“Big Words” say little.

Responses to Irrelevant & Removed Science-Teaching. Socio-Cultural Domination of Urban Youth

AUTHOR: Luis Alberto D’Elia – Educational Policy Studies

BACKGROUNG: Personal experience teaching science at an inner city school suggests that science-teaching that uses content, materials and laboratory practicesthat are disconnected to the students’ daily lives results in the students’ alienation from the curriculum and may do nothing to reduce drop-outs.

RESEARCH QUESTION: In the context of high schools with urban youth students, What pedagogic philosophical approach and methods would adequately respond research findings that show the problematic disconnection between teaching materials, techniques and methods, and the students’ everyday-life problems and events?

The importance of responding to that question is that the irrelevancy of science-teaching and inaccessibility of instrumentation used tends 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. That 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 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 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, 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, they 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).

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS:

1-The planning and delivering of the science program need to start from the students’ experiences with the phenomena, and from their own connections to the subject and with the laboratory material. However, much of the instrumentation used in the science experiments has to be readily accessible to them beyond the school. Shift the control of the students’ experimentation with from the teacher to the students, but also make material and methods accessible and reproducibly by students outside the school.

2-Overall, the control of in order to engage those students significantly with the science material and, ultimately, to encourage them to take more control of their own lives.

3- Use everyday-life materials and instruments (taken from house kitchen, garden, etc)so that theyhave some familiarityto the students.

4- Materials & science methods that connect to students’ lives would increase the students’ own confidence in managing them, and consequently would engage those students in a non-alienating science-discovery process

IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY:

The results of this study are relevant for public schools with urban youth populations as well as for schools with specialized approaches for urban youth.

A whole-school approach appears to be needed if Freirean pedagogy is proposed.
(INITIAL) LITERATURE REVIEW:

Adams, E., Smith, G., Ward, T. J., Vanek, D., Marra, N., Jones, D., et al. (2008)

Journal of Chemical Education

Aikenhead, G. S. (1996)

Studies in Science Education

Bennett, J., Lubben, F., & Hogarth, (2007)

Science Education

BouJaoude, S., & Tamim, R. (2008)

Science Educator

Freire, P., (1990)

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Norris, S. P. (2006)

Theory and Research in Education

Kennedy, L. M., Yezierski, E. J., & Herrington, D. G. (2008) Science Educator

Philip H Scott, Eduardo F Mortimer, Orlando G Aguiar. (2006)

Science Education

Sanders, J., Patrick, J. D., Dedeoglu, H., Charbonnet, S., Henkel, M., Z. Fang, et al. (2007)

Educational Leadership

Shor, I. (1980)

Critical teaching & Everyday Life

Wilensky, U., & Reisman, K. (2006)

Cognition & Instruction

Illustration of home-replicable experiment

  1. Biology 30 Unit 1: Systems regulating change in human organisms: Enzymes- Laboratory class:WHY MEET TENDERIZERS SOMETIMES DO NOT WORK? *

Approach 1: Students propose their own plan to explore effectiveness of tenderizing (enzymatic) action on gello (cartilage tissue) in groups of two. Discussion of scientific evidences (Western and non-Western based)

Approach 2: A demo is done before students reproduce experiment (i.e., By incubating cartilage tissue--common kitchen gelatin--with regular meet tenderizer at different temperatures we will be able to demonstrate how meet tenderizers--biochemical enzymes--work and when they will not work. Discussion of process and results.

MATERIALS:

  • MEET TENDERIZER
  • UNCOLORED GELATIN (GELLO) PACKS X 16

* Materials can be found in a house kitchen, method can be replicated at home.

QUESTION to consider: Is science about everyday experience? if it is not, then the approach I advocate might have the dual effect ofengaging students with science teaching but disengaging them from science.

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Special thanks to Dr D. Chovanec, Dr S. P. Norris, and Dr D. Leard for valuable discussions