concerned with the appropriation and transfer of facts and theories mandated as outcomes in the curriculum guidelines of the relevant authorities (e.g.,…

Science education can be alienating for students, as it is apart from the mundane world with which they are familiar. Science education research has approached the gap between everyday understandings and science learning largely as a challenge arising while learning about science concepts and the kinds of instructional approaches that may support…

As part of a series of investigations in which we explore the integration of verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication into a dialectical, sense-constitutive unit during science lectures, this study adapts the notions of catchments (i.e., repetitions of essential features of the gesture-speech dialectic) and growth points (i.e., moments in…

To understand students' argumentation abilities, there have been practices that focus on counting and analyzing argumentation schemes such as claim, evidence, warrant, backing, and rebuttal. This analytic approach does not address the dynamics of epistemic criteria of children's reasoning and decision-making in dialogical situations. The common…

In its focus on social practices, the feature article presents an interesting theoretical framework for rethinking not only where and how knowing and learning in science education exhibit themselves but also we might change our own research practice. The framework is not new to me, as I have advocated it explicitly for more than 15 years. But over…

In (science) education, primacy is given to agency, the human capability to act and, in this, to learn. However, phenomenological philosophers and societal-historical psychologists point out that agency, the purposeful (intentional) engagement with the world, is only the effect of a much more profound capacity: passibility, the capacity to be…

In this tribute, I articulate the contributions Michiel van Eijck made to science education, as experienced through our relation, which ranged from supervisor and colleague to friend. His ecological thinking about human knowing, which was reflected in his spiritual inclinations, constitutes his legacy that will have an impact on our field for…

For many students, the experience with science tends to be alienating and uprooting. In this study, I take up Simone Weil's concepts of "enracinement" (rooting) and "déracinement" (uprooting) to theorize the root of this alienation, the confrontation between children's familiarity with the world and unfamiliar/strange…

Learning science interpreted in existing theoretical frameworks often means that students are assimilated, accommodated or enculturated from the entity of the vernacular world to the entity of the scientific world. However, there are some unsolved questions as to how students can best learn purely a new language or new knowledge of science. The…

In the literature on the situated and distributed nature of cognition, the coordination of spatial organization and the structure of human practices and relations is accepted as a fact. To date, science educators have yet to build on such research. Drawing on an ethnographic study of high school students during an internship in a scientific…

Lecturing is an important aspect of the culture of science education. Perhaps because of the negative associations constructivist educators make with lecturing, little research has been done concerning the generally invisible aspects of the (embodied, lived) "work" that is required. Traditional research on science lectures focuses on…

In much of science education research, the content of talk tends to be attributed to the persons who produce the sound-words in a speech situation. A radically different, sociological perspective on language-in-use grounded in Marxism derives from the work of L. S. Vygotsky and the members of the circle around M. M. Bakhtin. Accordingly, each word…

Research on learning science in informal settings and the formal (sometimes experimental) study of learning in classrooms or psychological laboratories tend to be separate domains, even drawing on different theories and methods. These differences make it difficult to compare knowing and learning observed in one paradigm/context with those observed…