Science Discovery in Education
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Statesman JournalScience Discovery in Education
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Statesman JournalName: Address:
W. Jason Niedermeyer 1495 21st St. NE Salem, OR 97301 Phone: 503-763-8854 Word Count: 1209 words *This essay can be found online at: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/09/10/03niedermeyer.h28.html
Scientific Literacy Without a Text:
The importance of discovery It is hard to look at a pair of words like scientific literacy and not think it an oxymoron. I am an English teacher, and after Jumbo shrimp, it may be the second easiest example of linguistic opposition for my students to identify. Subject matter in high school has for the better part of the last century been compartmentalized, whereby it was the domain of the English department to introduce and investigate the use of the written word and the science department to provide opportunity for experimentation with a variety of living, non-living, and previously living subjects. With a drive to boost state and national reading scores, however, I have been asked as a biology teacher to incorporate the teaching of literacy skills into my science classes. I have attended trainings on how to help students distinguish between a topic sentence and supporting details in their books, and been given hand-outs on how to write questions that force students to provide answers in complete sentences. This, you might say, has become the textbook definition of scientific literacy. Learning with a ten-pound text in hand has the potential to produce the kind of populace that the educational theorist E.D. Hirsch hoped his goal of cultural literacy would accomplish. Hirschs notion was that if every child had a bank of words and concepts that he or she knew at the end of each grade level, we would end up with a citizenry that could communicate much more effectively with each other. If these standards were applied to the sciences, this would theoretically infuse society with individuals who are capable of discussing the natural world in a literate manner. It would counteract the sense of informed ignorance that has come to pervade fields like technology and medicine. When someone is discussing the speed of a computers processor, they would know that the Hertz they are discussing has nothing to do with renting a car but the number of cycles per second, and when he or she is told that they cannot be given an anti-biotic for West-Nile virus, it is because the virus is not actually alive. We may even be able to have a national conversation about global warming that mentions practical solutions. Would this mean we have achieved scientific literacy? No. Science is about wonder, it is about discovery. The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget thought that each child learns through discovery, and Howard Gardner determined that each person much achieve that input in his or her own way because there are multiple intelligences possessed by populace. Charles Darwin stepped foot on the HMS Beagle simply because it offered the promise of handling creatures no one in England had ever observed; he eventually proposed the theory of natural selection. Einstein preferred his own thought experiments (i.e. daydreaming) to schoolwork; he posited the theory of relativity. If science is about finding the ruling principles of our natural world, and the people who helped to write the definitions came to their
conclusions by personal discovery, shouldnt a part of becoming scientifically literate be to go through those same paces? By allowing a person to discover concepts on his own, the student is able to scaffold the ideas with observations he has made in his daily existence, thus binding the learning to emotion. By binding emotions to learning, Daniel Golemanthe author of Emotional and Social Intelligencewould argue that the student is creating lifelong memories. This will ensure that something that was taught to an individual in fifth grade, revisited in seventh grade, and further elucidated in the tenth grade will be easily recalled. It will also provide opportunity for individuals to develop unique questions based on perceived anomalies. These questions can lead to investigation and experimentationthe lifeblood of science. It is during the investigatory part of a science course that the final, and possibly most important, part of scientific literacy is learnedthe fallibility of experimentation. Science is not static, and students sometimes fail to recognize this. Teflon was discovered because an experiment to produce refrigerant went awry. Penicillin was discovered because Alexander Fleming let a bacteria culture become contaminated with funguson accident. By allowing students to both replicate others experiments and devise their own, they are able to recognize that mistakes can be made, variables unaccounted for, conclusions wrong, andthis is keythat it is okay if something did not go as planned. It is from our mistakes that we learn most. But if students are so busy questioning and creating experiments, how can it be ensured that they are actually becoming scientifically literate? This is where curricular development fits. Leaders in each field should meet with decorated teachers every year to discuss where science is headed and what kind of background is needed to investigate science in its current state. This would become the core subject matter for that year, providing the relevance and foundational knowledge that Jerome Bruner argued are essential to learning in his treatise on the matter, The Process of Education. By having a yearly forum in each subject, we would be teaching students as if each class were the last one they would take. For sophomores in my on track biology class, this may have very well been the case. Instead of telling students that we were going to be studying evolution immediately after geneticsand risking have some students immediately objectI provided students with opportunities to discover natural selection the same way Darwin did by taking them through the same paces. The word evolution was not mentioned until the fourth week of the unit. There was a single dissenter, a lone girl who declared that she did not believe in evolution. One day, near the end of the seventh week, a girl approached me and asked if there was any way to reconcile the beliefs of both she and her family as Christians with the discoveries she had made about evolution. Her outlook on the world had changed, and she wanted to know how she could convey this to her parents. I was floored. I wanted to provide students with the chance to discover as Darwin had. She wanted to help others challenge their views as she had. That moment has remained etched in my mind. A teenage girl, in the midst of the chaos that is a typical high school students life, had discovered the most important thing about science she couldthat any hypothesis, theory, or even belief can be challenged. Now she wanted to advocate on behalf of science. John Dewey, in his book Democracy and Education, suggested that it was the goal of education to produce citizens, and that the United States as a democratic society must, in consistency with its ideal, allow for intellectual freedom and the play of diverse gifts and interests in its educational measures. By allowing a student to discover concepts on her own, she might just ask a question about a chemical process, about an accepted theory, or about a personal belief that could change not only her own perspective, but her classmates and teachers as
well. It is within the potential of that question that a students success can be evaluated. That is a student on her way to scientific literacy.
*This is the e-mail response I received to the Education Week article from Dr. Janice Johnson:
Greetings: My name is Dr. Janice Johnson and I am the head of school for Jess Schwartz College Prep, an independent college preparatory school in Phoenix, Arizona. My husband Bob is a former high school science teacher and currently teaches inquiry-based learning science classes at Arizona State University with Dr. Anton Lawson (renowned for his inquiry learning work). Bob is also a science consultant at my school, working with our teachers on inquiry-based learning. Your article in Education Week was GREAT and we both would love to visit your classroom and talk more with you about your teaching and your science curriculum. We have relatives in Salem and a second home in Lincoln City and enjoy our time in Oregon very much. We will be in Salem in December and wanted to know if we could visit with you at your school the afternoon of Thursday December 11 or the morning of Friday December 12. We look forward to hearing back from you. Keep up the great work; we need more teachers like you. Respectfully, Janice Johnson www.jessschwartz.org School Phone: 602-385-5100 Cell Phone: 480-694-7662