Philip Bell

• PhD in Education from the University of California, Berkeley
• Chair at University of Washington

Recent policy documents position engineering as a way to broaden participation for students in STEM fields. However, a recent review of the literature on engineering education found that fewer than 1% of reviewed articles focused on issues of equity and broadening participation. For this reason, there are few frameworks to build on when designing f...

Abstract Objective Systems thinking can be counterintuitive to everyday ways of knowing. This can surface doubt around predicted patterns of emergence in complex systems data, especially as it relates to the current climate crisis and related justice-oriented solutions. Method Our study describes a four-year design-based research project in which...

Building on Vea’s (2020) emotional configurations perspective, this symposium examines emotion and learning across a range of environments representing science education and explicitly politicized contexts. An emotional configurations perspective denaturalizes supposedly individual, internal, and discrete emotion states and instead foregrounds the...

This article presents findings from TechTales, a participatory design research (PDR) project where learning scientists, public library staff members, informal science educators, and staff members from Native-American-serving organizations collaborated to design a family-based robotics workshop that was grounded in storytelling. We approach this by...

State-level leaders face a difficult challenge of determining where to invest scarce professional learning dollars. To address this challenge, a team of researchers and state-level science educators surveyed teachers to learn more about their vision for science education and what kind of learning opportunities they preferred. The survey enabled the...

Developing an understanding of education as a complex, adaptive system can be useful in helping leaders understand the impact of various interventions on the system as a whole. This paper describes the design of two learning opportunities, which draw on Actor Network Theory, for assisting state science coordinators in exploring complex educational...

This article presents findings from TechTales, a participatory design research (PDR) project where learning scientists, public library staff members, informal science educators, and staff members from Native-American-serving organizations collaborated to design a family-based robotics workshop that was grounded in storytelling. We approach this by...

In this study, we present a case for designing expansive science learning environments in relation to neoliberal instantiations of standards-based implementation projects in education. Using ethnographic and design-based research methods, we examine how the design of coordinated learning across settings can engage youth from non-dominant communitie...

To increase student engagement in STEM, we know that students need to see in themselves the potential to pursue STEM interests and careers. One typical approach is to expose students to relevant images of STEM professionals who represent the cultural diversity of our global community throughout instruction. However, to enhance student engagement an...

All science learning is a cultural process. For the purposes of equity, it is crucial for science teaching to make meaningful connections to the cultural knowledge, experiences, and ways of knowing of students and their communities. However, it is complex work and involves avoiding possible complications and prevalent myths. Culturally responsive a...

This paper describes a Networked Improvement Community comprised of a network of 13 states focused on improving coherence and equity in state systems of science education. Grounded in principles of improvement science adapted from healthcare, we are developing and testing resources for formative assessment in science, with the aim of developing sys...

Recent science educational policy reform efforts call for a shift toward practice-focused instruction in K-12 science education. We argue that this focus on engaging students in epistemic practices of science opens up new possibilities for the design of learning environments that support the stabilization of learners’ science-linked identities. Lea...

This paper explores practical ways to engage two areas of educational scholarship—research on science learning and research on social networks—to inform efforts to plan and support implementation of new standards. The standards, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States in Next generation science standards: For states, by states...

This symposium addresses the design and enactment of learning environments in support of the new vision for K-12 science education (NRC, 2012) and the related collaborative co-design practices of research-practice partnerships (Coburn, Penuel & Geil, 2013) as we focus on how to promote and understand cognitively and culturally expansive learning ex...

In this analysis, we argue that science education should attend more deeply to youths' cultural resources and practices (e.g. material, social, and intellectual). Inherent in our argument is a call for revisiting conceptions of ‘prior knowledge’ to theorize how people make sense of the complex ecologies of experience, ideas, and cultural practices...

In this paper, we explore the details of one youth's science-related learning in- and out-of-school at the time of her participation in an ethnography of youth science and technology learning across contexts and over time. We use the Cultural Learning Pathways Framework to analyze the youth's interests, and the related sociocultural, historical, ma...

This project analyses the prevalence and social construction of science in the everyday activities of multicultural, multilingual children in one urban community. Using cross-setting ethnographic fieldwork (i.e. home, museum, school, community), we developed an ecologically grounded interview protocol and analytical scheme for gauging students' und...

This NSF-funded workshop is designed to support a community of STEM researchers, district and school leaders, formal and informal educators, and community coalitions engaged in building and sustaining research-practice partnerships to improve STEM education.

This symposium addresses teacher learning and agency as teachers adapt existing curriculum and instructional practices to promote student learning through Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM) disciplinary practices. Each study in our symposium aims to foster student learning of STEM disciplinary practices as an overarching goal. We focus...

In family activity children learn how to be participants in family practices, how to be learners and teachers within family relationships, and to approach learning and knowing in ways valued by their families and communities. Increased attention to children's learning across contexts highlights that meaningful learning can be ubiquitous across time...

A fifth-grade girl, born in Haiti and adopted into a Seattle family, talked at home about how she wanted to be a chemist or a paleontologist when she grew up. For 6 months, she spent portions of her Saturdays mixing perfumes, as a chemist might, with her mother. But her public schoolteacher, who is a seasoned professional with sophisticated teachin...

People circulate across a broad range of learning environments as a routine matter of daily living. In the LIFE center, we have referred to this “learning across settings” phenomena as the “life-wide” dimension of learning—as people circulate from moments of elective family life, compulsory schooling, participation in online communities, or other p...

In this paper, we report on the structural nexus of one youth’s gaming practices across contexts and over time. We utilize data from an ethnography of youth science and technology learning, as well as expertise development, across settings and developmental time. We use Ole Dreier’s theory of persons to understand how this youth is able to develop...

Many science education scholars, predominantly using Toulmin’s argumentation framework as a design template, have created learning environments to engage youth with what it means to argue scientifically. We argue, using Tilly’s framework that categorizes people’s reasons, that there is also promise in utilizing the everyday argumentative competenci...

In this study, we argue that in order to understand the underlying causes of inequities in education, we need to look outside specific educational settings to the larger social, historical and political structures behind those inequities. Therefore, in this work we take a social justice perspective to look at the relationship between environmental...

This paper outlines a theoretical framework intended to provide a more ecological and holistic accounting of how, why and where people learn in relation to constructs of human difference - race, class, disability designation, etc. - as learners circulate across places and associated operating value systems over multiple timescales. The framework fo...

The purpose of this symposium is to explore students' scientific argumentation practices in relation to the recently released Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2011) in the United States. We will present data from four research efforts on pre-kindergarten, upper elementary school, and high school students' science learning in classroom set...

Developments in information technology and digital media offer the opportunity to dramatically reorganize the curricular experiences available to students. This symposium explores elements of a next-generation high school biology course design, development, and implementation project that utilizes a social networking/media platform, facilitates you...

There are significant gaps in our scientific understanding of how and why youth learn science, technology, engineering and technology (STEM) across the range of settings in which they participate in cultural practices. At the same time, there are missed opportunities in educational practice to orient to the educational capital youth bring to the cl...

Abstract In this article, the editors of the recent National Research Council report Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits discuss the report’s implications for museum professionals. The report is a synthesis of some 2,000 studies and evaluations of learning in non-school settings such as museums. Here we focus on...

We develop the Parental Facilitation of Children's Interests in Museum Environments as a framework and tool for research and practice that highlight the role of parents in the development of youths' interests. We create the framework by combining empirical data from our research study with three theoretical perspectives from the psychological and i...

A growing set of research projects in science education are working from the assumption that science literacy can be constituted as being centrally focused on issues of social justice for the youth and for communities involved in such work (Calabrese Barton, 20036. Calabrese Barton , A. , Ermer , J. L. , Burkett , T. A. and Osborne , M. D. 2003 . T...

From a spatialized critical social theory, place is political and ideological because it is shaped from historical and natural elements (Lefebvre & Enders, 1976). It is also a medium through which culture is reproduced because of the way it is organized and experienced (Gruenewald, 2003). According to Rodman (1992), place is also socially construct...

This paper explores the socio-cultural-historical influences on educational decisions made by a sample of families from an urban community in the northwestern United States. We report on three analyses of the everyday cultural and social contexts in which parents' and their children's ideas about formal and informal education are developed and appl...

Critiques of school science from sociocultural perspectives focus on the narrow scope of the science that is presented to students in school, which in turn constrains how children should engage in scientific sense-making in classrooms. We have designed a seven-week instructional intervention, Micros and Me, which attempts to (a) make science more p...

This research project aims to examine how participation in authentic community-situated science contributes to adolescent apprentices' sense of the scientific enterprise and identity development in this discipline. Using a theoretical framework based on the current research perspectives on informal science learning, learning science in the context...

We develop the Parental Facilitation of Children's Interests in Museum Environments as a framework and tool for research and practice that highlight the role of parents in the devel-opment of youths' interests. We create the framework by combining empirical data from our research study with three theoretical perspectives from the psychological and...

Few research efforts in engineering education study the impact of affect on student experience. However, a substantial number of interventions, research centers, and similar organized efforts seek to improve the strength and cohesiveness of the community in which the student spends a substantial part of his or her time. Belonging and the related af...

In this paper, we examine the interactional ways that families make meaning from biological exhibits during a visit to an interactive science center. To understand the museum visits from the perspectives of the families, we use ethnographic and discourse analytic methods, including pre- and postvisit interviews, videotaped observations of the museu...

The present paper describes a study in which 13 children aged 9–11 years, of diverse ethnic, linguistic, and socio-economic backgrounds, were asked to use a digital camera and small notebook to document the range of things they consider to be healthy and unhealthy. Using open-ended interview questions, the children were then asked to explain each i...

This research project examines the way that children and parents talk about science outside of school and, specifically, how they show distributed expertise about biological topics during visits to a science center. We adopt a theoretical framework that looks at learning on three interweaving planes: individual, social, and cultural (tools, languag...

This poster session showcases ten examples of expertise development in everyday domains of personal relevance and consequence to learners. The collection of cases highlighted in the posters stem from ethnographic research studies investigating learning from socio-cultural-historical perspectives. In each poster, authors describe their ethnographic...

This research project examines the way that children and parents talk about science outside of school and, specifically, how they show distributed expertise about biological topics during visits to a science center. We adopt a theoretical framework that looks at learning on three interweaving planes: individual, social, and cultural (tools, languag...

Argumentation has become an increasingly recognized focus for science instruction---as a learning process, as an outcome associated with the appropriation of scientific discourse, and as a window onto the epistemic work of science. Only a small set of theoretical conceptualizations of argumentation have been deployed and investigated in science edu...

This session explores the cultural foundations of children's knowledge of the living world. Cognitive research on students' conceptual understandings has overly relied upon sequestered tasks and structured interviews; we argue that participant observation can provide insight into important particulars of everyday life to answer fundamental question...

Building and sustaining communities of new engineering education researchers is crucial for bringing people into an area of scholarship, supporting them working in this area, providing opportunities for long term professional development within a community of practice, and building capacity in the engineering education research infrastructure. The...

Engineering education research crosses multiple disciplines and as such there are no discrete or clear guidelines. Rather, it is evolving through practice - and the community is at a point in time where dialogue and community building are important next steps for advancing engineering education scholarship. The goal of this interactive session is t...

Research has elevated the proposition of knowledge’s domain specificity from a working hypothesis to a de facto truth. The assumption of domain specificity structures handbooks, organizes branches of funding agencies, and provides headings for conference proceedings. Leading researchers often focus on a single slice of the school day despite the po...

In this chapter, we argue that the learning sciences are poised for a "decade of synergy." We focus on several key traditions of theory and research with the potential for mutually influencing one another in ways that can transform how we think about the science of learning, as well as how future educators and scientists are trained.

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Over the past decade, design experimentation has become an increasingly accepted mode of research appropriate for the theoretical and empirical study of learning amidst complex educational interventions as they are enacted in everyday settings. There is still a significant lack of clarity surrounding methodological and epistemological features of t...

A panel representing five design studies will describe the approach each is taking to help learners develop historical thinking practices through technology-supported inquiry, and the results of research conducted on the projects over the past few years.

The authors argue that design-based research, which blends empirical educational research with the theory-driven design of learning environments, is an important methodology for understanding how, when, and why educational innovations work in practice. Designbased researchers’ innovations embody specific theoretical claims about teaching and learni...

We designed Knowledge Integration Environment (KIE) debate projects to take advantage of internet resources and promote student understanding of science. Design decisions were guided by the Scaffolded Knowledge Integration instructional framework. We report on design studies that test and elaborate on our instructional framework. Our learning studi...

In this paper, we discuss the design and study of a guidance and prompting system for a technology-based learning environment used in science classrooms. We focus briefly on how the tool has evolved through several years of iterative refinement, how the tool has been used by students in different curricular contexts for different epistemic practice...

We designed Knowledge Integration Environment (KIE) debate projects to take advantage of internet resources and promote student understanding of science. Design decisions were guided by the Scaffolded Knowledge Integration instructional framework. We report on design studies that test and elaborate on our instructional framework. Our learning studi...

We describe how science education partnerships composed of educational researchers, technologists, classroom teachers, natural scientists, and pedagogy experts can create effective instructional innovations using Internet technologies. We show that our Scaffolded Knowledge Integration framework gives partnerships a head start on effective designs....

We have developed the Knowledge Integration Environment (KIE) to promote lifelong learning. We believe that science courses can promote lifelong learning by offering students science models that apply to problems they encounter in their everyday lives and by engaging students in personally relevant science projects where they connect science models...

This research investigates how to design and introduce an educational innovation into a classroom setting to support learning. The research yields cognitive design principles for instruction involving scientific argumentation and debate. Specifically, eighth-grade students used a computer learning environment to construct scientific arguments and t...

This paper describes how an argument representation tool called SenseMaker has been used to promote science learning with middle school science students during a debate activity. The argumentation tool is one component of the Knowledge Integration Environment (KIE) Internet-based learning suite for science education. The argument representations ma...

Abstract As part of a larger ethnographic research project on children’s everyday learning of science and technology, twelve upper elementary and early middle school children were videotaped working on commercial science kits at home. The informal home setting, combined with the formal, designed nature of the kits, gives unique insight into how chi...

Our research connects lab-based research on metacognitive development and ethnographic fieldwork on children's everyday cognition. We aim to combine experimental and ethnographic research traditions to enrich our understanding of children's learning across contexts and provide a model for interdisciplinary collaboration. We report on four studies f...

Interdisciplinary thinking is gaining momentum as an important topic for empirical investigation, particularly in regard to how crossing disciplinary boundaries can enrich teaching and learning across fields. This paper focuses on one particular interdisciplinary setting: engineering education. Using data from semi-structured interviews with engine...