Faculty of Education

Steve Alsop (Sabbatical)

Professor

Location(s) / Contact Info:

Room 217, Winters College - WC
Keele Campus
Phone: 416-736-2100 Ext. 20665

Available to supervise graduate students
Currently taking on work-study students, Graduate Assistants or Volunteers

Biography

Steve Alsop is a professor in the Faculty of Education. He teaches courses and supervises graduate students in the fields of education, science and technology studies, environmental sustainability and interdisciplinary studies. Steve has held a series of administrative appointments including Associate Dean (Research and Professional Development - York University); Teaching Studies Area coordinator (Science - Roehampton Institute, University of Surrey, UK), and Head of Physics (Haverstock School, London, UK); and a series of honorary positions at the Froebel Institute, Roehampton University and the Universidad Baja California, Mexico.

Professor Alsop’s research explores the personal, social, political and pedagogical articulations of scientific knowledge and technologies in educational settings and contexts. Such settings include the public sphere, cultural insitutions (museums and science centres), new social movements, schools and universities. His teaching, research and writing are informed by a commitment and belief in the importance and hopes of knowledge and education building a more wondrous, humane, diverse, equitable and just world.

Steve is irresistibly curious and likes to engage with educators in a diversity of contexts and settings such as the PROMEB project - an 8-year Canadian International Development Agency funded project set within rural Peru. The experiences of this project continue to shape his thinking and research.

Faculty & School/Dept

Science and Engineering
Faculty of Environmental Studies
Faculty of Education

Courses Taught

Educating for a Sustainable Future:A Multidisciplinary Approach (ED/EDUC 3700)
Educating for a Sustainable Future: A Multidisciplinary Approach (ED/EDST 3700)
Education for Sustainability (GS/EDUC 5444)
Place and Learning (ED/EDST 1200)

Selected Publications

Alsop, S. (in-p). Encountering science education's capacities to affect and be affected. Cultural Studies in Science Education.
Alsop, S. (2015). Thinking and meddling with boundaries: Critical reflections on narratives of street medics. ( , Ed.) Cultural Studies of Science Education. doi:10.1007/s11422-014-9643-7 .
Otoide, L. & Alsop, S. (2015). Moments with Jacque Ranciere: Sketches from a lived pedagogical experiment. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematic and Technology Education .
Alsop, S. & Bencze, L. (Eds.). (2014). Activist Science and Technology Education. (Alsop, S. & Bencze, L., Eds.) DordrechtSpringer
Alsop, S. (2014). Reflecing on the activist question with science and technology education..
Alsop, S. & Beale, S. (2013). Molasses or crowds: making sense of the Higgs boson with two popular analogies.. Physics Education,, 48(5),, 670-676..
Alsop, S. (2013). The Body and the Laboratory, . In Mike Watts (Ed.), Dilemmas and debates in science education (pp. 205-219). London: Routledge
Alsop, S. & Bencze (2012). Toward activist pedagogies in STME,. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education,, 12(4),, 394-408..
Alsop, S. (2011). The Body Bites Back.. Cultural Studies in Science Education,, 6(3),, 611-623..
Alsop, S. & Bencze, L. (2010). SMT Education in the claws of the Hegemon.. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education,, 10(3),, 177-196..
Alsop, S. & Fawcett, L. (2010). After this nothing happened.. Cultural Studies in Science Education,, 5,, 1027-1045..
Alsop, S. & Ibrahim, S. (2008). Visual Journeys in Critical Place Based Science Education. . In Y-J. Lew, & A-K. Tan (Eds.), Science Education at the Nexus of Theory and Practice. . Rotterdam: Sense Publishers
Alsop, S. & Bowen, M. (2008). Inquiry science as a language of possibilities in troubled times. . In W-M. Roth & K. Tobin (Eds.), The World of Science Education. . Rotterdam: Sense Publishers
Alsop, S. (2005). Beyond Cartesian Dualism: Encountering Affect in the Teaching and Learning of Science. (Second ed.). Dordrecht,, The Netherlands: KluwerSpringer Academic Press.
Alsop, S., Bencze, L. & Pedretti, E. (Eds.) (2005). Analysing exemplary science education: Theoretical lenses and a spectrum of possibilities for practice.. Buckinghamshire,, UK: Open University Press.

Research Projects

The Project for Activist Science and Technology Education [PASTE]

Role: Co-Principal Investigator

Funded by: Other...

This collaborative project explores two interrelated questions: What might activism offer technoscience education? What might technoscience education offer activism? The project houses a series of theoretical and empirical studies. It has an associated 'open access' journal - The Journal for Activist Science and Technology Education (http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/jaste/index), and an associated edited volume (Bencze, L. & Alsop, S. (2014). Activist Science and Technology Education. Dordrecht: Springer Press.

Policy Enactments and Sustainability Education [PEASE]

Role: Co-Principal Investigator

Funded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)

This project explores how imaginaries of sustainability and climate change work within polices, social practices and ecologies within educational institutions (universities and schools). Recent empirical work has shaped, and been shaped by, theories of 'instituted imaginaries', 'STS', and micro politics.

Beyond Cartesian Dualism: Encountering Affect in Secondary School

Role: Principal Investigator

Funded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)

A significant development in recent science education has been a revitalized interest in affect and emotion. This project offers a reading of affect from a particular theoretical trajectory - Spinoza, Deleuze, Whitehead and more contemporary scholarship associated with the 'affective turn' and science and technology studies (STS). The project seeks to articulate affect as embodied, dynamic and performative; drawing attention to the multiplicities of ways that bodies (broadly conceived - human, animal, technological, material, social and biological) merge into new pedagogical configurations to affect and to be affected in science and education.

Climate Change Education

Role: Co-Principal Investigator

Funded by: TD FEF

In response to the upcoming climate change negotiations in Paris (December 2015), this research report outlines nine approaches to teaching climate change in schools and makes nine recommendations for future policies and practices. The report is intended for school administrators, teachers and students in the Great Lakes Bio-region and across Canada.

All I's on Education

Role: Collaborator

Funded by: Other...

All I’s On Education: Imagination, Integration, Innovation is an experimental research project, forging the way in teacher practice. We are accomplishing this by combining the strength of arts, math, science and technology in Ontario schools. Secondly, All I’s On Education gives teachers the support to experiment and the tools to lead their own imagining. Research is taking place in 10 schools across Ontario, each in a different school board. Three teachers in each school will work in teams to experiment with integrative, imaginative and innovative teaching practices. With the support and guidance of York University faculty, teachers will develop their own projects. All I’s On Education: Imagination, Integration, Innovation is organized from the Faculty of Education at York University. The project is being launched on November 4-5 2014 and will run the length of the 2014/2015 school year. All I’s On Education is supported by the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Council of Ontario Directors of Education. Kathleen Lundy is the Principal Investigator.

Service/Community Activities

ECOSOURCE: Educator, co-teaching the York/Ecosource sustainability professional program

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