0000000000208762
AUTHOR
Paola Fantini
Defining and Operationalizing Appropriation for Science Learning
The overarching goal of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the interplay between students’ disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and identity. Appropriation implies productive learning including deep conceptual understanding, but it also involves a reflexive process of populating scientific discourse with personal intentions, purposes and tastes that allow a student to embody scientific discourse and concepts in a way that is authentic and personal. The core aim of th…
From Heuristics to Humble Theories in Physics Education: The Case of Modelling Personal Appropriation of Thermodynamics in Naturalistic Settings
This paper concerns the analysis of data collected during the implementation of a teaching proposal on thermodynamics in a class of 20 students (17 year-olds) of a scientifically-oriented secondary school in Italy. After a brief presentation of the teaching proposal design and of the notion of learning environment as properly complex territory, the results of two levels of analysis are discussed. The first level regards a phenomenological (bottom-up) analysis of a selection of individual interviews to students. The analysis allowed us: i) to reconstruct how different students approached the study of thermodynamics; ii) to show in what sense we can infer, in the words of Confrey, that the te…
Forms of productive complexity as criteria for educational reconstruction: the design of a teaching proposal on thermodynamics
Abstract The paper discusses teaching materials on thermodynamics, designed and implemented in 5 classes of scientifically-oriented secondary schools in Italy (grade 12). The materials are designed to: i) foster conceptual understanding; ii) create a learning environment rich enough to enable each student to find a personal way for appropriating content knowledge. In order to achieve the first aim, the design takes into account the main results of literature about student's difficulties in thermodynamics. In order to achieve the second aim, forms of “productive complexities” are implemented. The paper presents the design criteria and shows why they have the potential to create an inclusive …