On Being Explicit: Toward A New Pedagogical Synthesis in Science

Closed Program

In "On Being Explicit" the Chèche Konnen Center is intensifying its focus on documenting the intellectual power of the ideas and sense-making practices that children from diverse ethnic and linguistic communities bring to the study of science. Center staff and teacher researchers from the Cambridge and Boston Public Schools are designing and documenting pedagogical practices that harness the diversity in children’s ideas and ways of talking as an intellectual resource in science, and make this diversity into an explicit theme of discussion and inquiry in the classroom. As part of the process of developing their understanding of scientific ideas, children investigate the affordances and limits of their own and others' ways of using language and other symbol systems to construct accounts of scientific phenomena.