Developments And Dilemmas In Science Education

Peter Fensham, Australia. Peter Fensham Monash University, Peter Fensham Monash University, Australia.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136613852
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A summary of the strengths and weaknesses in present practices of science education in schools, and of research in science education. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

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Familiar but Different: Some Dilemmas and New Directions in Science Education

Peter J. Fensham

Introduction

At a time of general economic restraint and cutbacks in education, a Learning in Science Project was set up in New Zealand in 1979 for three years that has so far been extended to nine, and in 1982 Britain's Department of Education and Science established the complex and expensive Secondary Science Curriculum Review. Almost before the last staff, lingering into the 1980s after a longish period of depression in American science education, had left their posts at the National Science Foundation, this body, and a number of others in the USA, were reviewing and reporting on the state of this field in schools and establishing new projects to remedy its deficiencies.

In 1984 UNESCO's Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific was asked by its member states to make ‘Science for All’ a top priority area for development over the remaining years of the decade. Australia, one of these member states, has lagged behind the efforts that, for example, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines have been recently putting into science curriculum developments. In 1986, it did, however, begin to review its school science education seriously and several projects with strong government backing have now begun. Canada, a country with many similarities to Australia, undertook a very extensive review of its school science education earlier in the 1980s and its provincial governments are now responding with a number of new curriculum initiatives.

This list of renewed national concern and activity about science education in schools could be substantially extended. It will, however, suffice to testify to a widespread political and economic concern, and to a willingness on the part of authorities to provide funds, personnel and other resources for the improvement of science education in schools.

This situation, with its positive climate of support, should at first sight be a very pleasing one for science educators. To many of us it does, however, present one very general dilemma and a great number of more specific ones as the various aspects of what should be done in this field of curriculum development are considered.

The general dilemma relates to the fact that the 1960s and early 1970s are so recent that the very similar rhetoric and enormous effort that went with the science curriculum reforms of that period have not been forgotten. Even today's younger science educators, through their own training, are aware of these similarities because the documentation of that earlier period is so extensive and because its residues in the schools have been their own experience of learning and teaching science at school. Furthermore, for any who are prepared to turn to the histories of science curricula (see, for example, Lay ton, 1973, and Jenkins, 1979, in Britain; Hurd, 1961, and Bybee, 1977, in the USA; and Fawns, 1987, in Australia) there is ample evidence that the generation of the 1960s (let alone the 1980s) was certainly not the first to expect great things for learners at school from science education. There is a strong sense of déjà vu.

The great burst of activity in curriculum development in science began in Britain and the USA in the late 1950s and continued there till the early 1970s. It did much to give a new meaning to curriculum development and to professionalize its procedures. These new conceptions spread beyond science to many other parts of the programme of schools as curriculum development centres or departments rapidly became established as part of the educational scene. Nor was the notion of ‘curriculum development’ confined to these two countries for it rapidly spread to many others. Some of them did not, however, embark on truly indigenous curriculum development till the 1970s. In a number of cases this delay was due to the fact that a form of educational imperialism occurred. That is, materials for the school populations of Britain, the USA or France were exported, with or without minor adaptation, to the school systems of other countries where quite different sociopolitical and socioeducational needs and demands prevailed. These differences were very apparent in the countries of the Third World that had only recently gained their political independence. Nevertheless, it was the education systems of some of these (under persuasive advice from now ‘foreign’ consultants) that, in a number of instances, took up these new materials more extensively than did the schools in their countries of origin. Countries like Australia and Canada, which in some senses were socially similar to the USA, also made extensive use in some of their centralized provincial school systems of materials from the National Science Foundation's projects in the USA. It can now be seen, however, that this period of direct importation of science curricula, even in these countries, distorted the educational scene and inhibited more appropriate local developments.

As I wish in a number of ways to relate the present and future prospects for science education to the situations, events, and products associated with this earlier period of interest and activity in science education I shall refer to it as ‘the 1960s’ knowing full well, as I have just indicated, that some of its effects on science curriculum reform were more evident, in fact, in the 1970s.

In the various rationales that were provided for the activity in science education in the 1960s and in those for the 1980s two similar targets are addressed. These are a scientifically-based work force and a scientifically literate citizenry.

The stress on the former is quite evident. The National Science Foundation's 1983 report ‘Educating Americans for the 21st Century’ sees school science education as important to produce the scientific and technological professionals who will enable the USA to compete economically with Japan. This is so reminiscent of the Rickover report in the 1960s although the threat then was the USSR and in a political sense rather than an economic one. Likewise, in their reference to the latter target, the statements for the two periods are also quite similar, generally presenting a picture of more science education, along with more science and technology, as being unquestionably good things for societies to have.

It is surprising to find this recurrence of such an uncritical stance about science in society in the 1980s, but the NSF report referred to above is indeed as devoid of reference to the disastrous state of the environment and the contributions of American industry and technology to it as were its 1960s counterparts. Reading its arguments for ‘making American science education the best in the world’ (!!) is as if Rachel Carson, Paul Erlich and Barry Commoner were part of science fiction, and there have been no problems with acid rain, species depletion, waste disposal and nuclear accidents in the twenty-five years since the 1960s.

So it is both what the contemporary reports say about science education and what they omit that heighten the sense of déjà vu and contribute to it being a dilemma for the efforts that are being made to improve the teaching and learning of science in schools.

It might be (and it is a possibility that would be quite consistent with the framework I present a little later in this chapter), that this déjà vu simply means that science education is now being challenged to do for the coming generations of school learners what was achieved by the reformers in the 1960s. In other words, the societal conditions have now so changed that what were good solutions for science education in the 1960s are now no longer appropriate.

Alas, the dilemma cannot be so simply dispelled for this interpretation assumes that solutions were found in the 1960s to the problems of science education as they were perceived at that time. Unfortunately the record of achievement from the 1960s does not support such a position. Quite literally, by the late 1970s in some of the countries which first embarked on these reforms to their science curricula in the 1960s their managers had run out of excuses and ideas. Initially it had seemed that all that was needed were first class suggestions for what science education in schools should be like and an adequate supply of carefully prepared supporting materials (texts, films, laboratory exercises, etc). Even when these proved unattractive to the majority of teachers in countries where they were not mandatory, or were distorted almost beyond recognition where they were, the momentum of this approach was so great that most of the available resources continued to go into revisions of these first materials or into other attempts to design ‘the package’ of science education that could, when developed, be handed over to teachers to use in their schools. Along with this ‘package’ approach to improving science education a number of countries put considerable resources into upgrading their school science facilities in the form of more and better laboratory provision in schools and/or the introduction of ancillary technical staff. Somewhat belatedly, attention then began to turn to teachers as ‘the problem’ in relation to the implementation of these improved science courses, and by the early 1970s in-service education courses to induct teachers into the intentions of the new science curricula were being conducted on a large scale in a number of countries. Almost invariably these courses were conducted away from the teachers’ schools, in centres like universities and colleges. The perception of the ‘teacher as problem’ was of the teachers’ own interactions with the curriculum package. The contextual features of their particular schools and classrooms were not seen as relevant.

In the latter half of the 1970s a number of major evaluations of these attempts at solutions to the problems of science education were conducted. In Britain, Harding et al. (1976) investigated the implementation of the products of the Nuffield science projects, and in the USA, several separate evaluations of the effects of the NSF projects were carried out (Hegelson et al., 1977; CSSE, 1978; and Research Triangle Institute, 1977).

These, and evaluations from many other countries, were shared at an international conference in Israel (Tamir et al., 1979). When the range of problems that were tackled and when the extent of the implementation of the proposed solutions are taken into account, a reasonable summary would be that success was at best patchy.

In Australia, one of the countries were schools throughout the country had been equipped with new laboratories and technical assistants, there was evidence that there was less practical work in senior secondary science than earlier. Only two of the nineteen countries participating in the first IEA study of science education (Comber and Keeves, 1973) chose to include practical tests despite the centrality they were giving to the laboratory in their curriculum rationales.

I am not saying that there were no educational achievements as a result of the 1960s efforts. Clearly there were a number, and it is important to recognize the sorts of changes that were possible since these may be the easiest sort to change again. Equally, however, for the good of what might be achieved in the next decade, we would be foolish not to recognize that we now know that effective science education in many of its aspects is much more difficult to achieve than the reformers of the 1960s ever dreamt.

In an attempt to dispel the déjà vu dilemma, I intend in this chapter to do three things. First I shall provide a framework for discussing what was happening and what was achieved in the efforts of the 1960s. Next I will use it and some of the features of the contemporary scene to argue that the present and the more immediate future are very different from the 1960s. Finally I shall point to some of the more specific challenges and developments that seem to me to be important to heed if real advances are to be achieved on a wide scale in school science education.

A Sociopolitical Framework for Science Education

The curriculum movement of the 1960s has rightly been criticized (for example, Young, 1971, and Waring, 1979, in Britain; Gintis, 1972, and Apple, 1979, in the USA; and Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977, in France) for often behaving as if schooling, and science education in particular, takes place in a social and political vacuum. The export of science curricula to which I referred earlier is an example of this attitude. The fact that science does have some ‘universal’ aspects was used to justify and make possible the transferability of science curricula across national boundaries. Another example of this ‘social vacuum’ attitude to science education is the ‘desocializing’ of science and science education that occurred in many of the projects. References to scientists as persons and citizens contributing to our understanding of nature and its manipulation in their own societies almost disappeared in the first wave of these new curriculum materials, as did any serious reference to industrial and science applications of science. There was accordingly little or no discussion in these new science courses of the social implications and consequences of science (Fensham, 1976). As one further example, I can refer again to the naivety project after project displayed in assuming that implementation in complex social systems like schools was essentially only a function of the science education ‘package’ or of this package and its interaction with a science teacher, abstracted from the social realities of her/his school and classroom.

Historians and curriculum theorists, like those mentioned above, have helped us to see that schools are established by societies to fulfil a number of educational functions. The curriculum, in its parts and in its totality, is the instrument to serve these functions as well as being the field where the competition between these societal demands on schooling is resolved. In figure 1 I have tried to indicate some of the societal demands that compete for priority in a science curriculum's emphases (see also chapter 2).

The sciences, particularly the physical sciences, in many societies, are gateway subjects that filter the relatively few students who are allowed to move into certain professions of high status, societal influence and economic security. Because of the societal power associated with these positions, we can call this a political demand on schooling. Again, a limited but definite number of persons with scientific skills and expertise are needed in any society to maintain and expand a variety of aspects of its economy. This is an economic demand. Scientists, particularly in research institutions and universities, are now a powerful faction in society with a major interest in maintaining their subject as an elite and important field. They are thus keenly interested in having the schools begin the process of reproduction of the sciences as those in higher education define them. In addition, there are clearly many ways in which all cultures and social life are now influenced by knowledge and applications from the sciences. Science education can assist people to have a sense of control rather than of subservience and to take advantage of what science in these ways has to offer them. The fascination of scientific phenomena and the role of human inventiveness in relation to them offer much potential for school science education ...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Half Title
• CONTEMPORARY ANALYSIS IN EDUCATION SERIES
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor's Preface Philip Taylor
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Familiar but Different: Some Dilemmas and New Directions in Science Education
• Chapter 2 What Counts as Science Education?
• Chapter 3 Teachers in Science Education
• Chapter 4 Learners in Science Education
• Chapter 5 What Children Bring to Light:Towards Understanding What the Primary School Science Learner Is Trying to Do
• Chapter 6 Theory into Practice I
• Chapter 7 Theory into Practice II:A Constructivist Approach to Curriculum Development
• Chapter 8 Role of Language in Science Education
• Chapter 9 Practical Work and Science Education I
• Chapter 10 Practical Work and Science Education II
• Chapter 11 Gender and Science Education I
• Chapter 12 Gender and Science Education II
• Chapter 13 The Dilemma of Science, Technology and Society Education
• Chapter 14 Broadening the Aims of Physics Education
• Notes on Contributors
• Index