News Science Outreach: A Dilemmatic Approach

Abstract:

Decision making in research is critical. Narrowing down the research problem, eliciting specific research questions and identifying a research methodology to draw adequate insight is an ongoing challenge where we continue to question each alternative.  This seminar invites you to consider decision making as a provoked and exploratory research methodology.  Our overarching research aim was to examine and compare primary teachers’ and outreach practitioners’ understanding and   perception of a constructivist science pedagogy, in an effort to understand the potential of a teacher-outreach partnership.  From a qualitative perspective, we took a dialectic pragmatic stance.  Conceptual and pedagogical dichotomies were created from educational theories and their practical application.  These dilemmas were then illustrated through video animation in order to entice the participants to consider each virtual concept within the daily practice of their classroom.  A brief overview will be given of our research context, question, and the methodological design of three conceptual and three pedagogical dichotomies and insight into the dilemmatic method that was enacted with 31 teachers and 30 outreach practitioners.  During the seminar, we will also invite you to try out some data analysis with us, to get a sense of the type of data that we analysed and the fun we had in trying to make sense of it all.   

Relevant papers that were discussed during the talk to illustrate the dilemmatic methodology are below: