What experiences contribute to the overall development and preparation of a scientist? Are there elements of this process that educators can recreate to support the development by all students such that they acquire similar skills and habits of mind, regardless of the career path they finally select? And if so, what shape might these processes take in science classrooms? I hope to stimulate a conversation among JRST readers about the issues these questions raise by addressing aspects of the process by which scientists develop their personae and sharing two examples of efforts to bring together cultural and scientific processes into schools.
The argument which follows rests on the claim, not unlike that made by Gee (1990Gee ( , 1991)), Lemke (1990), and others (e.g., Anderson, Holland, &Palincsar, 1997;Richmond & Kurth, 1997, 1998;Varelas, 1997), that both canonical and cultural knowledge (the latter reflecting the community's values and norms of practice) constitute the foundations upon which individuals develop professionally, building their understanding and professional personae as they move from novice to expert status (see also Lave & Wenger, 1991). This is especially true in science, whether the professional community is nuclear physics (Traweek, 1988), molecular biology (Latour & Woolgar, 1986), immunology (Goodfield, 1991), or computer science (Latour, 1987). In fact, the process by which an individual "becomes" a professional scientist is not unlike that undertaken by individuals hundreds of years ago as they prepared to become skilled craftsmen or artisans. Back then, if your talents and interests came to the attention of an established craftsman, or your father was so employed, or he knew someone (who may have known someone) so employed, you became apprenticed to an expert, laboring, often for decades, in that person's shop, surrounded by others at various stages of their professional training, learning the skills of that trade. Your training was orchestrated so that these skills increased in complexity along with the expectations your master had for your responsibility to the finished product. And while you were learning these increasingly complex tasks, what surrounded you in the workshop, in addition to other apprentices, were the pieces or finishes they produced. You overheard feedback from the master to other individuals as well as receiving it yourself. You conversed regularly about your work, that of your peers, and of those more expert in the craft. You commented on the quality and value placed by others on the master's work, which everyone understood was rarely a product of the master's hands alone, but of his along with those he had trained. In the