Dear Colleagues,
The Chemistry Education Research Committee is excited to announce the next talk in the CERC webinar series!
- Talk Title: “Valuing Multiplicity in Chemistry Learning”
- Speaker: Dr. Ira Caspari-Gnann
- When: Monday, December 2, 2024
- Time: 5:00 p.m. EST
- Link to Join: https://bit.ly/CERC_Webinar_Caspari
About the Talk
This presentation will draw from several research projects to illustrate how multiplicity enhances chemistry education:
- Learning Assistant Practices: Understanding how dialogic and authoritative facilitation techniques impact student learning.
- Class Design Influence: Examining how employing multiple frameworks in class design offers deeper insights into educational innovation.
- Problem Design Comparisons: Highlighting how encouraging diverse student perspectives can lead to deeper understanding and collaborative sense-making.
Abstract: In university chemistry classrooms, we often center and ascribe more value to certain ways of thinking, speaking, and doing, while others are ascribed less value and are pushed to the margins. Multiplicity instead allows for multiple ways to be valued equally, co-exist and be true in the same time and space. In this talk, I will draw on insight from several research projects to illustrate the value of multiplicity in different aspects of chemistry education research and practice. (1) How facilitators can center a multiplicity of student perspectives during learning encounters will be demonstrated through a dialogic-to-authoritative spectrum of learning assistant (LA) facilitation practices and the impact of dialogic and authoritative moves on student learning. (2) Examples of how different class designs influence these LA facilitation practices will be used to demonstrate how employing a multiplicity of frameworks to understand learning systems allows us to go beyond the descriptive level of studying educational innovations towards an explanatory account of complex systems. (3) Through comparing two different implementations of an organic chemistry mechanism problem, I will showcase how multiplicity of students’ thoughts can be encouraged or shut down and how the synergy of multiple students’ thoughts can lead to deeper sense making than elaboration on the correct answer. Implications for the use of frameworks in chemistry education research and for the implementation of problem designs and facilitation practices in university chemistry classrooms will be discussed.
For more about Dr. Caspari-Gnann's work, visit her research group website.
We hope you can join us for this engaging and insightful webinar!
