Intersections of Formal and Informal Science

Lucy Avraamidou, Wolff-Michael Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317361039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Science learning that takes place between and at the intersections of formal and informal science environments has not been systematically reviewed to offer a comprehensive understanding of the existing knowledge base. Bringing together theory and research, this volume describes the various ways in which learning science in various settings has been conceptualized as well as empirical evidence to illustrate how science learning in these settings can be supported.

Part I
Theoretical Perspectives

Any science teacher will have heard this question: “Why do I have to learn science?” Many (science) teachers—and sometimes parents as well—might have found themselves saying that it is important to make a good living. But looking around ourselves, we see that people often do well in life even if they know little or no science. Even scientists themselves often know little outside of their limited domain, and, as a number of studies show, fail to provide correct interpretations of graphs from introductory courses of their own fields (Roth, 2012). Much of science education appears to be stuck in the ideology of basic facts that we need to know not only to be scientifically literate but also to count as citizens, to be educated (aesthetically enriched), and to be able to appreciate the intellectual coherence of the world (e.g., Hazen & Trefil, 1991). In a world where there are an exponentially growing number of scientific publications, which of the zillions of scientific facts should school-aged individuals learn? Some studies show that even the most educated scientists may find themselves at a loss when caught up in a situation—such as personal health—where science is involved (Roth, 2014).

An important shortcoming of current science education appears to be that it fails to look at the lives of individuals in their entireties to answer the question of how science, if at all, might have a role as one strand among many others (see Figure E.1 in the epilogue of this book). It is here that out-of-school opportunities for learning have an important role, including, for example, science museums and other formal-informal settings. Such settings, although often thought about in terms of (free-choice) learning and informal settings, are in fact formally organized settings with specific, science-related purposes. There are many other settings in which science learning occurs but they are not framed in the same way. For example, environmental groups—such as the marine and watershed ecology related groups that Roth and his graduate students researched—do not inherently focus on science. If they do, it always is in the context of other dimensions of human life, such as engineering, politics, economics, health, ethics, public consciousness, and personal experience. In any environmental issue, these and other strands of human life are involved. Given that the ecological advantage of the human race derived from division of labor, we therefore need to think about science in the context of division of labor and in terms of the requirements for people with very different forms and levels of expertise to work together to solve a particular issue (Roth, 2003). It turns out that in such a context, scientists often exhibit scientific illiteracy because they appear to be incapable of communicating and negotiating with others in the assessment of the relative contribution science could make, rather than insisting on a unilateral dominance of science over all other fields of knowing and experience. Once we accept viewing science as but a strand among strands in the context of the whole lives of persons, we have made a first step toward understanding the contributions science actually can make. Chapter 1 takes such a broad perspective, which allows us to escape from the ego-centrist, within-science perspective that dominates science education today.

In “Learning: From Transitive Construction to Intransitive Being,” Wolff-Michael Roth articulates a theoretical approach that no longer privileges the subject’s agential engagement with the object via some form of mediator but orients us to the inherent changes that occur because we live and act in a world. His overall concern is with lifelong and life-wide changes, rather than merely those occurring in a school science classroom or a science museum. Using a practical example of a curriculum in which he, together with resident teachers, offered students opportunities to participate in environmentalism, he develops an alternative view on learning and a number of theoretical concepts. He sketches the reasons for his claim that constructivism is a dead end because it focuses on the transitive relations between subject and object. Grounded in the work of the anthropologist T. Ingold and the philosophers G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, the theoretical approach outlined orients us to the intransitivity of becoming. In the course of our lives, we find ourselves in many different contexts where we participate in doing what everyone else is doing and, in the course, are changed. Each person, each artifact, indeed each molecule is associated with a line of becoming; and when such lines come together and intertwine (as in a strand of wool, see “Epilogue”), they shape each other in the process. The chapter introduces leading activity, a concept developed by the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky. This is a form of activity in which we participate and incrementally change (learn) but all of a sudden find ourselves having developed a qualitatively different form of consciousness and practice. Such developmental steps, according to Vygotsky, are unpredictable, suddenly and often unnoticeably arising in and from leading activity. Roth also introduces experience (pereživanie) as a theoretical category and analytic unit of the subject-acting-in-its-environment.

One step (or part) in the endeavor to rethink science education is to better understand the ways in which people are changed when they visit informal science institutions, such as science museums and science centers. Chapters 2 through 4 focus on the ways in which such places might be conceptualized to afford opportunities for free-choice learning, learning science content, and equity.

In “Free-Choice Learning: What Does It Mean?,” Laura Martin from the Arizona Science Center addresses the question of how constructs such as “free-choice learning” help us understand how learning happens in different environments. She is concerned with the question of who wants to know what and the “production context” of the knowledge we have about learning science in formal and informal settings. She suggests that at the juncture of research and practice are competing explanatory and methodological frameworks attempting to pin down what constitutes evidence of “learning” in different circumstances. None of these alone explain the learning trajectories of individuals in different settings and the complex histories they bring to any particular program that allows them choice. After sketching the idea of free choice and the learner outside schools, she sets her readers up with answers to a series of questions: “What is knowledge and what counts as knowing?,” “What do we know from practice?,” “What do we know from research?,” and “What do we know from theory?” She then turns to a discussion of how these insights add up and to what end. Can we usefully explore “free-choice” learning in different settings from different vantage points or does there need to be one story about them?

In “Attention to Content: Some Lessons From School-Oriented Education Research” (chapter 3), Marianne Achiam and Jan Alexis Nielsen argue that the content of science, as part of out-of-school science education, has been neglected in theoretical frameworks developed to explain how learners in out-of-school settings interact with other learners, the environment, and their prior knowledge to make meaning during their visits to these settings. In this chapter, the authors describe how the two contemporary conceptual frameworks (i.e., the generic learning outcomes and the contextual model of learning) that have generally been used to examine how learning takes places in out-of-school environments may have two unintended effects: (a) they may cause science centers/museums to disregard the discipline-specific ways in which the scientific content is represented and experienced in their dissemination activities and (b) neglect their disciplinary interpretative responsibility toward their visitors. The authors offer a set of possible solutions drawn from research situated in formal science education and, specifically, placing emphasis on the science content, setting learning objectives when designing exhibits, and using various types of assessment/feedback. This discussion is framed around two examples of science exhibits: a hands-on exhibit in the Paleontology Lab at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and a hands-on exhibit at Experimentarium in Copenhagen.

“The Museum of Pink: Retheorizing the Science Museum” (chapter 4) written by Bronwyn Bevan from the Exploratorium in San Francisco is concerned with how the science museum—working at the intersection of formal, informal, and non-formal science education—can contribute to equity work. For the science museum to do such work, it needs to be retheorized to broaden our view of where such work occurs and what it looks like. She begins with the supposition that science museums are significant cultural resources in most urban landscapes. Whereas some, such as natural history museums, may also house vast collections, most science museums trade on providing their audiences experience with science as a field, as a process, and as a human endeavor. The possibilities for experiences with science vary across audiences. All of these audiences come to the museum equipped with their own prior experiences with and perspectives on science, driven by some sense of purpose, and informed by larger cultural representations of science. Bevan uses the Exploratorium as a case to articulate what is currently being done to expand possibilities for learning when science museums adopt ecological perspectives on learning and human development. Rather than conceptualizing themselves as a destination point, museums can actively position themselves as key resources for their communities if and when they recognize and leverage the purposes and resources that their varied audiences are developing and exercising in other contexts. She introduces the concept of tinkering, a form of engagement where people operate (and learn) at the boundaries of their current understanding; it therefore shares some important aspects with the notion of leading activity (chapter 1).

In the science education literature, (science) museums frequently are listed among the places where “informal” science learning may occur. In a strong sense, however, science museums, as museums generally, are not informal places at all. They are institutions in which people with various backgrounds—that may, but do not have to include, education degrees—organize exhibits with specific science concepts, forms of engagement, and display designs in view. The formal-informal dichotomy may actually not be appropriate when used to characterize school-museum relations. It is in this direction that Justin Dillon argues in “Beyond Formal and Informal.”

In chapter 5, “Beyond Formal and Informal,” Dillon encourages readers to rethink the use of formal and informal as descriptors of both learning and learning contexts. This is not a new argument, although it continues to be necessary to make it as the term “informal learning” still occurs in policy documents and educational materials. This chapter takes a critical look at the relationship, theoretically and practically, between science in the classroom and science outside—whether that is on school grounds, in museums, or in homes. In some cases, learning beyond the classroom reinforces existing understanding of scientific concepts; in other cases, it extends and challenges it. More recently the notion of a blended pedagogy—taking the best of school and museum education has emerged. What this blended pedagogy might look like is discussed in a number of contexts. Finally, the possibility of a convergence between science and environmental education through ICT-supported citizen science is discussed with a focus on breaking down the notion of formal/informal science education.

Readers will notice that despite the different approaches the authors of this section take, there are some important currents crossing them, which may be emphasized in one chapter but only implicit in another. Thus, for example, the idea of free choice underlies all chapters but is foregrounded in Martin’s chapter. Free choice is in fact one of the fundamental human conditions that comes with the division of labor mentioned earlier: It does not matter where and in which way we contribute to generalized societal conditions (e.g., being farmers producing grain or vegetables), we assure expansion and control over our own personal conditions. However we contribute in productive activity, we secure the resources required to meet our personal needs. The content of the choice is free—although not choice itself—and even if we do not choose, we make a choice. To engage directly with science or to engage with someone knowledgeable in science are but two of the many possibilities we have in life. But there needs to be the possibility of deciding whether to engage with science at all—lest we become inconsistent with the democratic ideals underlying free-choice learning.

References

Hazen, R. M., & Trefil, J. (1991). Science matters: Achieving scientific literacy. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Nietzsche, F. (1954). Werke Band 3 [Works vol. 3]. Munich, Germany: Hanser.

Roth, W.-M. (2003). Scientific literacy as an emergent feature of human practice. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 35, 9–24.

Roth, W.-M. (2012). Limits to general expertise: A study of in- and out-of-field graph interpretation. In C. A. Wilhelm (Ed.), Encyclopedia of cognitive psychology (pp. 311–348). Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science.

Roth, W.-M. (2014). Personal health—personalized science: A new driver for science education? International Journal of Science Education, 36, 1434–1456.

1 Learning

From Transitive Construction to Intransitive Becoming

Wolff-Michael Roth

As individuals express their lives, so they are. What they are therefore coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. What individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production.

(Marx & Engels, 1978, p. 21)

This book is about learning science generally and about learning at the intersection of formal and informal educational settings. Underlying much of the current debate is a constructivist epistemology, which, in some situations, appropriates for itself a sociocultural discourse—without nevertheless taking up the fundamentally dialectical and Marxist underpinnings of the work of the Russian psychologists that have given rise to that discourse. A Marxist view on learning is very different than that often conceived for the purpose of schooling with its decided intention to make institutionally designated students repeat a fundamentally outdated stock of knowledge; and they do so without really being studious, dedicated, zealous, and eager as per the etymological origin of “student” (Lat. stude¯re). We may understand learning in very different ways when we turn our gaze to what happens in informal settings, where there is less or no concern for making people—through the forces of an educational system where there is no free choice over contents and processes of participation—in the image of current science. In this chapter, I articulate a radically different view of learning, which arises from an epistemology that conceives of change not in terms of the transitive relation between the individual subject and its intentional object but intransitively; that is, in a direction that is transversal to the former. The view developed here also is consistent with anthropological and poststructuralist (postmodern¹) conceptions of change associated with productive human life. To ground this theoretical discourse, I draw on a concrete situation where I taught science differently—traditional science educators may say perhaps I did not teach it at all—together with resident teachers.

Deterritorializing School Science

Societal-Historical Context

Over the course of my professional career as a science teacher, I became dissatisfied with pre-specified lesson structures where students do not participate in determining what or how to research. I changed these conditions so that toward the end of my full-time teaching, the students in my cl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Prologue: Intersections of Formal and Informal Science
• Part I Theoretical Perspectives
• Part II Learning Science in Diverse Settings
• Part III Universities and Informal Science Intersections
• Index