The dominant learning paradigms conceive of learning as the construction of something, which, depending on the particular bent of the researcher, may be "meaning", "knowledge", "conceptions", or "conceptual frameworks". However, some recent studies conducted from very different theoretical perspectives…

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…

Since the 1950s, originating with and driven by the Sputnik shock, there have been tremendous efforts to improve science education. Over the past two decades, the initial focus on science content has been abandoned, at least among many science education researchers, in favor of socio-scientific issues. Yet even this social turn does not appear to…

To learn means coming to know something new at the end of, or subsequent to, a (learning) process. Because students do not yet know at the beginning of the process what they will know subsequent to the process, they cannot actively orient towards the object of learning. In this article, I propose a phenomenological perspective that theorizes…

Traditional (e.g., constructivist) accounts of knowledge ground its origin in the "intentional construction" on the part of the learner. Such accounts are blind to the fact that learners, by the fact that they do not know the knowledge to be learned, cannot orient toward it as an object to be constructed. In this study, I provide a…

The idea that mathematical knowledge is embodied is increasingly taking hold in the mathematics education literature. Yet there are challenges to the existing conceptualizations: There tend to be breaks between (a) the living and experienced body (flesh) and linguistic forms of thought, (b) individual and collective forms of knowing, and (c) the…

As the end result of metaphysics, the Kantian and constructivist mind is not present in the world but withdrawn into the netherworld of its representations and constructions. First phenomenology then the embodied cognition research showed how there could be no cognition without the human body. There is something unsatisfying and lacking, however,…

This study examines the origins of geometry in and out of the intuitively given everyday lifeworlds of children in a second-grade mathematics class. These lifeworlds, though pre-geometric, are not without model objects that denote and come to anchor geometric idealities that they will understand at later points in their lives. Roth's analyses…

Mathematical concepts and conceptions have been theorized as abstractions from--and therefore transcending--bodily and embodied experience. In this contribution, we re-theorize mathematical conceptions by building on recent philosophical work in dialectical phenomenology. Accordingly, a conception exists only in, through, and as of the experiences…

In this study, we propose a set of concepts for conceptualizing issues of learning science related to globalization, the encounter with the (radically) foreign/strange--as this occurs as part of migration and even as part of the encounter of a learner with the unknown content that science lessons are to impart--from the perspective of the…

Examined cognitive complexities when graphs were used in lectures by observing 39 lectures, 36 seminars in which students solved problems, and 14 sessions of scientists interpreting graphs. Findings show that lectures present a scanty image of the use and interpretation of graphs. Discusses the analytic method, which relies on semiotics and…

A study of the processes by which 24 grade-12 Australian physics students brought order to their observations and practices shows that the phenomena students construct from their laboratory work (not always accurate) develop from connections among the embodied practices of language and physical action, their world, and social relations. (SLD)

One important challenge for researchers is to understand what happens inside classrooms that make the environment available for children's learning. This study develops the margin|centre dialectic as a general framework for describing participation of very young children in science-related activities. It employs a cultural-historical approach that…

Develops the analytical framework in which inscription (i.e., grades) and actor network are the central points. Exemplifies this framework in a case study of grades and grading practices. Shows how the framework can be used to provide constructive poststructuralist analyses and how the efforts of critical and liberation pedagogies are undercut by…

Information processing models do not account for much of human competence in everyday scientific and lay contexts. Situated cognition models account better for competence in widely differing situations. In situated cognition models, the purpose of science education must be reconceived as preparing citizens to participate in public enactments of…