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A new science curriculum for all?

Posted on: Friday, 7 March 2003, 06:00 CST

A new science curriculum for all?

Source: Studies In Science Education

Global science literacy. Victor J. Mayer (Ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2002, ISBN 1-4020-0514-8.

I firmly believe that conclusions about global warming reached by researchers ... are valid and based on very solid science. They are telling us that humans, by their actions, are causing the global climate to change.

... [Science teaching programs] have focused on the type of science supporting our technical needs, neglecting an equally important part of science, what we in this book are calling the 'system sciences'.

These extracts, from the editor's preface, indicate the interpretation to be given to the global science literacy (GSL) of the title of this book. GSL is not to be understood in terms of a universal list of qualities that any scientifically literate person might be expected to display, but by reference to a 'new curricular basis for literacy in science' derived from an earlier curriculum initiative in the USA, known as Earth Systems Education (ESE).

So-called 'Earth system science' is defined in terms of a set of seven statements presented as long ago as 1988 by the Earth System Sciences Committee (ESSC) in the USA. The first two of these statements highlight the difference between the new and the 'traditional Earth science view'.

The two traditional motivations for Earth science are an understanding of the Earth as a planet and the search for practical benefits from such research.

Earth system science treats the Earth as an integrated system of interacting components, whose study must transcend disciplinary boundaries.

This change of focus is justified by a third statement that refers to the 'maturation of the traditional disciplines, a global view of the Earth from space, and the increasing role of human activity in global change'. The next two statements identify two sets of processes, differing in time scale (thousands of millions of years or decades to centuries) that underpin 'Earth processes'. The penultimate statement asserts that the goal of Earth system science is

... to obtain a scientific understanding of the entire Earth system on a global scale by describing how its component parts and their interaction have evolved, how they function, and how they may be expected to continue to evolve on all time scales.

As for research in Earth system science, the task, specified in the final ESSC statement, is to 'develop the capability to predict those changes that will occur in the next decade to century, both naturally and in response to human activity'.

While six of these seven statements from the ESSC 'could be taken to define the nature of a secondary school science curriculum', Global Science Literacy is much more than is implied by the Earth Science initiative from which it is seen as evolving. It also embraces the notion of 'global education' and the content standards developed by the US National Academy of Sciences. In addition, it seeks to respond to 'the probable direction of science in the new millennium' and to accommodate 'aspects of Eastern thought', such accommodation promoting 'border crossing' into the sub-culture of science (Aikenhead 1996, not 1998 as in the text) and the development of 'intercultural understanding'.

'Global education' is said to have a 'long history' in American social studies education. That history includes, among much else, the heavily criticised NSF curriculum project, Man: a course of study, described here as a 'very successful' initiative that 'focused on providing an understanding and appreciation of the cultures and societies of other nations and how they developed'. Of particular significance in the present context is the work of Anderson (1992), who saw global education as engaging all students, irrespective of age or subject, in the study of

humankind as a singular entity interconnected across space and time the earth as humankind's ecological and cosmic home the global social structure as one level of human social organisation themselves as members of the human species, as inhabitants of planet earth, and as participants in the global social order.

The present 'resurgence of interest in and the need for global education programs' are attributed to economic globalisation, the end of the Cold War and 'other events of the 1990s'.

The National Science Education Content Standards are used as a set of goals for developing GSL curricula 'not because they are American in origin, but because they are succinct yet comprehensive' and stated in sufficiently broad terms to find 'substantial acceptance among science educators worldwide'. These goals are combined with those of Anderson, referred to above, to establish the rationale of Global Science Literacy curricula.

As for the re-direction of science itself, this will involve increased attention to the so-called 'system sciences', their methodologies and 'their role in assessing changes in our global environment'. The goal is the deployment of scientific knowledge and expertise 'to assist in solving or ameliorating environmental and social problems resulting, at least in part, from the past use of science'.

Establishing and justifying the rationale of GSL is the task of three coauthored chapters that comprise the first section of this book, entitled 'Foundations for global science literacy'. The second section, 'Appropriate learning environments' is followed by a concluding section of five chapters that explore 'Issues in structuring curriculum'. Although there are contributions from authors based in Israel, Spain and the UK, the book draws heavily upon collaboration between the editor and science educators in Asia, notably Japan and Korea. While this multiple authorship brings a welcome and appropriate international dimension to the volume, it leads to a somewhat disparate collection of chapters. It also does surprisingly little to undermine the sense that many of the assumptions underpinning the book, and its approach to curriculum reform, are those most readily associated with the education systems of the USA. For example, the so-called 'layer cake' approach to science education that has 'become the traditional sequence of offerings the secondary level in the USX has no counterpart in the education systems of many other countries, including the United Kingdom. More particularly, chapter 2 is devoted exclusively to the 'history of national science priorities and the nature of the science curriculum in one country, the United States of America'. While it is true that 'equivalent links' can be found in most other countries, especially those that have 'aspired to some form of international leadership in politics and commerce', comparative studies suggest that differences, often subtle and far from obvious, between education systems are usually more important than the similarities.

Despite the marked emphasis on developments in the USA, there is much in this volume to engage the attention of science curriculum developers in any part of the world, e.g., the account, in section 2, of the contribution that the Internet can make to Earth Systems courses. In the same section, King's 'Explanatory stories' approach to a curriculum for global science literacy may be of particular interest to science educators in England and Wales, with its obvious resonances with Beyond 2000; Science education for the future (Millar & Osborne 1998). Likewise, colleagues in Asian countries are likely to value Goto's description, in section 3, of 'How a Japanese science teacher integrates field activities into his curriculum' and the broader account of `the potential role for global science literacy in Japanese secondary schools', co-authored by the editor, Shimono, Goto & Kumano. In this same section, researchers in science education may be drawn to Trend's review of the modest amount of research that has been done into the concept of deep time. Although this concept lies at the heart of geological science and evolutionary theory, and may be a significant obstacle to learning, it did not feature strongly in the early years of the research programme of the 'alternative frameworks' movement. This low level of salience reflects the background and interests of the researchers and the relatively low status that continues to be accorded to earth science in most secondary school curricula.

Although not its primary purpose, Global science literacy offers a timely reminder that secondary school science has concentrated far too much on the controlled and readily reproducible experiments of laboratory sciences to the near exclusion of those sciences that do not lend themselves so readily to practical work of this kind. (The reasons for this deserve exploration, although it seems clear that if science had been schooled in the first, rather than the second, half of the nineteenth century, the historical trajectory may have been somewhat different.) A parallel concern might be voiced about much of the history and philosophy of science where scholars have paid relatively little attention to `interpretive and narrative' forms of science, concentrating, for example, upon physics and the Copernican revolution rather than earth science and the intellectual revolution that followed the work of Hutton and Werner. Mayer and Kumano address this latter issue in a chapter entitled `The philosophy of science and Global Science Literacy', where they argue that attention must also be given in school science education to the hermeneutic and historical modes of reasoning that characterise the geological sciences. In so doing, they also present an important correction of the misleadingly narrow picture of science portrayed by most secondary school curricula.

It will be clear that this book is very ambitious in its scope and in the claims it makes for Global Science Literacy. The practical difficulties of implementing and teaching appropriate GSL curricula are evidently immense, and traditionalists are unlikely to be persuaded by the notion of `system science' or to espouse curriculum goals drawn from social studies rather than the natural sciences. There is also an obvious risk that GSL might burden the school science curriculum with responsibilities that it cannot realistically hope to meet. Nonetheless, many of the issues raised or implied in presenting the case for GSL are both important and controversial and worthy of serious scholarly consideration. Throughout the book there are skirmishes with the idea of science as a form of Western cultural imperialism or neo-colonialism, and with the attempts to establish 'indigenous sciences'. Key importance is attached to reconciling 'Western' science with the values and beliefs of other, non-western, cultures, notably Japan where the 'basic philosophy' is 'of the oneness of people and nature'. In the West, in contrast, 'Westerners or moderns' tended until recently to 'think that men (sic) were quite separate and different from the natural world'. This distinction is related to another drawn in the book, that between 'reduction science' and 'system science', the latter being regarded as more culturally attuned to 'Eastern thinking' than the former. (Even if these distinctions can be sustained, their implications for school science, and for science itself, are not perhaps as straightforward as some contributors to this book seem to imply.)

There is much in this volume that is likely to provoke controversy, but it can be welcomed as refreshingly different from much of the literature advocating reform of the secondary school science curriculum. Ultimately the case it presents for new curricula to promote global science literacy stands or falls upon the extent to which the reader accepts the assumptions and claims upon which that case is based. However, as in all good advocacy, much can be learnt from the argument even when the case itself fails to persuade.

REFERENCES

AIKENHEAD, G. 1996. Science education: border crossing into the subculture of science, Studies in Science Education, 27, 1-52.

ANDERSON, L.E 1992. Introduction. In B.B. Tye and K.A. Tye, Global education: A study of school change. Albany: State University of New York Press.

MILLAR, R. & OSBORNE, J. (Eds.) 1998 Beyond 2000: Science education for the future. London: King's College.

Contact details: E.W. Jenkins CSSME University of Leeds Leeds UK

EDGAR W JENKINS University of Leeds, UK

Copyright University of Leeds, Centre for Studies in Science and Mathematics Education 2002

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