Our Action Research
The STEPWISE project has been working since 2006 to promote – through science & technology education – development of critical and activist citizens. Working with me over the years have been teams (like this one) of graduate students, colleagues and teachers to conduct action research – involving cycles of reflecting on existing practices; brainstorming new practices; field-testing new practices; data collection from field-tests; and, reflections on new practices. As elaborated here, we often study effects of changes in possible ’cause’ variables (e.g., teaching about the Mendelian Paradox) on changes in certain ‘result’ variables (e.g., students’ views about importance of data vs. theories in inquiries). Teachers & others working with us should gain new & better teaching materials and, if they wish, contribute to publications for teachers, academics and others. A teacher here describes his work efforts to continually improve his teaching (in this case, of actor-network theory). If you’re interested, you can write to me about different aspects of our project at: larry.bencze@utoronto.ca.