ENGLISH: Novel Science-Teaching Approaches and Strategies That Could Help Teachers To

ENGLISH: Novel science-teaching approaches and strategies that could help teachers to appropriately retain at-risk students in schools.

Overview: Review particular science-teaching methodologies and strategies used in university teaching, undergraduate pre-service teaching programs and in high school that could help teachers to retain at-risk students in schools. The study would include a literary review, personal experiences in science teaching youth at-risk in Canada, and primary data obtained from recent (2010-2011) interviews on particular strategies adopted by universities in Madrid, Valencia & Barcelona in Spain and in a university in Lisbon, Portugal.

LANGUAGES: Spanish & English

RESEARCHERS: Professors Luis Alberto D’Elia BetolazaDiane Wishard – Educational Policy Studies – Faculty of Education – University of Alberta – AB – CANADA.

BACKGROUNG: Personal experiences in teaching science in different high-school contexts and a survey of recent relevant literature suggest that science-teaching that uses content, materials and laboratory practices that appear to be disconnected to the students’ daily lives have a good chance of increasing the students’ alienation from the curriculum and the school program and, consequently, may do little to reduce drop-outs.

RESEARCH QUESTION: In the context of high schools with youth-at-risk (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.

for more info:

Prof Luis-Alberto D’Elia Betolaza

In Spain: 964 105972

in Canada: +1 780 438 0635

Educational Policy Studies

Faculty of Education
7-104 Education North
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB
T6G 2G5 CANADA