הרצאות העוגן – Keynotes

Professor Sibel Erduran

University of Oxford, UK

Professor Sibel Erduran, University of Oxford, UK

Sibel Erduran is a Professor of Science Education at University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College. Prior to her move to Oxford, she served as the Director of EPI-STEM, National Centre for STEM Education based at University of Limerick, Ireland. She has held Visiting Professorships at National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan, Kristianstad University, Sweden, and Bogazici University, Turkey. She is an Editor for International Journal of Science Education, Section Editor for Science Education, serves on the Executive Board of European Science Education Research Association. Her work experience also includes positions at University of Pittsburgh, USA, King’s College London and University of Bristol. Her higher education was completed in the USA at Vanderbilt (PhD, Science Education & Philosophy), Cornell (MSc, Food chemistry) and Northwestern (BA, Biochemistry) Universities. She has worked as a chemistry teacher in a high school in northern Cyprus. Her research interests focus on the infusion of epistemic practices of science in science education including professional development of science teachers. Her work on argumentation has received international recognition through awards from NARST and EASE, and has attracted funding from a range of agencies including current grants from the Wellcome Trust and Templeton World Charity Foundation. She has an upcoming co-authored book (with Ebru Kaya) entitled “Epistemic Bonding of Chemistry in Teacher Education” (Springer), and an edited book entitled “Argumentation in Chemistry Education” (Royal Society of Chemistry).

Making epistemic processes and products of science visible to pre-service teachers
Epistemic aspects of science are relatively underemphasised in science teaching and learning. Epistemic aspects of science may include the processes and products of science that concern the development of scientific knowledge. For example, scientists engage in modelling practices in formulating scientific knowledge. Scientists may use epistemic criteria such as objectivity in interpreting data. Epistemic aspects of science demand teachers and students to adopt a meta-perspective on how science works as a knowledge construction enterprise. As such, epistemic processes and products of science can be difficult to understand. In this presentation, I draw on our work on nature of science (NOS) that capitalises on the use of visual representations to facilitate the understanding of epistemic aspects of science. Based on reviews of literature from philosophy of science, we produced a series of images that summarise some key features of the epistemic aspects of science. For example, we proposed the “Benzene Ring Heuristic” (BRH) inspired from the benzene ring structure as an analogy to highlight the dynamic nature of the epistemic, cognitive and social components of scientific practices. BRH stresses the social mediation of data, models and explanations through argumentation and social certification. In this presentation, I will illustrate how we have used these visual representations in a pre-service science teacher education programme, and what impact they had on pre-service teachers’ own visual representations of epistemic aspects of science.


Professor Arthur Bakker

Utrecht University, Netherlands

Professor Arthur Bakker

Arthur Bakker is an associate professor at the Freudenthal Institute, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. After studying mathematics, he became a mathematics teacher. His dissertation was about design research in statistics education. After a postdoc at the London Institute of Education (UCL) with Celia Hoyles and Richard Noss, he returned to Utrecht. His interests include: mathematics and statistics education, methodology (design research), theories of learning (embodiment with Dor Abrahamson, inferentialism), boundary crossing and interest development (with Sanne Akkerman), and technology. He is the new editor-in-chief of Educational Studies in Mathematics.

Designing for embodied and extended mathematical cognition
In the learning sciences, there is increasing interest in so-called E-perspectives (embodied, extended, embedded, enculturated, enactive, etc.) on disciplinary cognition. I focus my talk on the question of what it means to design for embodied and extended mathematical cognition (where “extended” here refers to extending the body with digital technology). Building on Dor Abrahamson’s embodied design research, I summarize what we learned from our design studies on proportion and trigonometry in terms of an embodied design genre of action-based learning activities. Reflecting on this design genre, I propose that the learning sciences should not only care about common criteria such as validity, generalizability but also about generativity—the potential to produce practical principled knowledge to help designers and educators make concrete decisions, while also raising interesting new theoretical and methodological questions.