Managed Doubt in Standardised Personal Experiences - Coordination of Exploration at a Large-Scale Educational Science Centre

PhD defence by Liv Nøhr

Assessment Committee

Professor Lene Møller Madsen, IND, University of Copenhagen (Chairperson)
Full Professor Laurent THÉVENOT, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Lektor Hanne Knudsen, Aarhus University (AU), Danish School of Education (DPU)

Supervisors

Professor Morten Misfeldt
Assistant Professor Marie Larsen Ryberg
Associate Professor Daniel Spikol

Department

Department of Science Education

Place

Building: Niels Bohr Bygningen (NBB), Room: Margrethe Bohr Auditoriet, Jagtvej 155, 2200 København

Email address to gain access to the thesis: lsnl@ind.ku.dk.
You will either receive a copy of the thesis or be informed where you can read a physical copy.
Recipients of copies of the thesis are not allowed to share or distribute it due to copyright compliance.

Short description of the thesis

This dissertation studies how forms of doubt become convenient in standardised teaching situations. Specifically, how adolescents’ personal experiences are moulded into deliberate choices at an educational science centre. Grounded in the sociology of regimes of engagement, the dissertation investigates doubt based on ethnographic observations following 24 school classes’ centre-visits. The thesis examines how doubt functions in this context: how technologies in the laboratory enable and delimit convenient ways to take part in assigned group work, how visiting adolescents valuate wondering based on their task progression, how adolescents’ hesitations are deliberatised in inquiry based teaching, and how joint inquiry demands deliberateness among adolescents, which contrasts their drifting attention in exploration. Based on this, the dissertation discusses three aspects of managed doubt.