Decentralized thinking and understanding of evolution in K-12 evolution education (Petrosino, Lucero, Mann, 2014)

120 year old Coal Ovens
Dom's Bakery Grand- Hoboken, NJ

The following is an article I wrote along with 2 colleagues that will appear in the peer reviewed journal Evolution: Education and Outreach. The article centers on a number of difficult concepts that must be understood before one can really understand the idea of evolution. To be clear, this article is not about beliefs--- it is about knowledge and understanding. I take no formal position on what a person believes or why (or why not) they believe what they believe. Rather, the rationale behind this line of work is rooted much more in cognition and comprehension of complex phenomena. A previous article on this topic was published by a number of graduate students and myself a few years ago and is entitled "Evolution Education: Seeing the Forest for the Trees and Focusing Our Efforts on the Teaching of Evolution" (McVaugh, Birchfield, Lucero, and Petrosino, 2011).

Some of the initial ideas for both of these papers originated while I was working with teachers to develop a fully inclusive K-12 curriculum in Hoboken, NJ. Others thoughts and ideas came from a series of classes and lectures I gave on the topic from 2010-2013.

  Petrosino, Lucero and Mann (2014)