I-RISE congress 2013 - Jesper Haglund

Below, I share some of the slides I presented at the I-RISE congress and some reflections along the way.

I am a postdoctor in Science Education at Linköping University, Sweden. Dring my stay in Seattle, I was asked about geography and climate, so I started off with some comparisons:

These overlays comparing the latitudes of Europe and North America show how far to the north Sweden (and also Poland) are located. We thank the Gulf Stream for making our countries habitable.

 

I have experience of recording and analysing video data from my previous research, but never in the organized form that has been developed within I-RISE. While I-RISE records what happens throughout entire courses, I have previously been involved in short interventions only.

There are many commonalities between the lines of research being done within the Energy Project at SPU and in our group at Linköping University. From a science content perspective, we have a shared interest in thermpdynamics, and in particular in concepts relating to its second law, i.e. efficiency and energy degradation. We have also both analysed language in science and science education from the perspective of conceptual metaphor. What I learned most about being an I-RISE scholar, however, was to get to know about the structured approach to qualitative research, involving taking and sharing field notes and making blog posts, so that episodes that had caught one person's attention quickly could be discussed within the group.

 

 

In all, I found my time as an I-RISE scholar a very rewarding experience. Apart from getting to know about the professional development at SPU and the research on its outcome, it provided good opportunities to build networks within the PER community.

 

In addition, I think that the way conceptual metaphor was introduced in E2 and how the participants came to approach the matter holds an interesting story that may be the embryo of a manuscript. In previous research, it has been shown that conceptual metaphor is prevalent in language in scientific discourse and science textbook. However, we have struggled to establish eduactional implications of such analysis. Reactions reviewers and at conferences have sometimes been of the type:

 

“OK, you have found that science language is full of metaphorical language. So what? How can I as a science education researcher or teacher use that?”

 

I think that we have gathered data in E2 which can help us respond to such reactions in two ways:

• Science teachers find the idea of looking for metaphorical aspects in students’ language intriguing and worthwhile. It may help them analyse the students' thoughts and respond to them.
• After a brief introduction to conceptual metaphor, some science teachers independently reach the conclusion that we cannot talk about energy without recourse to metaphor (as has been argued in general about language overall by Lakoff & Johnson).

To the best of my knowledge, these arguments have not been put forward before, and may provide a basis for research collaborations in analysing the participants' dialogue and a useful manuscript pitch.