The school holidays are almost over, and the text book revision on hold as the Magnet and I run teacher call back days in schools before the students return on Monday ...
You might imagine that teachers would be cranky about giving up “holiday time” for a day spent looking differently at learning but the call back days are a lot of fun ... the teachers we laugh and work with are genuinely excited about what is developed ...
But playing on repeat in the back of mind as I work with the teachers is the stuff in the New Zealand Curriculum Science AOs that I am still uncertain how to introduce into the text book.
There is this bit in the Nature of Science: Communicating Science where the Level 4 Achievement Objectives require teachers to design learning experiences so that students
- Begin to use a range of scientific symbols, conventions, and vocabulary.
- Engage with a range of science texts and begin to question the purposes for which these texts are constructed.
Hitting the first AO is a doddle ... the demands within the second stopped me in my tracks
Questioning the purposes of a science text is pretty complex stuff for adults to engage with let alone 13 year olds.
My thinking on this was not helped by a recent article in The Atlantic By Sandra Tsing Loh I Choose My Choice! - The fruits of the feminist revolution? Sisterhood, empowerment, and eight hours a day in a cubicle.
The article suggests that debate over the value of woman’s work is biased by nature of those doing the debating ...
Not that being an academic isn’t a hell of a lot of fun; in fact, its very pleasantness contributes to a bias peculiar to members of the thinktankerati. So argues Neil Gilbert, a renowned Berkeley sociologist, in A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market and Policy Shape Family Life. According to Gilbert, the debate over the value of women’s work has been framed by those with a too-rosy view of employment,
mainly because the vast majority of those who publicly talk, think, and write about questions of gender equality, motherhood, and work in modern society are people who talk, think, and write for a living. And they tend to associate with other people who, like themselves, do not have “real” jobs—professors, journalists, authors, artists, politicos, pundits, foundation program officers, think-tank scholars, and media personalities.
Many of them can set their own hours, choose their own workspace, get paid for thinking about issues that interest them, and, as a bonus, get to feel, by virtue of their career, important in the world. The professor admits that his own job in “university teaching is by and large divorced from the normal discipline of everyday life in the marketplace. It bears only the faintest resemblance to most work in the real world.” In other words, for the “occupational elite” (as Gilbert calls this group), unlike for most people, going to work is not a drag.
Gilbert’s description of the thinktankerati as people who talk, think, and write for a living, makes me think about the Science AO quite differently ...
Before reading the article I’d been thinking that the AO’s “purposes” needed something a little deeper than the Open Spaces for Enquiry Methodology’s pdf Traditional Reading questions
Does the text represent the truth?
Is it fact or opinion?
Is it biased or neutral?
Is it well written/clear?
Who is the author and what level or authority/ legitimacy?
What does the author say?
That the AO could be met by thinking about the purposes in Science texts through Open Spaces Critical Reading questions
What is the context?
To whom is the text addressed?
What is the intention of the author?
What is the position of the author [his/her political agenda]?
What is the author trying to say and how is he/she trying to convince/manipulate the reader?
What claims are not substantiated?
Why has the text been written in this way?
BUT the article makes me suspect that both sets of questions miss the point ....
I need to ask
What are the biases that come from the life/workstyles of people who write science texts?
How do science text writers represent science in a way that is different from the representations of people who think about science but are not paid to write it down?
It looks like I should be asking the Open Spaces for Enquiry Methodology’s Critical Literacy questions.
Getting students to ask ....
What are the assumptions behind the statements?
How does the author understand reality?
What is shaping his/her understanding?
Who decides [what is real, can be known or needs to be done]in this context?
In whose name and for whose benefit?
What are the implications of these claims?
What are the sanctioned ignorances [blind spots] and contradictions of this perspective?
And because all of this remains too big an ask in terms of writing activities for the text book content tonight .... I retreat back to thinking about the kind of educational content I read in edublogs ... and wonder –
What are the sanctioned ignorances [blind spots] and contradictions of the perspectives of teachers who choose to make time spare in their lives so they can edu_blog talk, think and write online?
"Engage with a range of science texts and begin to question the purposes for which these texts are constructed."
Reminds me of the contrary position put by Frank Furedi which Bill pointed out.
"Postmodernism, which became the dominant philosophy in the academy, holds that there is no such thing as truth. It is elitist to value one type of experience over any other--and what has been called "truth" over the years is just the white European male's idea of truth. The idea that there is a single reality that intellectuals aim to discover is outdated. Furedi furnishes example after outrageous example: "'A bit dodgy' is how Charles Clarke, the British Secretary of State for Education, has described the idea of education for its own sake, while asserting that his government has no interest in supporting 'the medieval concept of a community of scholars seeking truth.'""
http://www.frankfuredi.com/intellectualreviews.shtml
Posted by: Tony Forster | July 18, 2008 at 12:52 AM
Thanks Tony - Have been reading the reviews on the Frank Furedi site – I loved this bit from Roger Scuton’s review in The Times ...
Intellectuals have an inveterate tendency to be on the Left and to turn on dissenters with a venom that no educated person could comfortably endorse.
Furedi's ideas made me go back at look at the early New Zealand Science Curriculum Level 4 Achievement Objectives
It was interesting to compare them ... When I looked at “THE THEN AND NOW “OF THE NEW ZEALAND CURRICULUM at Level 4 I could see that differences between them could be explained as indicating the introduction of the postmodernist idea of other truths/ ... the thing is that I quite like uncertainties in other areas of my thinking ...
THEN
ACHIEVEMENT AIM
In their study of science students will use their developing scientific knowledge, skills, and attitudes to:
• further develop their investigative skills and attitudes.
Students will be developing their investigative skills and attitudes within the content and contexts of the other learning strands. For this reason, no learning contexts or assessment examples are given and the learning experiences have been linked to achievement objectives of the other learning strands.
ACHIEVEMENT OBJECTIVES
Students can
1. plan and carry out a 'fair test' and make decisions about whether the conclusions drawn from an investigation are soundly based;
2. investigate examples of simple technology to clarify some scientific ideas, e.g., a Māori planting calendar and the Earth's relationship with the Sun and Moon, hair driers and evaporation, use of yeast in food and drink production;
3. investigate ways in which developments in science and technology have changed the lives of older members of the community or made life easier for people with specific physical difficulties.
NOW
NATURE OF SCIENCE Level 4
Appreciate that science is a way of explaining the world and that science knowledge changes over time.
Identify ways in which scientists work together and provide evidence to support their ideas.
Build on prior experiences, working together to share and examine their own and others’ knowledge.
Ask questions, find evidence, explore simple models, and carry out appropriate investigations to develop simple explanations.
Begin to use a range of scientific symbols, conventions, and vocabulary.
Engage with a range of science texts and begin to question the purposes for which these texts are constructed.
Use their growing science knowledge when considering issues of concern to them.
Explore various aspects of an issue and make decisions about possible actions
Posted by: Artichoke | July 18, 2008 at 09:18 PM