About the Books
Book or book chapter proposals can be submitted through ISTES . After the peer-reviewing process, the books or book chapters will be processed for publication.
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Current Issue
Exploring Social and Cultural Contexts of the Nature of Science through Action Research
This book focuses on one of the tenets of NOS that needs further exploration in current teaching practice: the social and cultural aspects of NOS. This tenet recognizes that science is a human endeavor and is thus inevitably influenced by social and cultural contexts. While scientists employ procedures to validate the applicability of their work to others and engage in robust investigations, they cannot fully remove their context from their work. This correlates to the CCCs, as “a careful analysis of the crosscutting concepts included in the Framework shows that they are more than organizational schemas that interrelate knowledge from different scientific fields. They also encapsulate overarching ways of thinking that we should help our students to develop” (Talanquer, 2019, p.18). The CCCs capture the complexity of the nature of scientific knowledge and recognize the rich contextual factors that impact the science practices. This book includes exploration of some of these contexts through educators’ action research in their career setting.
The chapters in this book explore various ways to embed the social and cultural context of NOS into science instruction. They build on other works that explore NOS instruction across contexts through action research (Akerson & Carter, 2022; Namakula & Akerson, 2024). We hope that works within this book offer ideas to shape your practice. Some tenets of NOS are more concrete, such as that scientific knowledge is developed by collecting empirical data. Focusing on the empirical nature of science may be conducive to a variety of contexts and concepts within science because of the concrete nature of collecting data. Other NOS tenets connecting to the CCCs are more complex and abstract, presumably because they cross disciplines and focus on a dimension of science with which educators may be less familiar. The science content, or what the NGSS call Disciplinary Core Ideas, and inquiry/process skills, or Science and Engineering Practices, have had a place in science education discourse for many years. The CCCs offer a level of depth to science teaching and learning, offering a new dimension to the work of scientists. Researchers have found that CCCs can be challenging for teachers (e.g., see Arias, 2024), thus action research is logical approach to systematic investigation of classroom approaches to this work.
Prof. Dr. Ingrid S. Carter
Prof. Dr. Valarie L. Akerson
Prof. Dr. Gayle A. Buck
Editors
Published:
2025-02-20
