Responses to Irrelevant and Alienating Science-Teaching of Urban and Other Youth
BACKGROUNG: Personal experiences in teaching science in different high-school contexts in Western Canada 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 results in the students’ alienation from the curriculum and may do little to reduce drop-outs in cases of the so-called “students at risk”.
STUDY: Contrast science teaching strategies for at risk youth in selected Canadian cities and in urban areas of cities in Spain and other countries, and make inferences about the science-teaching strategies in those contexts that appear to respond to the problem of alienation of urban and other young students
RESEARCH QUESTION: In the context of the observed 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 (discussing mostly North American data) 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 may 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 in Canada and abroad, 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, 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).
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.