Disrupting Science Education Research: Choosing to Honor and Make Visible Specific Contexts

• In Event: Disrupting Qualitative Inquiry: Possibilities and Tensions of Educational Research

Abstract

This presentation exposes the methodological choices the authors made for disrupting science education research, choices which confront scholarly principles and standards for conducting meaningful research in science education settings. Through cross-cultural research projects, the authors turn the discussion inward towards the researcher to show evidence of their awareness of the influence/imposition/interpretation of research projects on participants, the field of science education research, and themselves. The authors posit that if the current trajectory of methodological choices continues in the field of science education, as a science education community educators will only permit a certain way of knowing in science classrooms. Arguing for researchers to consider what and whose knowledge and ways of knowing are left out, they propose a disruptive methodological process to collect and analyze data.

Authors

• Cassie Fay Quigley, Clemson University

• Nicole Beeman-Cadwallader, Project Lead the Way (PLTW)