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Research project FUSE - The unexpected scientists

The FUSE project examines different paths that students can take to apply for a degree in physics. The focus is on students from under-represented groups, such as women and people from families with non-academic backgrounds.

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Theme

Overview

Project period

01-01-2019 - 31-12-2022

Responsible

Department of Teaching and Learning

Participants

Uppsala University

Research subjects

Science Education

Status

Completed

Funding

Swedish Research Council

Research groups

Science Education Equity

In our research group we are interested in exploring issues of inclusion–exclusion and participation in science education, both in formal and informal learning contexts. The group has a particular interest in minoritised learners of science, and an emphasis on the physical sciences.

Eleanor Armstrong, Amy Smith, Beatrice Hansen, Anna Danielsson, Carolina de Barros Vidor och Nhu Tru

Photo: Jens Olof Lasthein

Science and technology have a high status in society and are considered important for the individual. Mastering the area is important both for being able to make well-founded decisions on complex social science issues, and for being able to contribute to society's prosperity and development in general.

The problematization of unequal participation - historical and contemporary - in these disciplines has been discussed both as a matter of national prosperity and of social justice. It is against this background that the need for nuanced analyzes of processes for inclusion and exclusion in scientific and technical education is significant.

Project description

The purpose of the project FUSE - The Unexpected Scientists - is to investigate what has made it possible for students from under-represented groups to continue to higher education in physics and to contribute to the analysis and development of more inclusive science teaching.

Issues

Within the framework of the project, several different questions are used to get answers to what can contribute to under-represented groups applying for science.

The questions are:

What role do students' positionings play, in relation to which social category they belong to, for how they identify themselves as researchers?
Which aspects of scientific capital can be identified as particularly relevant to which students?
How can school education be designed to enable broader participation?
How can the theory of scientific capital contribute to the development of didactic models?

Method

The method for collecting data for the project consists of two different sub-studies. These are:

Sub-study 1: Life story interviews with first-year students in Technical Physics and other selective physics educations.
Sub-study 2: A participatory research study carried out in dialogue between researchers and university teachers in physics. The study aims to develop materials that support inclusive physics education.

Theoretical approach

The project is interdisciplinary, and moves between educational sociology and didactics. The project as a whole is inspired by socio-cultural theories of action and identity, where identity is considered constituted by social, cultural and material actions and is based on an intersectional and poststructural understanding of social categories.

The project is based on Louise Archer and colleagues' development of the term "science capital" (based on Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction) combined with an intersectional, poststructuralist perspective on, among other things, gender and ethnicity. The second study combines this approach with didactic theory within the pragmatic tradition. In this way, we want to deepen the analysis of inclusion and exclusion in science teaching in relation to the different dimensions of science capital.

The project is theoretically innovative in the way that educational sociological and didactic theories are combined to provide as deep and detailed an understanding as possible of inclusive teaching practices in science. The project breaks new ground by having an interdisciplinary grant and focus on student groups, which research has not paid much attention to before. Therefore the project contributes to a deeper and more nuanced knowledge of inclusion and exclusion processes in science and uses this knowledge to analyze and develop teaching.