This program involves research into the development of key disciplinary and interdisciplinary capabilities and expanding the focus of disciplinary learning to include higher level thinking and practice, and student agency. Researchers explore affective outcomes, identity and belonging, and aesthetics, language and learning, and modelling.
Learning for the Future
Preparing students for futures that will require an expanded range of capabilities is the focus of this MSET-Ed research program. The capabilities of critical and creative thinking, problem-solving and design are foregrounded in world leading research on multi-modal and model-based reasoning in science and mathematics, financial mathematics, socio-scientific sustainability reasoning, creative reasoning through art-STEM initiatives, and critical reasoning and student agency in climate change education settings. Research foci in this program encompasses student identity, aesthetics, language-focused and embodied perspectives on learning.
Language and Learning
A long-term program of research for which the group has gained international prominence involves a view of learning as a process of induction into the discursive practices of a discipline. In science these ‘discovery’ practices are increasingly understood to involve the invention and coordination of visual, textual, symbolic and embodied representations, and we have developed and refined a guided inquiry approach to science, and more recently interdisciplinary science and mathematics, based on such practices. This program has progressed through several strategic
