Our research focuses on biology education and addresses two closely related mediation challenges:
the mediation between the disciplinary culture of science and the cultures of learners, and the mediation between the disciplinary culture of science education and teachers’ culture and professional identity.
Bridging between science and learners through contexts that are authentic to learners.
One line of our research examines how learners’ cultures intersect with the disciplinary culture of science through contexts that are experienced as authentic to learners. Central to this work is digital curation, understood as learners’ engagement in searching, evaluating, organizing, and integrating scientific and socio-scientific information. We investigate how digital curation supports personalized learning, critical thinking, and engagement with socio-scientific issues, and how these processes shape learners’ participation in science education.
Bridging between scientific culture and learners through authentic scientific contexts.
A complementary line of research examines how immersion in authentic scientific contexts—such as citizen science projects, research laboratories, and natural history collections—supports learners’ understanding of the social and epistemic aspects of science. This work focuses on how carefully designed learning experiences in authentic scientific contexts raise the accessibility of the Nature of Science (NOS) and support the development of interconnected forms of scientific, statistical, and NOS reasoning.
Bridging between science education and teachers through contexts that are authentic to teachers.
In parallel, our research investigates how teachers’ cultures and professional identities intersect with the disciplinary culture of science education through contexts that are authentic to teachers. This includes teachers’ engagement in digital curation as part of their everyday professional practices, supporting professional learning, pedagogical decision-making, and identity development. We examine how these processes enable teachers to integrate personal experience with pedagogical reasoning and future teaching practice.
Bridging between science education and teachers through authentic scientific pedagogical contexts.
Finally, our work examines authentic scientific pedagogical contexts, particularly teaching practica, as sites for teacher identity construction. We study how participation in inquiry-based and PBL-oriented practica supports reflective, social, and cognitive processes that shape teachers’ professional identities, and we develop theoretical models that capture the mechanisms of identity construction within authentic science education contexts.
The conceptual framework illustrated below synthesizes these four interconnected lines of research, highlighting parallel mediation processes and the distinct roles of authenticity, context, and participation for learners and teachers.
Discover more about our research projects by following this link
