David Ian Hanauer

In several writings, Hanauer stresses the need for pedagogical innovation in science education. He argues that the scientific disciplines have historically tended to rely on a narrow range of externally derived assessment tools, such as multiple choice tests.[4] Contending that such measures often fail to promote the “personal feelings of excitement and fulfillment so characteristic of the active scientist” among learners, Hanauer calls for active assessment in the sciences. Active assessment is guided by the principles that science teaching should be informed by procedural knowledge of scientific inquiry, occur in laboratory settings, and culminate in authentic scientific discovery.

Hanauer has published several studies demonstrating evidence of a positive correlation between enhanced student learning outcomes and the development of a sense of project ownership in science classrooms. Data from these studies was obtained via inter-institutional collaborations,[2] and his own experiences with implementing an active assessment program in a bacteriophage laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh.[4] Hanauer has also coordinated a research initiative aimed at enhancing science faculty knowledge of assessment that was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Additionally, Hanauer has researched literacy practices among apprentice and established scientists. His work in this vein includes a quantitative investigation of the perceived burden that Mexican scientists associated with the obligation to publish in English, their second language.[5] He has also published a linguistic landscape study of how language is publicly displayed in laboratory contexts to express personal and professional identities, scientific ability, and community membership.[6]

This area of Hanauer’s research agenda builds upon a small but burgeoning body of qualitative research in the humanities that advocates for poetry writing as a means of eliciting and representing highly personalized understandings of human experience.[7][8] In a 2010 book, Hanauer challenged conventional thought by proposing that poetry inquiry can be practiced among second language learners even if they possess relatively low proficiency levels and that poetry writing could be used as a research method.[3] On the basis of corpus linguistics and qualitative analysis of poems written by university-level English as a Foreign Language students, Hanauer argues that poetic data “produced through a reflective process and cycles of revision” reveals meaningful insights about “the influence of context on individual experience” and the subjective emotional understandings that individuals attach to lived moments. This is the basis for the pedagogical approach to teaching writing in EFL classrooms that he has developed and termed meaningful literacy.[9] His measurement work in poetry has addressed the poetic genre decisions, voice and poetic interpretation.

Hanauer developed the research method of Autoethnographic poetic inquiry in order to explore his own experiences living and growing up as a second-generation Kindertransport survivor.[10] He has used poetic ethnography to explicate the human side of war experiences and promote a pacifist agenda.[11]