It is acknowledged that to improve the value of the learning process and outcomes in areas such as science, technology, engineering and math, the teaching quality needs to be enhanced. Therefore, it is crucial to have access to real teaching practices. The multimodal narrative (MN) tool allows teaching practices to become public, sharable, and usable (open science perspective), preserving their holistic, complex, and ecological nature. This tool has characteristics and a structure that enable an in-depth study of teaching practices, in different contexts, with several purposes (e.g., teacher education, professional development, and research). This chapter presents MNs and the necessary steps involved in collecting multimodal data, structuring the narrative, and validating the document. MNs can be used by teachers and researchers, or other professionals, with multiple specific objectives, globally contributing to improving professional practices.
TopAn Open Science Contribution: Making Teaching Practices Public, Shareable, And Usable
In the context of our societies’ strong immersion in Science and Technology (S&T) in everyday life, it is fundamental to ensure that the advances in S&T support and promote well-being both for individuals and for society from a holistic perspective. This principle not only involves the challenge of providing people with the capacity to understand and interact in scientific and technological contexts but also encompasses the recognition of the need to shorten the time between the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination and incorporation. This book can contribute to the Open Science movement.
The Open Science movement seeks to make scientific research accessible to everyone, particularly the research community, by taking advantage of the technological communication networks currently available. It is a concept that is widely recognized among researchers (e.g. Altunay et al., 2011; Fecher & Friesike, 2014) and institutions. In this regard, the European Union recognized the value of Open Science in the program Horizon 2020: EU Research and Innovation. It is also acknowledged by the Group of Seven (G7). In a statement (2017, p. 7), the G7 pronounced:
First, the incentives for the openness of the research ecosystem: the evaluation of research careers should better recognise and reward Open Science activities. Secondly, the infrastructures for an optimal use of research data: all researchers should be able to deposit, access and analyse scientific data across disciplines and at the global scale, and research data should adhere to the FAIR principles of being findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
This book shows how Science and Technology (S&T) teaching practices can be public and sharable (the open science perspective), preserving their holistic, complex, and multimodal nature using a tool—Multimodal Narrative (MN)—validated by the academic community (Lopes et al., 2014). This tool has two components: a protocol to elaborate an MN and a validated document. As a document, the MN can be used in education research, in professional development, and in the articulation between S&T teaching practices and S&T education research to improve the quality of both. This tool allows researchers to overcome the difficulty of entering a classroom and obtaining reliable data on teaching practices that can be used and compared by teachers and researchers.
The characteristics and structure of MNs allow for comparability between them (even in different contexts) to achieve purposes related to the improvement of S&T teaching, research, and professional development.
MNs, both as a tool and as a collection, occupy an open science perspective, since (a) professionals can elaborate an MN of their own professional practices, based on data, thus participating in the research process and gradually increasing the MN collection available, and (b) researchers can access and analyze scientific data about S&T teaching practices in several contexts and countries and at different educational levels.
MNs open new possibilities for:
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Research, because they allow the comparison of teaching practices at different levels of education and in different countries and contexts, and even professional profiles, allowing a deeper understanding;
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Teacher education and professional development, because researching professional practices may influence the quality of teaching practices.