Re-engineering Education
Having worked for more than 30 years in education research, and for most of them also in teacher education and with weekly visits to schools and classrooms, I am quite sure that our present system of formal education through schooling is fundamentally dysfunctional and cannot be successfully reformed.
It must be replaced. I outline the reasons for this radical conclusion in the first of the papers linked below. I know very few serious education researchers who do not agree with my basic premises, at least in private, but many do not accept my conclusions, and some who do will not say so publicly because they cannot see any alternative to the present system, especially for economically marginalized students. I believe that we must create and try out a variety of alternative systems and I sketch some possibilities in the work below.
Also included here is some of my earlier work on Education that does not specifically fit under the heading of Science Education. I have written for example about many aspects of literacy education, including reading, writing, and literacy education for speakers of low-prestige dialects of English. Educational policy in the U.S. is often seriously misguided on these matters to the profound detriment of many students, communities, and the nation itself.
Six Pieces of the Higher Education Puzzle
Re-engineering Education in America
Complex Systems and Educational Change
Making Meaning: A Critical Statement on Reading Comprehension
Intertextuality and Educational Research
Language development and identity: multiple timescales in the social ecology of learning
Becoming the Village: Education across Lives
Towards Critical Multimedia Literacy
Metamedia Literacy: Transforming Meanings And Media
Cognition, Context, and Learning: A Social Semiotic Perspective
Semiotics and the Deconstruction of Conceptual Learning
The Coming Paradigm Wars in Education: Curriculum vs. Information Access
Genres, Semantics, and Classroom Education