Assistant Professor of Education
Department of Education, University of California Santa Cruz

I am an Assistant Professor in the Education Department at UCSC. I have been a science teacher all my life. I received my Ph.D. in Science Education from the University of California Berkeley, working with Ann Brown and Joe Campione on the Fostering a Community of Learners' project in West Oakland. I have an MS in Biology from Cornell University. I was a science educator at the Exploratorium for five years working with NSF-funded national science education reform efforts. I have received an early Career grant from the NSF REC division in 2002. I was awarded an AERA/OERI research grant and a Center for Adaptive Optics teaching grant in 2002.

1) Studies of family scientific sense making in science museums and how they inform our view of learning
Over the past decades, researchers of teaching and learning have discovered that observing social activity, conversation, and sense-making in informal settings (Vasquez, Pease-Alvarez, & Shannon, 1994; Rogoff, 2001) has much to teach us regarding learning in general. I am interested in how scientific understandings grow and prosper, especially as part of collaborative actions and dialogue with social groups of mixed ability. In all my research, I focus on the intertwined roles of dialogue in scientific meaning making and on the science content in the dialogue. Over the past 15 years I have closely examined the kinds of dialogue that social groups use in both classroom and non-classroom settings, such as museums and aquariums. My focus for the past 7 years has been on out-of-school learning and how this kind of research can more broadly inform learning theory.

I have worked with dozens of families, starting with families who typically attend museums, most often European-American middle class families and students. I have conducted research at the Exploratorium and the California Academy of Sciences, both in san Francisco, the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, and at the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa Florida. I collaborated with colleagues in all these locations. The Museum Learning Collaborative (MLC) at the University of Pittsburgh funded me in part in this work. As part of the MLC I collaborated with Kevin Crowley and Gaia Leinhardt, Leona Schauble and Laura Martin.

2) Shared scientific sense-making and bilingual student advancement in science: Linking museums, home and school
Research on education and diversity suggests that "too many of (second language learning) students are not challenged with the same content as mainstream children" (Tharp 97, p. 47). To date there has been little research with Spanish speaking families at informal learning settings and virtually none that integrates the home with both formal and informal learning. I have conducted research at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Seymour Discovery Center; these are settings where families can congregate comfortably, feel free to share funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, 1993), and freely choose their own activities and conversational agendas. To date I have collaborated with approximately 30 families in this capacity. A five-year NSF Early Career grant funds this large multi-layered project.

I believe it is critical for scholars in my field to address the theoretical issues of language access and science learning from a perspective that moves beyond current models of science learning and teaching. I explore how parents and children learn together as they participated in scientific conversations that can lead to the deeper ideas of biology. I believe that family dialogues in non-school setting can become the foundation for scientific ways of thinking.

This research is informed by a variety of disciplines; (including informal and formal science and mathematics education, bilingual education and cultural anthropology) all unified by sociocultural theory (Rogoff, Tharp, Vygotsky, Wells, and Wertsch). In all my work I rely on Vygotsky's theories. He emphasized the inherently social nature of learning through his construct of the "zone of proximal development (zpd) which can be described as "the zone in which an individual is able to achieve more with assistance than he or she can manage alone" (Wells, 1999, p. 4). The zpd allows us to understand how an individual's or group’s development can be assisted by others, both face-to-face and with artifacts such as exhibits, books, computers or signs.

3) Reflections on stimulated recall of scientific dialogue in informal settings
I also have been awarded an AERA/OERI grant which allows me to explicitly explore one critical aspect of dialogic inquiry. This centers on determining the nature of reflective meaning making conversations over time. I use a specific methodology which relies on stimulated recall research. This allows families to watch and comment upon aspects of their own visits, both directly after and months after the visit. A sub-set of families is chosen for this in-depth work. I am specifically interested in how parents and children participate in reflective scientific conversations and interviews, and how these can lead to the deeper ideas of biology.

4) Linking family and school learning through informal learning research
A central premise of my research is that analyses of family science conversations in non-school settings can inform science-teaching practices with bilingual minority students. The over arching question is— how can we build on the understandings gained in informal settings to help professional development efforts to enhance under-represented Latino students' science-learning opportunities in school? Towards this end I am developing a series of case studies of both teaching practice in the classroom and family learning in informal settings that relate to both bilingual students and principled science content.

1) Studies of family scientific sense making in science museums and how they inform our view of learning

1) Ash, D. (2003). Dialogic inquiry in life science conversations of family groups in museums. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 40(2), 138-162.

2) Ash, D. (2002). Negotiation of thematic conversations about biology. In G. Leinhardt, K. Crowley, & K. Knutson (Eds.), Learning conversations in museums. (pp. 357-400). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

(3) Ash, D. & Klein, C (1999) Inquiry in the Informal Learning Environment.

4) Ash, D. & Klein, C (1999) Inquiry in the Informal Learning Environment. In J. Minstrell and E. Van Zee (Eds.), Teaching and Learning in an Inquiry-based Classroom. Washington, D. C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

5) Paris, S. & Ash, D. (2002). Reciprocal theory building inside and outside museums, Curator 43(3) 199-210.

6) Ash, D. & Wells, G. (in press). Dialogic inquiry in classroom and museum: Actions, tools and talk. Journal of Museum Education.

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7) Ash, D. (in press) Dialogic Inquiry of family groups in a museum. Journal of Museum Education.

8) Ash, D. (1998) Learning to Listen to Robert. In J. Shulman, R. Lotan, and J. A. Whitcomb (Eds.), Groupwork in Diverse Classrooms: A Casebook for Educators. NewYork: Teachers College Press.

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(9) Ash, D (in review). Reflective scientific sense-making dialogue in two languages: The science in the dialogue and the dialogue in the science.

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