ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the science and engineering concepts, processes, and practices are socially constructed through coordinated interactions among students, teachers, curricula, texts, and technologies. The methodological challenges include understanding the cognitive, social, and interpersonal factors supporting or constraining the learning of these disciplinary ideas, concepts, and practices. Science and engineering education each have a history of ideas, recommendations, instructional design and practice, and suggested reforms. Educational research seeks to produce knowledge about learning, activities, people, institutions, and systems. Research methodologies are designed to produce new knowledge. Critical discourse within group are conversations concerning developmental and definitional work regarding the creation, specification, and extension of a research group’s central theories, assumptions, and key constructs. Hermeneutical conversations across groups are conversations designed to foster learning from differences across traditions. Interactional ethnography is an approach to the study of culture. It considers the social contexts discourse uses as cultures-in-the-making.
