What Does Science Tell Us About How Teaching and Learning It?

“Promoting an environment of trust where students raise their doubts is essential to channel their research work and keep them motivated and interested in the discovery process.”

As a teacher of subjects linked to research practice at the bachelor’s level, I have heard various comments from students characterized by resignation, complaint, or protest toward doing research work. “How do I know if my research question and objective are interesting to science?” or “I feel that the problem I raise contributes nothing” are typical. Placing the learner in a kind of limbo, where he or she does not know whether to “go for it” to channel their research question or “let it all go” because they feel that science is not their thing. However, without being aware of it,  the students raising these questions make the first approaches, comments, or questions that will gestate scientific knowledge.

But how do these insecurities arise or manifest themselves in the apprentices? What causes their interest in learning and pursuing science to be lost? A frequent reason is an inattention by the teacher to an environment of trust where students can raise their questions. This act devalues their first approaches or forces them to jump into it with agitating reasoning, not providing the necessary advice. It becomes a lottery of tortuous corrections and circulation of methodological recipes that do not consider their interests and motivations towards the particular topic or phenomenon that led them to problematize and formulate their subject of interest.

This article aims to rethink how to teach and learn science at the university level, i.e., to think about who teaches it – teachers – and who learns it – students and consider what science itself tells us about teaching and learning: it is a discovery process.

“Sometimes it is forgotten that research work carries with it ‘warm components’ such as motivation, curiosity and passion.”

The plotting of teaching and learning science is often associated with the adjective “wizened” as described by Gellon et al. (2018); in other words, as a “methodological recipe book” to be followed (Gibbs, 2012; Samaja, 1999; 2007). As if it were only a sequenced and linear work, having little space for passions, changes, emotions, and questions. It is precisely here where the stumbles occur. It is forgotten that research work carries with it “warm components” (motivation, curiosity, and passion) that are keys to putting together a research project. These components have been recognized by different methodologists (Creswell, 2014: 2015; Hernandez – Sampieri et al., 2010; Kerlinger and Lee, 2002;  Ravitch and Mittenfelner, 2020; Samaja, 1999) and even researchers from the discipline of Cognitive Psychology (Limón y Carretero, 1997; Ness, 2011; Rodríguez – Moneo, 2009; Tapia, 2005; Pozo, 2014). Although this seems obvious, it is necessary to remember these components and incorporate them in the university classrooms.

These warm components begin to be noted in the student plans and present the approach to the problem and the research questions; they operate to motor the scientific project and sustain it as they help to overcome the multiple obstacles typical of the academic and scientific field (the marches and counter-marches of the subject itself, the reformulation of objectives and hypotheses, the methodological and field decisions, and the publication aspects and criteria) that the student will undoubtedly face in the science journey (Gibbs, 2012; Creswell, 2014; 2015; Ravitch and Mittenfelner, 2020). Giving their voices room and value: “I no longer like the subject,” “I don’t know what I am going to do anymore,” “I have to change everything now!”

So, to find the whereabouts of these precious warm components, it becomes crucial to invite common sense in its “natural condition” to participate in constructing a scientific project. After all, no research project begins without ideas about what must be known or explored. These, in turn, arise from questions and curiosities emerging from the realities experienced by the individuals, so it should be no surprise that these ideas are wrapped in common sense.

However, by inviting the common sense derived from previous ideas to build the research project, it could be thought that its outcome will be chaotic, especially if most of the previous ideas that students have are misconceptions, prejudices, misrepresentations, and non-scientific data. So, common sense should be understood to mark the beginning of the research project, like a spark within popular knowledge that sets off a transformation process to become scientific knowledge, better known as conceptual change  (Limón and Carretero, 1997).

So, the previous ideas or preconceptions that the students have about their subjects of interest provide: 1) the vision and proximity that the apprentice has on this subject, that is, what he knows, how he knows it, what cognitive coverage he has about the phenomenon, and what his experiences have been with it, and 2) the feelings that the subject gives them, what moves them, what provokes them from the place they speak, in other words, what is their socio-historic-political-cultural positioning on the subject (Geertz, 1975; Ravitch and Mittenfelner, 2020).

Considering the above, I propose that, faced with teaching to build a scientific project, as teachers, we enable and encourage the learner to pursue his or her subject of interest. From my experience as an undergraduate, postgraduate, and thesis advisor on qualitative research in both Mexico and Argentina, I suggest that we be warm and approachable with the students, taking on the role of co-builders of their process from the beginning and not as authors of it. Let us allow them to take their steps, have their search for questions, their coming-and-going on the research path like we did.

Below, I propose this work guide to make it possible:

1. The learner is a cognitive subject. The student is endowed with multiple abilities, having cognitive skills such as creativity, critical and analytical thinking, and problem-solving, to mention a few, and is, therefore, able to propose and raise research problems. Listen to them in amazement; they have a perspective of reality different from yours.

2. Student ethnocentrism. Let us ask where the phenomenon originates, for example, from the student, son, daughter, woman, man, from Psychology, History, Biology, etc. What are their ideological positions, what makes them see something as a problem necessary to study, what experiences have they had, and their interests?

3. Assumptions in the open. Visualize the students’ suppositions of the phenomenon, that is, what they believe the variables are, what they know about them, what they have heard, what they know, what they can explain, and what remains without their explanation and interpretation.

4. Reflectivity ON. Assign prominence to the competencies of self-criticism and reflection about the sociocultural, political, and economic implications, and the students’ assumptions about their place in the research project: in other words, how the individual stands to define the other and the unknown (Lewis, 1976 in Krotz, 1994), and keep track of this (using a diary, for example).

Our task is to accept multiple scientific research pathways since those who trace and walk them are researchers or students. They are the ones who generate discoveries (Gellon et al., 2018; Limón and Carretero, 1997). However, they have different interests, passions, and motivations; each has a personality, identity, character, experiences, previous knowledge, and tendencies inherent in human activity (envy, prejudice, inertia toward thinking in new ways, and love with old ideas).

Let us convert the process of doing science from just discovering things unknown (Ceruti,1994; Gellon et al., 2018) to one where the learner builds a path(s) of knowledge (Guber, 2011), where one goes leaving some things unknown and proceeds to learn others.

About the author

Kathia Rebeca Arreola Rodríguez (kathiarreola@gmail.com) is an educational psychologist with a master’s degree focused on the cognitive, affective, and learning processes surrounding university students, so she designs and proposes pedagogical methods for teaching and learning science in Psychology. Her methodological approach to education research is qualitative, which led her to generate a learning space with students through the educational project @objetosconmente.

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Edited by Rubí Román (rubi.roman@tec.mx) – Observatory of Educational Innovation.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

Kathia Rebeca Arreola Rodríguez

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