Exploring the Landscape of Scientific Literacy

Cedric Linder, Leif Östman, Douglas A. Roberts, Per-Olof Wickman, Gaalen Ericksen, Allan MacKinnon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136911743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Scientific literacy is part of national science education curricula worldwide. In this volume, an international group of distinguished scholars offer new ways to look at the key ideas and practices associated with promoting scientific literacy in schools and higher education. The goal is to open up the debate on scientific literacy, particularly around the tension between theoretical and practical issues related to teaching and learning science. Uniquely drawing together and examining a rich, diverse set of approaches and policy and practice exemplars, the book takes a pragmatic and inclusive perspective on curriculum reform and learning, and presents a future vision for science education research and practice by articulating a more expansive notion of scientific literacy.

1
Overview

Scientific Literacy and the State of the Art in School Science Education

The Editors

This book is the product of collaborative effort by 34 authors from 10 countries, over a period of nearly three years. Consistent with its international perspective, the scope of the collection is marked by a diversity of topics, theoretical approaches, and research methodologies. At the same time, the collection is unified as a coherent whole by its focus on scientific literacy and its parallel focus on the complexities of understanding and influencing the practices associated with school science education. The “landscape” of scientific literacy is the best term we can think of, to capture the many facets of the worldwide interest this term currently enjoys as a rallying cry for rethinking what school science education is all about. As explained below, we have characterized the research in this volume according to four pervasive themes that stitch together the landscape of scientific literacy in terms that are representative of the concerns and activities of systemic reform in science education—in brief, curriculum, language in teaching and learning, classrooms, and professional development of teachers.

Origins and Concerns

The book originated at a two-day research symposium held at Uppsala University, Sweden, on May 28–29, 2007. The occasion was part of a celebration throughout Sweden of the 300th birthday of Carolus Linnaeus, one of Uppsala’s most famous professors. In addition to his well-known scientific achievements, Linnaeus was widely respected for his teaching, especially for making scientific knowledge accessible by demonstrating its relevance in such matters as nutrition, health, and economics. At this Linnaeus Tercentenary Celebration, Uppsala University conferred honorary doctoral degrees on 14 scholars selected by the various faculties of the university. From the Faculty of Educational Sciences, the recipients were two science educators, Gaalen Erickson and Douglas Roberts. The symposium that followed, entitled “Promoting Scientific Literacy: Science Education Research in Transaction,” featured presentations and discussion by an international group of 20 invited scholars in science education.

Common Focus of the Participants

The symposium opened with keynote presentations by the two honorary doctorate recipients. Roberts’ (2007) analysis of research and writing on scientific literacy formed part of the overall framing of the subsequent discussions by identifying two competing visions of scientific literacy that are rooted in the history of school science education. Vision I derives its authenticity by looking inward to the products and procedures of the scientific disciplines themselves. Vision II is broader, deriving its legitimacy from the demonstrable role of science in a whole array of human affairs in addition to scientific activity. Erickson (2007) expanded the framing by addressing two orienting preoccupations of the symposium: the search for conceptual clarity around competing notions of scientific literacy, and the development of fruitful models of educational inquiry that recognize and accommodate the variety of aspects of research into the complex world of practice. These he dubbed, respectively, the “what” and “how” questions of scientific literacy.

The presented papers and discussions during the symposium ranged across both theoretical and practical aspects of teaching and learning science within a broad, expansive vision of scientific literacy, at both individual and societal levels. Participants stressed, as Linnaeus did, that science education has the potential to develop and enrich students’ understanding of a wide array of human affairs in addition to scientific activity itself, that is, Vision II of scientific literacy. Yet, concern was expressed that Vision I still predominates in school science, despite some serious challenges that are becoming increasingly apparent. The published symposium proceedings (Linder, Östman, & Wickman, 2007) therefore include a formal Statement of Concern (pp. 7–8), which is reproduced here in its entirety.

The Statement of Concern

We, the members of the 2007 Linné Scientific Literacy Symposium, wish to express our concern about the current state of science education in many countries on the following grounds.

Attitudinal data from many sources indicate that it is common for many school students to find little of interest in their studies of science and to quite often express an active dislike of it. In comparison with a number of other subjects, too many students experience science education as an experience dominated by the transmission of facts, as involving content of little relevance, and as more difficult than other school subjects. This experience leads to disinterest in science and technology as personal career possibilities, and only a mildly positive sense of their social importance.

Science education has often overemphasized the learning of a store of established scientific knowledge at the expense of giving students confidence in, or knowledge of, the scientific procedures whereby scientific knowledge is obtained. Science education researchers have thus given increased attention to how various aspects of nature of science can be taught, but school science curricula remain too loaded with content knowledge for these aspects to be sufficiently well-emphasized by teachers.

In the last decade there have been widespread moves across many countries to increase the formal assessment of learning in science. These efforts have typically given more value to the students’ retention of bits of scientific knowledge than to their abilities with the procedures of science and the application of scientific knowledge to novel real world situations involving science and technology.

Science education, perhaps because of the sheer depth and volume of the knowledge base of modem science, has isolated that knowledge from its historical origins and hence students are not made aware of the dynamic and evolving character of scientific knowledge, or of science’s current frontiers. There is little flavor in school science of the importance that creativity, ingenuity, intuition, and persistence have played in the scientific enterprise. Nor is there any real sense of any meaningful exploration of issues that relate ethical and personal accountability to modern scientific activity. Indeed, the existence of human enterprise that makes science possible is almost ignored in science education. Curricula and assessment need to support teachers’ being able to share the excitement of the human dramas that lie behind the topics in school science with their students.

Recent policy statements about the changing nature of our work and the Knowledge Society have challenged education systems to give priority to the development in students of competencies that focus on generic skills. In doing so they undermine the importance of those other competencies that are intimately dependent on content knowledge such as those that are associated with subjects such as science.

Citizens’ lives are increasingly influenced by science and technology at both the personal and societal levels. Yet the manner and nature of these influences are still largely unaddressed in school science. Few students complete a schooling in science that has addressed the many ways their lives are now influenced by science and technology. Such influences are deeply human in nature and include the production of the food we eat, its distribution, and its nutritional quality, our uses of transportation, how we communicate, the conditions and tools of our work environments, our health and how illness is treated, and the quality of our air and water.

Science education is not contributing as it could to understanding and addressing such global issues as Feeding the World’s Population, Ensuring Adequate Supplies of Water, Climate Change, and Eradication of Disease in which we all have a responsibility to play a role. Students are not made aware of how the solution of any of these will require applications of science and technology, along with appropriate and committed social, economic, and political action. As long as their school science is not equipping them to be scientifically literate citizens about these issues and the role that science and technology must play, there is little hope that these great issues will be given the political priority and the public support or rejection that they may need.

Reforms of science education that continue to frame scientific literacy in terms of a narrow homogeneous body of knowledge, skills and dispositions, fail to acknowledge the different ethnic and cultural backgrounds of students. Such science education stands in strong contrast to the popular media. It omits a discussion of the reciprocal interactions between science and world views and between values and science that the media regularly recognizes as important to the public interest. Furthermore, it fails to contribute to a fundamental task of schooling, namely, redressing societal inequalities that arise from differences such as race, sex, and social status. Instead of equipping students to participate thoughtfully with fellow citizens building a democratic, open and just society, school science will be a key factor in the reproduction of an unequal and unjust society.

In the chapters that follow, these concerns are directly addressed and a number of new directions for school science that have strong research support will be presented.

A Blueprint for the Book Emerges

At the Uppsala symposium, participants also expressed concern that the scientific literacy literature is missing a more open exploratory approach that does justice to the variety of international research that the field holds. Thus they decided to meet again to start working on production of such a comprehensive publication in the form of a book.

The second meeting was held in the context of an invited symposium entitled “Beyond Borders of Scientific Literacy: International Perspectives on New Directions for Policy and Practice,” at the annual conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, May 31–June 3, 2008. As part of this symposium a two-day workshop was held to develop the blueprint for the book and begin to shape the overall structure and coherence of its components. To emphasize the diversity of our work and its open exploratory nature, the book was given its current title: “Exploring the Landscape of Scientific Literacy.” The focus on “exploration” is to bring out (1) the richness and diversity of contemporary thinking on various aspects of scientific literacy as these relate to research and practice in school science education, and (2) systemic reform that can address current challenges and concerns as expressed formally in the Statement of Concern from the Uppsala symposium. As suggested earlier, both of these components of our work are incorporated in the notion of a “landscape” of scientific literacy.

Participants agreed that significant change will require a commitment to nothing less than co-ordinated systemic reform of many aspects of professional science education (cf. Bybee, 1997). In the four sections of the book, aspects of systemic reform are addressed according to four themes:

• an examination of the characteristics and pervasive influence of science curriculum policy,

• a fresh look at the role of language in the practice of teaching and learning science,

• multiple aspects and possibilities of what scientific literacy means in a classroom, and

• the profoundly significant role of learning communities in teachers’ professional development.

All of these topics of research and practice have been scrutinized, investigated, and discussed individually in the science education literature, some of them for many years. This book relates and solidifies the diversity of such topics through a common, unifying conceptual framework laid out in Roberts’ opening chapter. There, curriculum policy choices and other aspects of systemic reform in school science education are linked according to their inter-relationship and the (intended) flow of influence that binds them together.

Many of the authors, a majority in fact, assembled as a group one more time, at the conference of the European Science Education Research Association held in Istanbul, August 31–September 4, 2009. At a symposium attended by more than 100 conference delegates, authors presented papers about the research themes in each part of the book, and about several representative chapters. Other authors were in the audience, and all responded to questions and discussion following the presentations.

A Synopsis of the Book

There are 18 chapters in the book, including this introductory one. These are presented in four parts, each of which has its own detailed introduction. This overview is intended simply to high...

Table of contents

• Teaching and Learning in Science Series
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Overview
• Part I Curriculum Policy and Scientific Literacy
• Part II Exploring Language Perspectives
• Part III Exploring Themes of Scientific Literacy
• Part IV Science Teachers’ Professional Development
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index