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<p>Over the past two decades, science education researchers have consistently emphasised the importance of recognising young children’s experiences and capacity for competent explorations. Nevertheless, a persistent gap remains between children’s everyday experiences and their encounters with primary school science teaching. This paper explores how children engage with and make sense of their surroundings and subsequently examines the challenges of providing meaningful science teaching for children in primary school. The paper draws on empirical material from ethnographic fieldwork carried out with children from two first-grade primary school classes (age 7). In the analysis, we employ María Lugones’ theoretical concepts of worlds and world-travelling to unpack the explorations of the children. In this perspective, a world is a social space inhabited by people with similar constructions of life. The paper shows how the children shared a particular world, characterised by curiosity and collaborative investigations of their surroundings. These investigations were further characterised by the children’s playful approaches, where they drew on and incorporated multiple perspectives. In the analysis, we contrast their world with that of primary school science, which we found were characterised by predefined content, a set structure and progression, and a focus on specific names and labels. Our findings show that there are few overlaps between the worlds of the children and that of primary school science, leaving a great potential for such connections to be made. The paper thus adds to the important discussion of how to develop primary school science in order to allow young children to participate in and relate to science.</p>

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The fox, the flowers, and the poking stick: the worlds of young children and their encounters with school science

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年5月15日

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  • Katia Bill Nielsen,
  • Henriette Tolstrup Holmegaard

摘要

Over the past two decades, science education researchers have consistently emphasised the importance of recognising young children’s experiences and capacity for competent explorations. Nevertheless, a persistent gap remains between children’s everyday experiences and their encounters with primary school science teaching. This paper explores how children engage with and make sense of their surroundings and subsequently examines the challenges of providing meaningful science teaching for children in primary school. The paper draws on empirical material from ethnographic fieldwork carried out with children from two first-grade primary school classes (age 7). In the analysis, we employ María Lugones’ theoretical concepts of worlds and world-travelling to unpack the explorations of the children. In this perspective, a world is a social space inhabited by people with similar constructions of life. The paper shows how the children shared a particular world, characterised by curiosity and collaborative investigations of their surroundings. These investigations were further characterised by the children’s playful approaches, where they drew on and incorporated multiple perspectives. In the analysis, we contrast their world with that of primary school science, which we found were characterised by predefined content, a set structure and progression, and a focus on specific names and labels. Our findings show that there are few overlaps between the worlds of the children and that of primary school science, leaving a great potential for such connections to be made. The paper thus adds to the important discussion of how to develop primary school science in order to allow young children to participate in and relate to science.