Thread by @philiplbell

Hey #NGSSchat

If we played the (somewhat serious) game of nominating important science & engineering practices missing from the carefully chosen 8 in #NGSS / Framework, one I would quickly nominate is NOTICING.

NOTICING is an embodied & multi-sensorial practice. It is foundational to making sense of & shaping the natural-cultural world.

It supports wondering, pattern-seeking, systems theorizing, seeking relevancies, tending to relations, identifying political connections & the 8 SEPs.

NOTICING involves careful & often collaborative sensing in context — through looking, smelling, feeling, hearing & tasting. It is learned in embodied ways.

NOTICING feeds directly into the other science & engineering practices.

NOTICING is a key element of #SciEd teaching. Through GUIDED NOTICING, more expert individuals help others attend to features / processes, see something anew, make a careful observation or connection. The knowledge differential might be very slight—but enough to support learning.

NOTICING THINGS TOGETHER supports collaborative observation, working through uncertainty, pondering possibilities & also the very conceptualization of objects & processes that exist(ed) in the universe.

It also helps build social ties & a culture of distributed expertise.

The culture of a learning community allows these NOTICING efforts to be about working towards collective meaning—while holding onto differences in perspective as necessary.
stemteachingtools.org/brief/47

NOTICING productively slows down the pace of investigation & meaning making—to make time for piecing things together & solidifying an account (alone & with others), learning to attend to subtle shifts in the universe, & developing relations with what is being investigated.

NOTICING can productively disrupt colonial pace of K-12 instruction. Many phenomena take substantial effort to attend to & to learn about. Timescales of many phenomena do not lend themselves to "efficient" instruction—and we should be worried when we only study phenomena that do.

NOTICING is foundational to science as an empirical endeavor. Science can be productively thought of as involving detailed and critical noticing—within & across (potential) interlinked natural-cultural systems.

NOTICING as a practice provides more flexibility & insight than the frames of observation or measurement — although they are entwined with noticing.

NOTICING is a more generative bridge to curiosity and provides a real opening to personal BECOMING-WITH objects of inquiry.

From a multi-species ethic of care perspective, NOTICING is foundational to attending to the world, engaging it with empathy and through perspective-taking, and learning to see and participate in webs of caring in socio-ecological systems.

NOTICING is theory laden, power laden & emplaced. It is never neutral—although it can be systematic. Accounts need to be contestable. Science is never from "nowhere." Standpoint is key. Interpretive frames matter. Political entailments matter. Purposes for noticing matter.

PROFESSIONAL VISION is a framework developed by Chuck Goodwin that can be used to see how NOTICING—though a shared practice of HIGHLIGHTING—supports important social learning processes in the context of controlled inquiry.
researchgate.net/publication/22…

PROFESSIONAL VISION coordinates (1) the use of CODING SCHEMES to transform materials into objects of knowledge within fields, (2) the social practice of HIGHLIGHTING salient features in a sensorial field, and (3) the collaborative production of MATERIAL REPRESENTATIONS.

#NGSSchat — How do / might we deepen the practice of NOTICING in #NGSS learning experiences in relation to the other science & engineering practices?

If we look for lines of interests across constructed disciplinary boundaries:

How does NOTICING in #SciEd & engineering relate to and overlap with the intellectual work of other fields—art, social studies, ethnic studies, math, music…?

Communities notice & attend in different ways tied to values, interests & contexts. Centering historically-rooted, culturally divergent NOTICING practices would be key for cultivating more expansive learning environments, tying back to these equity principles.

I think we need to desettle instructional efficiency that moves to detailed #SciEd representations (eg, crafting full explanations, elaborate CERs, models) without there being room for observing, exploring, attending, feeling, sensing—what might be called whole cloth sense-making

Part of what we might get by including NOTICING into the top-level of the Science & Engineering Practice list is instructional time where Ss get to sink into facets of NOTICING & CO-NOTICING—to get a deep sense of the phenomena, develop connections, notice patterns…

I first encountered a resonant image of this kind of scientific inquiry when reading about the research of Barbara McClintock in graduate school…
us.macmillan.com/books/97808050…

Early accounts of cognition cleanly separated perception from conception. Contemporary accounts—including PROFESSIONAL VISION—have shown how conceptualization & perception are interwoven in meaning making processes. NOTICING more easily connotes perceiving-conceiving-feeling.