Caitlin Donahue Wylie

University of Virginia | UVa · Department of Engineering and Society

Scholars and practitioners have long viewed learners as works-in-progress and as somewhat empty vessels to be filled with appropriate knowledge and skills to become future expert practitioners. However, based on an ethnography of two engineering laboratories, I found that laboratory members regularly swap the roles of learner and instructor, regard...

Who decides what good data science looks like? And who gets to decide what “data ethics” means? The answer is all of us. Good data science should incorporate the perspectives of people who create and work with data, people who study the interactions between science and society, and people whose lives are affected by data science. Who decides what g...

How behavioral scientists, engineers, and architects can work together to advance how we all understand and practice design-in order to enhance sustainability in the built environment, and beyond.

The initiation of novices into research communities relies on the communication of tacit knowledge, behavioral norms and moral values. Much of this instruction happens informally, as messages subtly embedded in everyday interactions. Through participant-observation and interviews, I investigate how engineers socialize future engineers. Specifically...

In this book the diverse objects of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science's internationally renowned collection are brought into sharp relief by a number of highly regarded historians of science in fourteen essays. Each chapter focuses on a specific instrument or group of objects, ranging from an English medieval astrolabe to a modern agricu...

Museum displays tend to black-box science, by displaying scientific facts without explanations of how those facts were made. A recent trend in exhibit design upends this omission by putting scientists, technicians, and volunteers to work in glass-walled laboratories, just a window away from visitors. How is science conceived, portrayed, and perform...

A research community must share assumptions, such as about accepted knowledge, appropriate research practices, and good evidence. However, community members also hold some divergent assumptions, which they—and we, as analysts of science—tend to overlook. Communities with different assumed values, knowledge, and goals must negotiate to achieve compr...

Philosophers of science are well aware that theories are underdetermined by data. But what about the data? Scientific data are selected and processed representations or pieces of nature. What is useless context and what is valuable specimen, as well as how specimens are processed for study, are not obvious or predetermined givens. Instead, they are...

We consider scholarly conversations about digital citizenship as a continuation of centuries of discourse about citizenship, democracy, and technoscience. Conceptually, we critique portrayals of citizenship from Jeffersonian polities to technical literacy to critical health and environmental justice movements. This analysis forms the basis for prop...

There is a longstanding belief that research should be a calling more than a job. How does this expectation shape the selection of future researchers? Specifically, undergraduate research experience is credited with increasing students’ success in science and engineering majors and their likelihood to choose careers in science and engineering; thus...

New technologies can upset scientific workplaces’ established practices and social order. Scientists may therefore prefer preserving skilled manual work and the social status quo to revolutionary technological change. For example, digital imaging of rock-encased fossils is a valuable way for scientists to “see” a specimen without traditional rock r...

Laboratory technicians are typically portrayed as manual workers following routine procedures to produce scientific data. However, technicians in vertebrate paleontology laboratories often describe their work in terms of creativity and artistry. Fossil specimens undergo extensive preparation - including rock removal, damage repair, and reconstructi...

We explored 30 Black Kindergarten-2nd grade students' spoken narratives around pages of their science journals that the children selected as best for showing them as scientists. Because in all narratives, space-time relationships play an important role not only in situating but also in constituting them, we focused on such relationships using Bakht...

England's Education Acts in the late nineteenth century made school free and mandatory for all children, filling schools with more and younger students. Visual teaching methods such as blackboard drawing were used to catch young students' eyes and engage their interest. At the same time, there was high public engagement with natural history and pop...

We focused on young, low-income, African American children in first- to third-grade classrooms where they experienced varied forms of interactive, participatory, and dialogic pedagogy in the context of yearlong, integrated science-literacy instruction. Using conversations that started around children's own science journals, which were an important...

BrinkmanPaul D., The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. xiv+345. ISBN 978-0-226-07472-6. $49.00 (hardback). - Volume 44 Issue 3 - Caitlin Donahue Wylie

The blackboard, a useful teaching tool in nineteenth-century England, was transformed into a teaching necessity in the decades follwing 1870, when the Education Acts made school free and mandatory for all children. The resulting huge population of schoolchildren inspired the development of teaching techniques appropriate for large-group learning. M...

Osteoporosis, a disease of bone loss associated with aging and estrogen loss, can be crippling but is 'silent' (symptomless) prior to bone fracture. Despite its disastrous health effects, high prevalence, and enormous associated health care costs, osteoporosis lacked a universally accepted definition until 1992. In the 1980s, the development of mor...

Despite widespread interest in paleontology, few people know how paleontologists produce knowledge about past life. How does a fossil change from a fragile eroded rock into a scientific specimen? Fossil preparation, or the processes carried out to make fossils useful for research and exhibition, shapes how fossils are studied and interpreted. This...