Opening Plenary
VIIth International Congress on Research in Science Teaching
Granada, Spain (2005)
Research for the Future of Science Education:
New Ways of Learning, New Ways of Living
Jay L. Lemke
University of Michigan
New information and communication technologies make it possible for students to learn about science and about the natural world across multiple media and multiple sites of learning. Research needs to help us understand better how to help students integrate learning through text, spoken language, graphical images, animations, audio, video, simulations, and three-dimensional models and virtual worlds. We must also learn how to effectively link learning in schools and other educational institutions with learning online, in nature, at technological sites, and through internships. With these many new possibilities, we need to re-examine the goals of science education. Should they be the same for all? Should we focus science education more on social issues and students' concerns? Can we make science education more democratic and more politically progressive?
Re-engineering science education for the 21st Century
In the 21st century, what are the most important contributions which science education can make to students and to society? How can we make science education better serve the interests of all people? I will argue that science education needs more wonder, more honesty, more humility, and more real value for most students. For the youngest students, we must work to create a more profound engagement with the wonder of natural phenomena. For older students, we need to present a more honest picture of the harmful as well as the beneficial uses of science. For all students, we should offer a science education that makes science a true partner with other ways of viewing the world and an essential contributor to students’ general multimedia literacy and critical thinking skills. I invite you to think with me about how to make a new science education that will not be rejected by the majority of students.
Science education research needs to re-direct its efforts toward better understanding: (1) how emotional and intellectual engagement with the wonder of natural phenomena combine in younger and older students; (2) how to promote critical thinking about the harmful as well as the beneficial uses of scientific knowledge; (3) how to present scientific ways of knowing as constructive partners with other human ways of knowing; and (4) how science education can make essential contributions to students’ general multimedia literacy and critical thinking skills. We need to focus more of our research on learning how to increase the value of science education for those many students who have no special interest in scientific and technical careers. We need more attention to learning that will last a lifetime, learning that demystifies quantitative reasoning, and learning that provides the keys to thinking with multiple representations for our new multimedia world.
Aims and Goals of Science Education: Fundamentals
Any serious consideration of how we might fundamentally change science education for the 21st century needs to begin with some larger questions concerning its goals. The goals of science education need to be formulated within the context of our larger goals for education in general, and our definition of what will make for a better society and a better life for all people. The goals of science education cannot be merely technical. It cannot be our only purpose to provide skilled workers and educated consumers for a global economy that students have not learned to intelligently critique. So let me state briefly some of my own core beliefs about the social goals of education.
Education must aim to contribute to the improvement of social life: To give more people in the world a better opportunity for a better life and to safeguard minimum standards of social welfare for all. To learn to take a global and not only a local or national perspective; indeed to place the local and the global above the regional or national interest. Education must also contribute to better lives for students, across the needs of many nations and many social classes. A better life for those most in need means provision for health, education, basic necessities, protection from disaster, insurance against disaster, hope. For those who have these basics, it means greater opportunities to develop their skills and talents and to use them in the service of a harmony between global society and the rest of our planet’s ecosystem.
How can we translate these broad goals to more specific aims for science education across the years of schooling and learning? Here is one beginning of an answer:
Across all the years of schooling, we also need to take science out of its isolation. We need:
Beyond trying to define a set of goals, about which we can and should have intelligent and serious conversations and even disagreements, we need to become better critics of our own work. For too long now, others have criticized us more than we have criticized ourselves. Better than any others, we know the shortcomings of the work of science education, and we need to discuss them more publicly and take action to change what we can change.
Among current criticisms of science education in the United States and a number of other advanced societies, I would identify the following as especially important and troubling:
Proposals for Action
Having presented ambitious goals and serious criticisms of our work, I feel a responsibility to present some initial proposals for action. After stating these proposals, I will provide a more extended analysis of some of the assumptions that lie behind them, and their implications for future research on science education.
I have based these proposals on several considerations. Some concern our new understanding of the nature of learning. Others concern the role of science and science education in society, historically, at the present, and for the future.
New Views of the Nature of Learning
Our best understanding of how people learn has changed a great deal in the last few decades. Let me summarize what I see as some of the most important new principles to guide education:
Learning takes place on multiple timescales, from moments to lifetimes. Some learning that takes minutes becomes part of habits that last days, or years, but most does not. Students need to learn how to cumulate and internalize for the longer term more what they learn in the short term. They need to work on extended projects that afford opportunities for what was learned before to be used in what is being done now.
Learning takes place across multiple sites. If something learned in one time and place is to become part of our habits of action more widely, then it needs to be carried over from one place to another, one task to another, one activity to another, and these cannot be restricted to schools and classrooms. Students’ learning needs to extend across classrooms and laboratories, online environments and natural settings, places of work and sites of community activity.
Learning takes place across multiple media. If language is one primary medium for learning, whether from conversations or books, it is far from the only one. We also learn from visual representations of many kinds (drawings, diagrams, graphs, maps, photos, films and video, 3D simulations, etc.), both static and dynamic. And we learn from observing and participating in activities, which are themselves structured in many ways like language (i.e. they form semiotic systems). Most of all, we learn by integrating meanings across all of these modalities, combining text and image, activities and summaries, narratives and observations. This integration is not automatic or natural, it is culturally specific and must be taught and learned.
Learning is a natural and inevitable part of lifelong human development. You cannot not learn from everything you do. All that is at stake is what you learn from activity and how past learning affects future action. Students who learn very little of the content of the curriculum in school still learn a great deal about how to play the “game of school”, about social life among their peers, and much else that we generally ignore. Students are always learning, but not always learning what we want them to learn.
Learning takes place most naturally in mixed-age communities, where younger and older learn from one another, and more generally in diverse communities, where we learn how to learn with and from one another across divisions of age, gender, culture, social background, etc.
Learning is not fundamentally the acquisition of abstract and general principles, but the development of concrete habits and strategies, some more tacit, some more explicit and reflective, for using a range of tools, from levers and microscopes to formulas and graphs, for relatively specific tasks in particular contexts.
Science Education and the Needs of Society
Current science education is largely a product of the desire of governments and corporations to produce a more technologically and scientifically literate workforce for commercial and military enterprises. As such it has not been designed for success in educating more than a small fraction of the population.
Current science education has become far too isolated from the everyday life concerns of students of all ages and also from the larger moral and social concerns of older students.
At the same time, various historical trends defining social privilege and status have led to the incorrect view that abstract learning is more noble than practical and concrete learning and that it is also more effective as a basis for practical activity. Current science education suffers greatly from this ideology.
The opportunistic basis of government support for science education tends to reproduce the artificial divide between science learning and learning in the humanities and the arts, and learning about society itself, including its history, laws, economics, and politics. National pride, and elite self-interest, have also worked to render invisible the dark side of human history and the dark side of the history of science, its long complicity with inhumane commercial and military projects. Without a commitment to honesty and reconciliation in the relations of our view of science to our view of the rest of human life, science education cannot succeed in engaging most students with science learning in a positive way. We must honest face the fact that many students today, at least after the age of primary school, have a negative attitude to science and many of its technologies.
Many of our students are idealistic and altruistic in their basic social views. They see a world rife with injustice and the horrendous consequences of prolonged injustice. There are also many global problems they will not see unless we teach them how to see them. Science education, in order to capture the imagination and loyalty of students, and in order to deserve their commitment to learning what we have to teach, needs to orient itself toward social issues and social problems, not toward teaching abstract conceptual principles of dubious practical usefulness or skills needed for technical occupations.
Three great issues I believe will dominate the century ahead for all of humanity:
In all these respects, science education must take political and moral stands -- or else in the judgment of its students today and tomorrow, and in the judgment of history and humanity in decades to come, we will be found to have been as blind and socially irresponsible as the educators who came before us who did not oppose imperialism, colonialism, slavery, or the oppression of women, who did not prepare citizens to criticize levels of sanitation, industrial pollution, or basic health care, deforestation, over-fishing, or the creation and use of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. These issues were never on the agenda of science education in the past, and it is to our shame that they were not.
Who will history blame if citizens do not understand the risks of private ownership of the genetic endowment of humanity and other species? Who will history blame if global environmental catastrophes occur that could have been avoided by the political action of a better educated citizenry?
What will be the attitude of the neglected peoples of the world toward a science education that turned a blind eye to their needs and to the role of science in their exploitation, when they who are the global majority eventually force their will to prevail in history?
What will be the attitude of the young whom we treat as mentally deficient and without rights or respect in our schools and science classrooms, when they are earning more money than we are and making their voices and votes heard regarding future policy for science education?
If this last dimension seems elusive or puzzling, imagine that you were teaching science education to influential adults in the community. Would you design a curriculum without consulting them at all about their interests? Would you insist that they all learned what you specified, in the way you specified, at the time and the pace you specified, without any consideration for their individual preferences for learning? Would you deny them the opportunity to undertake science learning projects of their own and fail to support them in these endeavors over extended periods of time? Would you teach them superficial bits and pieces of mostly useless knowledge rather than giving them in-depth understanding of particular valuable topics and problems? And if you did, what would they do? Would they not look for another teacher or another school? Would they not take their money and resources and come together to support alternative institutions that would be of more value to them in their learning? And would not our students do this too if they only had the resources and the freedom to do so?
If we do not design science education for our students as if their desires and preferences matter, is it not because we have been taught to see students, even those who are biologically adult (at age 12 for most today), or with many legal rights in progressive societies such as Spain (at age 15), as mysteriously infantile, irresponsible, and incompetent? And is this not the basis for a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby our expectations and treatment of the young encourages just these kinds of behavior? Developmental biologists will tell you that juveniles of all species are well-adapted to learning how to deal with their environments. For homo sapiens, they are better, faster learners than we are, at almost any task for which they have basic preparation.
This issue becomes more severe as our students become the young adults whom society refuses to recognize as adults. Our society deliberately infantilizes young adults in order to retain adult privilege and power over them, for they are seen as a dangerous and potentially destabilizing force in many societies. For centuries society did the same with regard to women, if for slightly different reasons (exploitation of their unpaid labor or sexual vulnerability), and historically we have held the same ideological false beliefs about serfs, slaves, workers, most non-European peoples, and even many poorer or more agrarian European peoples). None of these false beliefs were contradicted by the voice of science until after changes in the balance of political power. Will we wait for that to happen once again?
It may be the case that children below the age of four or five years are relatively unable to participate in the structuring of their educations, but this is not empirically established. It is certainly true that students from the ages of twelve to eighteen are able and interested in having more of a say in what and how they learn. From the age of six to eleven, we can assume there is a growing ability to form more equal partnerships with teachers, if we would encourage students in this and help them learn how to do so. If we would teach them more of the skills of independent judgment and independent learning.
Our present educational system of age-grading, or segregation by age, justified today by relatively questionable evidence about developmental readiness for different kinds of learning, was originally instituted because younger and older students worked altogether too well with another – in planning and executing rebellions against their schoolmasters. What was then a strategy of divide and conquer to maintain the power of the masters has become today an obstacle to cross-age learning and learning in naturally age-diverse groups and communities.
Science education is not alone in laboring under these cultural biases. But science educators claim to be guided by rational principles and systematic empirical evidence that challenges conventional wisdom and seeks theoretically-guided ways of finding alternatives. By and large we have not done this with regard to either the belief that our students are incapable of having a greater voice in their own educations in science, nor with regard to the equally unfounded cultural bias that favors teaching through abstract principles rather than teaching through concrete experience and specific issues. We have watched the light of wonder fade from the eyes of our youngest students, to be replaced in all too many cases by boredom, alienation, resistance, or a cooperative docility.
Yes, we are proud of the exceptions. The classes and activities where students become for a time genuinely engaged. The few students whose interest in science grows year by year. But for the most part these instances are not typical. Schooled adults today are not for the most part scientifically literate or prepared for technical careers. They are not prepared to make intelligent personal or political decisions about medical or technological issues. Their early wonder at the miraculous phenomena of nature has not been nurtured or supported to develop in some direction that might continue with them for the rest of their lives.
I do not believe, after more than 30 years in science education and educational research, that we are going to succeed where past generations have failed, unless we make major and fundamental changes in our approach to science education. We must change the goals to better fit with student interests and social issues. We must change the methods to support student learning across multiple sites and multiple media. We must change the curricula to support more in-depth study of fewer, more concrete topics. Above all, we must change our own attitudes and beliefs, allowing us to make our students as much equal partners in the design of their educations as they truly can be.
For all these changes, much research is needed. Many alternative paths must be explored and reported on for the benefit of the teaching-and-learning community. I do not believe in a “science of learning” in the same sense as a science of electromagnetism. People are not the same sorts of natural phenomena as electrons. Electrons are all alike; if you know how one behaves, you know how they all behave. They have no memory, no history, no culture, no processes of interpreting the meaning of their environments. They have no emotions, no likes and dislikes. We can generalize about them because they have no individuality. In the case of many more complex natural phenomena, we can also generalize about them to the extent that the ways in which they are alike are more important for our purposes than the ways in which they are different.
I do not believe that the best education for every student is the same education. I believe that the most important thing about educating a student is the way in which his or her education is different from, not the same as, the education of other students. I do not believe that all students need to know the same things, at least not beyond the most basic content of primary education. If there are truly fundamental principles in science, then the extended study of any few topics in science will eventually bring students into contact with those principles. (And if not, then they were not really so fundamental, were they?)
We live in a society which tries to do mass education on the cheap. We inherit a system of schooling and curricula that is based on the mass production model of the factory assembly line. We know that system does not work well for most students. We know that it places intolerable burdens on too many teachers. We know that it is not a humane way to approach to upbringing of the young. It does not send to our children the message that we really care about them as individual people. It does not feel right. Why should successfully educated adults spend so little time mentoring the next generation and so much of their lives making profits for the owners of large-scale enterprises? Why should society invest more resources in the production and marketing of goods than in the education of its people?
Science alone will not make the world a better place. Learning the results and methods of scientific research will not in itself help students make better lives for themselves. We must all learn to understand how science and science education can help us help ourselves. Science education still has a great potential for good, but only if we take the true path of science ourselves, rejecting what has been and exploring together new ways of thinking, teaching, and learning.