FCRP - Education

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Browsing FCRP - Education by Author "Negrea-Busuioc, Elena"

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    Explaining solidarity through metaphors: two examples from a romanian textbook
    (2021) Negrea-Busuioc, Elena
    Solidarity is a complex, abstract, multifaceted concept that may be unpacked and used in a variety of situations, ranging from socio-economic and political contexts to the currently salient pandemic context. Defining solidarity, either in theory or in practice, requires connections to other less abstract ideas, which are more familiar to people. In this paper, I examine the way in which the concept of solidarity is defined and explained in a Romanian social studies textbook for 6th graders. My analysis focuses on two metaphorical framings of solidarity found in the textbook, namely ‘solidarity as exchange’ and ‘solidarity as assistance’. I discuss these examples of metaphors of solidarity in the context of broader discussions surrounding the construction of the intercultural society (of which solidarity is a crucial value) in textbooks.
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    Science meets metaphor: Teaching and communicating about abstract concepts in Romanian science textbooks
    (2022) Negrea-Busuioc, Elena; Ștefăniță, Oana; Guiu, Gabriela
    Metaphors and analogies are efficient and attractive tools used in science teaching to explain ab-stract ideas in simpler, familiar terms. Science textbook authors and teachers rely on metaphors and analo-gies to explain abstract scientific concepts and convey them to young learners. In this paper, we discussa corpus of metaphorical expressions found in Romanian physics and chemistry textbooks for second-ary education (grades 6-8), and classified based on target domains (i.e., the core scientific conceptspresented in the unit lessons of the analyzed textbooks) and source domains (i.e., the more concrete,more familiar concepts used to explain scientific concepts from the analyzed textbooks). Furthermore,we explore the way in which the identified and annotated metaphors may provide the basis for under-standing core concepts from physics (e.g., electricity in terms of ‘water flowing’) and chemistry (e.g.,electron shells as ‘field track lanes’). This study is part of a larger research project which aims is to ex-amine how metaphors and analogies used in Romanian science textbooks are understood and misun-derstood by young learners and what (mis-) understanding complex scientific ideas might mean forpupils’ preparedness to make sense of the world we live in and, ultimately, for their future engagementwith and interest in science.