About the Book
Studies of learning are too frequently conceptualized only in terms of knowledge development. Yet it is vital to pay close attention to the social and emotional aspects of learning in order to understand why and how it occurs. How Students Come to Be, Know, and Do builds a theoretical argument for and a methodological approach to studying learning in a holistic way. The authors provide examples of urban fourth graders from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds studying science as a way to illustrate how this model contributes to a more complete and complex understanding of learning in school settings. What makes this book unique is its insistence that to fully understand human learning we have to consider the affective-volitional processes of learning along with the more familiar emphasis on knowledge and skills.
Table of Contents:
Introduction; 1. The context lens; 2. How ways of knowing, doing, and being emerged in the classroom: interpersonal interactions and the creation of community, part I; 3. How ways of knowing, doing, and being emerged in the classroom: interpersonal interactions and the creation of community, part II; 4. Personal lens of analysis: individual learning trajectories; Conclusion.
About the Author :
Leslie Rupert Herrenkohl, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Learning Sciences and Human Development and Cognition Programs in the College of Education at the University of Washington. She teaches in the Elementary Master's in Teaching Program. Dr Herrenkohl studies the intellectual, social, and emotional aspects of children's development as science learners in formal and informal settings. She enjoys collaborating with practitioners to apply developmental theory to support the design of learning environments. Her work has been included in the national panel summary of school-based science learning, Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 (2007) and was featured as one of twelve case examples in the volume on applying science research to teaching practice, Ready, Set, Science! Putting Research to Work in K-8 Science Classrooms (2008). She served on the oversight panel for the recently released Surrounded by Science: Learning Science in Informal Environments (2010). Dr Herrenkohl has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Véronique Mertl is a doctoral candidate in human development and cognition in the College of Education at the University of Washington. Her research explores the social, affective, and contextual elements that influence learning, with a particular focus on collaboration and belongingness in and out of school. She currently studies professional and adolescent musicians. She seeks to understand musicians' interactions, networks, and trajectories, particularly how out-of-school art and music settings engage and empower youth. Mertl works as a researcher for the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center, a National Science Foundation Science of Learning Center. She is also a consultant for several music and arts organizations in the United States.
Review :
“This excellent book beautifully captures the ways in which learning is simultaneously deeply subjective as well as relational. It is an essential resource for science educators who understand learning as entailing more than conceptual or procedural knowledge. Perhaps most importantly, it reveals and carefully documents the ways in which science learning, long described as knowing and doing by advocates of inquiry-based science instruction, is just as inextricably bound with ways of being, that is, with interests, ideas, perspectives, traditions, and life purposes.”
– Bronwyn Bevan, Exploratorium
“Drawing on a rich qualitative data set and utilizing an analytical lens that considers multiple layers of context, including school and classroom systems, teacher-student and peer interactions, and personal negotiations in the classroom, Herrenkohl and Mertl re-envision and reconceptualize the nature of learning. No longer can we think of classroom learning as simply what happens in the heads of students as they sit in their desks. No longer can we ignore the motivational, volitional, and interpersonal aspects of learning. The expanded view of learning offered in this book honors the complexity of human learning and provides a theoretically and methodologically sound approach to understanding that complexity.”
– Na'ilah Suad Nasir, University of California, Berkeley
“This book offers a fascinating account of how one teacher and her 4th-grade students create a classroom consisting of a community of learners. In this rich and detailed study the authors show how both teacher and students are transformed as they engage in a diversity of authentic scientific practices. Their research offers the field detailed insights into how this outcome is achieved, the challenges it presents, and their resolution.”
– Jonathan Osborne, Stanford University
“How Students Come to Be, Know, and Do expands the field’s vision of learning from one of teaching students to developing people. Herrenkohl and Mertl view learning as a dynamic, co-constitutive interaction of conceptual and epistemological practices – in this case, in school science. They present an engrossing case study of fourth grade students from varied backgrounds taught by a remarkable teacher, where the deep and careful intellectual work they do together will ring true for anyone who has spent time in classrooms in which knowledge and ways of knowing are being actively constructed, pulled apart, and reconstructed. One gets a palpable sense of who these students are – as learners of science and doers of life.”
– Ann S. Rosebery, Chèche Konnen Center, TERC
"Herrenkohl and Mertl (both, Univ. of Washiogton) have written a book advocating a broader view of learning than contemporary schools reflect. For those who believe that educational accountability and its attendant focus on semantic learning have created a too focused kind of educational experience, How Students Come to Be, Know, and Do suggests an alternative model.... Herrenkohl and Mertl have a very detailed study of how students learn and how they learn differently. The conclusions are intended to address the problems of students who consistently underachieve.... Recommended...."
- D. E. Tanner, California State University, CHOICE
