“Big Words” say little

Responses to Irrelevant & Removed Science-Teaching.

Socio-Cultural Domination of Urban Youth

AUTHOR: Luis Alberto D’Elia – Educational Policy Studies

BACKGROUNG: Personal experience teaching science at an inner city school suggests that science-teaching that uses content, materials and laboratory practicesthat are disconnected to the students’ daily lives results in the students’ alienation from the curriculum and may do nothing to reduce drop-outs.

RESEARCH QUESTION: In the context of high schools with urban youth students,

What pedagogic philosophical approach would adequately respond to the problematic disconnection between teaching materials, techniques lab experimentation, and the students’ everyday-life problems and events?

IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY:

The importance of responding to the research question is that the irrelevancy of science-teaching and inaccessibility of instrumentation used tend to alienate particular disenfranchised youth.

Moreover, the insignificance of what is being lectured, demonstrated, or practiced in laboratory to urban youth in some main-stream schools could be translated into an epistemological and cultural domination, as students do not appear to gain control of their learning through that approach.

This irrelevant teaching could be interpreted as responding to a social reproduction vision of education to which I propose an alternative critical, Freirean philosophical approach.

PELIMINARY FINDINGS

1- Recent literature has presented diverse science teaching approaches that are not only appealing but also tend to increase the relevancy of the subject to the students and their participation level, modeled after the Inquiry and Constructivist concepts.

2- However, more than hands-on activities and relevant, participatory techniques, urban youth students need to be given the confidence that they can control, interact, find meaning, and create new knowledge out of their encounter with the natural phenomena that (Western) science tries to measure and understand.

3- Students’ control of the science experimentation occurs, in my experience, when the teacher removes barriers to that control. The latter cannot happen if the experimentation has to be accessed through methods and equipment that are unfamiliar, not accessible to them (e.g., not reproducible at home) and, consequently, not relevant (alienating) to the students’ lives.

PROPOSAL

My proposal is the application of some of Paulo Freire’s popular education tenets to science teaching, specifically his propositions on resolving the teacher-student dichotomy, the students’ naming of the word and the world, and the ‘de-banking’ of education(Freire, 1970). These guiding tenets are different from constructivist, inquiry-based principles in that the latter, in spite of addressing the “banking” approach to teaching, they do not appear to resolve the teacher-student dichotomy, neither they intend that the students name the world of science with their own conceptual framework (which is a crucial anti-oppression aspect).

REFORMISM OR REVOLUTION?

Teachers’ removal of barriers to students’ access and experimentation of science is not just an ‘adjustment’ to existing pedagogies, it is the start of claiming back the right of everyone to engage with science, beyond the scientific social elite.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS:

1-The planning and delivering of the science program need to start from the students’ experiences with the phenomena, and from their own connections to the subject and with the laboratory material(e.g., materials taken from house kitchen, garden, etc).Moreover, much of the instrumentation used in the science experiments has to be readily accessible to them and be (safely) reproducible by students outside the school.

2- Materials & science methods that connect to students’ lives would increase the students’ own confidence in managing them, and consequently, would engage those students in a non-alienating science-discovery process.

THANKSTO:

Dr D. Chovanec, Dr S. P. Norris, and Dr D. Leard for valuable input

(INITIAL) LITERATURE REVIEW:

Adams, E., Smith, G., Ward, T. J., Vanek, D., Marra, N., Jones, D., et al. (2008)

Journal of Chemical Education

Aikenhead, G. S. (1996)

Studies in Science Education

Bennett, J., Lubben, F., & Hogarth, (2007)

Science Education

BouJaoude, S., & Tamim, R. (2008)

Science Educator

Freire, P., (1990)

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Norris, S. P. (2006)

Theory and Research in Education

Kennedy, L. M., Yezierski, E. J., & Herrington, D. G. (2008)

Science Educator

Philip H Scott, Eduardo F Mortimer, Orlando G Aguiar. (2006)

Science Education

Sanders, J., Patrick, J. D., Dedeoglu, H., Charbonnet, S., Henkel, M., Z. Fang, et al. (2007)

Educational Leadership

Shor, I. (1980)

Critical Teaching & Everyday Life

Wilensky, U., & Reisman, K. (2006)

Cognition & Instruction

______.______

QUESTIONS from colleagues:

  • Is science about everyday experience? if it is not, then the approach you advocate might have the dual effect of engaging students with science teaching but disengaging them from science.
  • How [the propodsal] contributes to challenging the current tenets and philosophies and practices of science? And how are the existing tenets etc. connected to oppression, imperialism, cultural/epistemological domination?
  • (on relevancy) I wonder whetherit can be used as a selection tool for deciding what to teach. Isn'tall knowledge potentially relevant at some time? how can we predictwhat might be relevant to somebody's future. Besides, what one personjudges relevant another can judge irrelevant.

ADD you OWN:

______

Illustration of home-replicable experiment

  1. Biology 30 Unit 1: Systems regulating change in human organisms: Enzymes- Laboratory class:WHY MEET TENDERIZERS SOMETIMES DO NOT WORK? *

Approach 1: Students propose their own plan to explore effectiveness of tenderizing (enzymatic) action on gello (cartilage tissue) in groups of two. Discussion of scientific evidences (Western and non-Western based)

Approach 2: A demo is done before students reproduce experiment (i.e., By incubating cartilage tissue--common kitchen gelatin--with regular meet tenderizer at different temperatures we will be able to demonstrate how meet tenderizers--biochemical enzymes--work and when they will not work. Discussion of process and results.

MATERIALS:

  • MEET TENDERIZER
  • UNCOLORED GELATIN (GELLO) PACKS X 16

* Materials can be found in a house kitchen, method can be replicated at home.