Unpacking the nexus between identity and conceptual change: Perspectives on an emerging research agenda

The fact that conceptual change in science education and in the learning sciences is traditionally thought of as an individual cognitive phenomenon and identity development has usually been conceived of as a social construct involving the relationship between groups and individuals raises important questions for how these constructs can be articulated in such a way as to be mutually illuminating. This section of the volume explores three different approaches to forging productive connections between the research agendas of conceptual change and identity development. The three contributions diverge for several deep reasons: they frame the relevance of investigating the nexus between identity and conceptual change within deeply different research programs, they choose different research approaches, they provide different definitions of identity, and refer to different processes of conceptual change. In spite of the differences, the three approaches share a theoretical skeleton that enabled all the researchers to rigorously address the nexus between the two constructs – identity and conceptual change – that can appear very distant in their time scale, in the involved actors and in the cognitive and social processes they refer to. In this synthesis chapter, the three approaches are compared through a framework that allows for pointing out a common theoretical structure of the approaches. This structure is argued to be potentially fruitful for orienting a program of further rigorous investigations of the nexus between conceptual change and identity.