The award lecture:
Science education and promises and politics of affect
Abstract:
In an era of educational measurement and high-stakes testing it can be difficult to hold onto values, desires and wishes. It is, so often, noted that we value what we measure, but our measurements are also expressions of our values, our desires, and our wishes. I am interested in how and why science education becomes entangled and so heavily invested in particular structures, relationships and practices.
In this talk, I offer a relational reading of choices and traditions: the values, desires and wishes that shape studies of emotions in science education. I have an enduring involvement in both ‘affect’ and ‘politics’ in science education, and here my wish is to bring these together, offering what might be seen as an inquiry into the affective politics of science education. My talk asks what might we learn from how science education researchers study emotions? What possibilities and promises might emotions and affect offer our science pedagogies and research? I start with popular studies of attitudes, motivations and interests, and then some situated studies of emotions in specific classroom contexts. In the later stages, my talk takes an ‘environmental turn’, exploring science education with commitments to nurturing more complex, dynamic, intimate and interesting relationships-with and within our world.
The appointment of Professor Steve Alsop, Faculty of Education, York University, Canada, in 2016 is as follows:
Professor Steve Alsop is an internationally recognized science education researcher. His pioneering research on affect, emotion and motivation, in science teaching and learning has had a major and lasting impact on the field and for the development of research at the Department of Mathematics and Science Education, Stockholm University. Through the textbook Analysing exemplary science teaching: theoretical lenses and a spectrum of possibilities for practice, Professor Alsop’s thinking has also empowered science student teachers in Stockholm.
