Ethically Eliciting Ethnographic Data: Seeking an Etic and Emic Perspective About Learning in a Creative Science Classroom

• In Event: Science Teaching and Learning: Equity and Social Justice Roundtable

Abstract

Evidencing learners’ interactivity in learning is challenging, not least because ethical approval systems limit researchers’ intrusiveness into classrooms to closely observe young people in schools. Substantiating a comprehensive way through the toing and froing of verbal and nonverbal actions and interactions requires videoing the participatory processes of learning. Digitally capturing emergent dialogue, gesturing, collaboration and other non-verbal communications in the classroom setting enables hermeneutic analyses that can elicit the nature of learning, as it unfolds. In this qualitative case, from a series of case studies, the learning processes of a classroom of eight and nine-year olds adopting theatrical strategies to learn about aspects of science related to Darwin’s life and work on adaptation and evolution are investigated.

Authors

• Sarah Frodsham, Oxford Brookes University

• Debra McGregor, Oxford Brookes University