Session Information
Contribution
This paper sets forth a tool in-the-making, the pedagogical graphic novel, being developed in an ongoing research project. The authors hope to gather contributions on practical and theoretical issues arising from its development to reflect on its relevance for educational research, practice and professional development.
Between 2007 and 2010, a national secondary schools rebuilding programme was implemented by Parque Escolar EPE in 106 schools in Portugal. One of its practical results was the implementation of a new concept for school science spaces, the science learning studio, aligned with the learning studios and classrooms / environments for active learning (Beichner et al. 2007; Brooks, 2010). These are hybrid spaces to support a diversity of teaching and learning activities, a discontinuity with the previous bipartite concept of laboratory for practical work and regular classroom for instruction (Fernandes et al., 2008).
One of the main problems in science classes in Portugal is that of rhetorical teaching, in “regular” classrooms resorting mostly to textbooks and exercise solving, and in the laboratory to recipe-like lab worksheets (Ambrósio et al., 1994; Martins et al., 2002).
With this in mind, the main consultant and his team who designed the concept of the science learning studio (one of the authors was part of it), developed and implemented in 2010 a teacher training program for teachers in the intervened schools, entitled "Using the new science laboratories". One of its goals was to design activities that promoted active learning, aligned with the view on teaching and learning of the new spaces. One of the proposed activities required trainees to produce a photographed protocol of a practical activity, to later be used in classes with students, so that they could infer the procedure and the materials involved, providing prompts with perceptual fidelity to support inquiry practices that coordinated the domain of objects and observables and the domain of ideas (Millar, 2010).
From this activity, and to better communicate to teachers the dynamics of this kind of activity, after a photographic recording of a class in the new spaces, one of the authors combined the photos with a brief explanation of the represented activities, in a format close to the storyboard.
With the goal of extending the same rationale to other activities not essentially practical, and to facilitate the production and dissemination of these storyboards, a class was photographed and the photos were processed with filters to anonymize participants, and later composed graphically in a matrix of 3x3 photos, adding another layer of information about the dynamics of activity.
The rationale for the matrix was that it could clearly communicate the interaction between teachers, students, space and tools, be an economic and easily readable format for 45-60 minute class, and that it could be printed in 2-3 pages, with each page representing approximately 30 minutes of class time.
Further funding was granted by the Portuguese National Science Foundation (FCT), for the ongoing research project "Attitudes, expectations and practices in the Portuguese secondary schools science laboratories", in which the authors participate. The project has as main research questions: (1) What attitudes and expectations do teachers and students have towards the new science learning spaces? (2) What teaching and learning activities are taking place in the new science learning spaces? To answer these research questions, several tasks were proposed, namely (1) a survey to all teachers teaching in the new science learning studios (2) case studies of classes in the new spaces, an (3) online teacher training course structure and materials to support the organisation, management and use of these new studios and (4) the development of exemplary science departments, in both organisation and management and teaching. The goals of the project are:
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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