14. Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC)
The University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) is one of the oldest in Europe (1495). It has over 30.000 students, 2.200 research and teaching staff and 1000 administrative staff. It is organised in two campuses in the cities of Santiago de Compostela (Unesco World Heritage) and Lugo, which hold 19 Faculties and Technical Schools, offering a wide range of degrees, from Humanities to Technical, and 67 doctoral programs, plus Master and Postgraduate degrees. Research and Technology Development (RTD) is carried by its 300 research teams, which in the last five years have executed over 650 research contracts with Public Funding Offices, 750 with industry and SMEs and 1150 technology contracts. It has participated in over 100 projects under the EU RTD Framework Programmes. Its official language is Galician, close to Portuguese, and Spanish is co-official. The Faculty of Education and the Science Education Department (Departamento de Didáctica das Ciencias Experimentais, DDCE), within it, is involved in Teacher Education, both primary and secondary. The Science Education Department runs a doctoral program, certified as a Quality programme, with a focus on discourse analysis and argumentation through classroom-based studies. The DDCE is involved in USC-headed projects, from the Spanish funding agency and under the Spanish-Latinoamerican framework, in a long-standing cooperation in particular with Brazil and Argentina universities. Currently it is participating in the EU funded project Mind the Gap. It has also a long tradition of cooperation with practising primary and secondary school teachers, who form part of its action-research teams. Task allocation The main tasks attributed to USC are the leadership of WP7 (assisted by UNIVBRIS). This involves coordinating the implementation and dissemination of training resources and strategies for supporting teaching and learning in argumentation and other discursive practices in science classrooms. It will also support teachers in addressing citizenship issues through argumentation. It will contribute its expertise in the design of learning environments and authentic tasks to promote argumentation, developed since 1994. Staff members who will be undertaking the work: Maria Pilar Jiménez-Aleixandre, Professor, will be the WP7 leader. She is Science Education Professor in the faculty of education of USC, with a background in biology, and previous experience as high school teacher and as coordinator of the Spanish in-service teacher training programme. She is Principal Investigator in a project on the development of scientific competencies on argumentation, use of evidence and epistemic practices, part of the DDCE research program, and has also been responsible for research on the factors affecting girls' options in technical education, and for other international collaborations. She is the author of more than 100 papers and book chapters Juan Ramón Gallástegui Otero, will be the WP7 assistant leader, and responsible for the country national role. He is lecturer in the faculty of education of the USC, teaching science methods and environmental education. His previous positions included teaching high school physics and chemistry. He is completing his doctoral research, focusing on the quality of students' questioning, as part of classroom discursive practices, as well as on the use of chemistry models by secondary school students. He has authored over 30 papers and book chapters. Blanca Puig Mauriz, is a PhD student in the DDCE doctoral program. Her research explores students' use of evidence in the construction of arguments, with a focus on the permanence of biological determinism in students' explanations about human "racial" differences. An outcome will be a methodological frame for evaluating the use of evidence by secondary school students, as well as suggestions for citizenship education in connection with "racial" issues.
Indicative Allocation of Person-Months:
USC name role PM (total 24) Maria Pilar Jiménez-Aleixandre WP7 leader, Production of 7.1, 7.2-7.4 7 Juan Ramón Gallástegui Otero NLP, Production of 7.1, 7.2-7.4 9 Blanca Puig Mauriz Production of 7.2-7.4 8