5. University of Bristol, Graduate School of Education (UNIVBRIS)
The University of Bristol was founded in 1876. It was the first higher education institution in England to admit women on an equal basis to men. The University organises its academic affairs in 45 departments and 15 research centres that are arranged in six faculties: Arts, Engineering, Medical and Veterinary Sciences, Medicine and Dentistry, Science, and Social Sciences and Law. Currently it is a member of the "Worldwide Universities Network" and of the Russell Group of universities. The academic quality of the University is reflected partly in the Nobel Prizes and Fellowships associated with the University community: 6 Nobel prize winners, fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences, British Academy, Royal Academy of Engineering and The Royal Society.
The Graduate School of Education, GSoE, is an international centre of interdisciplinary educational research and it has received the highest national ranking of 5* in the latest Research Assessment Exercise. The Graduate School of Education is the only UK education department that has this excellence in research as well as an initial teacher training programme for science teaching.
Task allocation
In WP7, UNIVBRIS will extend the research and professional development agendas from a range of projects. It will focus on the dissemination of training resources and classroom materials that support teaching and learning of argumentation in science classrooms. A particular aspect of the proposed project will be the development of teachers' epistemological reasoning about nature of scientific knowledge with an aim towards promoting epistemic practices around argumentation in science classrooms.
Staff members who will be undertaking the work:
Sibel Erduran has been conducting research in argumentation since 1993 having received funding from the Spencer Foundation and the National Science Foundation in the USA. In 2005 she received the best paper award from NARST for her co-authored publication on argumentation. She has extended her research-based work in argumentation to the production of professional development programmes in argumentation supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, Nuffield Foundation and Gatsby Foundation. She is the co-producer of the Nuffield-funded IDEAS pack, a training resource on ideas, evidence and argumentation that has been translated to Chinese, Catalan, German, Italian and French. Sibel Erduran has been coordinating the Argumentation and Communication Work package as part of the Mind the Gap project funded by EU FP7.
Neil Ingram is Senior Lecturer in Science Education (Biology) at the Graduate School