School Visits to Science Museums: A Framework for Analyzing Teacher Practices

ABSTRACT School visits to science museums are recognized educational resources that provide students with unique learning experiences, if teachers intentionally plan these. Surprisingly one finds that investigations analyzing teachers adopted practices by systematic monitoring, without researcher intervention, are almost non-existent in the literature. We developed the School Visits Articulated Framework (SVAF) to identify and classify (through levels’ scale) the school visits planning practices. The mainly objective was to reach a characterization of teachers’ practices in a perspective of articulations formal education and non-formal education contexts may then be defined. In this article, we describe how we applied the SVAF on five case studies configured as school visits to a science museum, simultaneously we test the framework efficiency. The analysis of the visit plan from the perspective of the SVAF allowed us to identify moments in which the teachers’ practices did not meet expectations according to the literature in the area. Likewise, it revealed the predominance of activities carried out in the steps before the visit to the museum and emphasized the lack of activities carried out in the museum and on returning to school after the visit. These results allow us to better outline the objectives and needs to be met in the initial and continuous training courses for teachers and museum educators, aiming at the best use of this resource for student learning. The SVAF is a framework capable of to identify and classify the teachers’ practices, since the instruments it integrates provided important and detailed information.