In this essay, we share historical and structural components of mentoring within institutions of higher education and grapple with technical and moral obligations of support. We argue for more humanizing approaches that embed personal, social, and cultural aspects of mentoring, and seek to disrupt the purposes of mentoring, and for whom? Using a…

Previous research in science education has suggested that difficulties among students learning science relate to challenges in framing its discourse. This article examines the role that language plays in a scientific literacy test for which everyday life is an augmented aspect. Video-recorded data was collected in four ninth-grade science classes…

The science education field readily recognizes that perceptions about science's claims and nature influence socioscientific decision making. However, sociocultural factors may overshadow these perceptions when people are forced to make personally impacting choices contextualized within actual socioscientific issues. This investigation…

This research investigates the interconnectedness of scientific inquiring at the early childhood level, as we explore the discourse-in-interaction processes occurring within small inquiry groups of 5- and 6-year-old children. The rationale behind this research is to explore the nature of science-related discourse, and to that end, this work…

This paper aims to further articulate multicultural science education scholarship. In particular, it explores the notions of borders and border epistemologies as intellectual resources to think again about the challenges of science education in the global world that demand more sophisticated concepts to unravel some of its complexities. It…

In this paper, we examine the interactional ways that families make meaning from biological exhibits during a visit to an interactive science center. To understand the museum visits from the perspectives of the families, we use ethnographic and discourse analytic methods, including pre- and postvisit interviews, videotaped observations of the…

In this paper, we describe two central epistemological norms related to the importance of making investigations and to scientific language and its logic. These norms have been identified in empirical material consisting of 200 video-recorded lessons in three different science classes. With regard to the learning of science and socialization, we…

Suggests the development of school science curricula on the basis of the societal philosophy which is derivable from culture core, or heritage, and present and future society's and individual's needs. (CC)

The study examines how social and cultural factors mediate the teaching and learning of science in an Australian high school. Grade 10 students, many of them new migrants, often transient and from circumstances of economic hardship, were taught a 5-week unit on chemistry by a teacher with social and cultural histories similar to those of most of…