INTRODUCTION:
TALKING SCIENCE
This is a book about communication. It
asks some fundamental questions and tries to give at least partial answers to
them:
·
How do we communicate ideas?
·
Why does communication work so well
sometimes, and fail so badly at other times?
·
What are the most basic difficulties in
communicating scientific and technical concepts?
This is also a book about scientific
and technical education:
·
How do teachers communicate science in
the classroom?
·
Why do some students succeed in
mastering science, while so many others find it impossibly difficult and
frustrating?
·
What attitudes and values are
transmitted in the science classroom along with the science that is learned?
"Talking science" does
not simply mean talking about science. It means doing science through the medium
of language. "Talking science" means observing, describing, comparing,
classifying, analyzing, discussing, hypothesizing, theorizing, questioning,
challenging, arguing, designing experiments, following procedures, judging,
evaluating, deciding, concluding, generalizing, reporting, writing, lecturing,
and teaching in and through the language of science.
Why the emphasis on language?
Because language is not just vocabulary and grammar: language is a system
of resources for making meanings. In addition to a vocabulary and a grammar, our
language gives us a semantics. The semantics of a language is its particular way
of creating similarities and differences in meaning. We need semantics because
any particular concept or idea makes sense only in terms of the relationships it
has to other concepts and ideas. This web of relationships of meaning is woven
with the semantic resources of language.
The content of every scientific and
technical subject can be expressed in language (and in specialized offshoots of
language, such as mathematics). In fact, the same scientific ideas can be
expressed in many different ways, because the semantics of a language always
allows us to use grammar and vocabulary in different ways to express the same
meaning. The wording of a scientific argument may change from one book to the
next, one teacher to the next, even one day to the next in the same classroom.
But the semantic pattern, the pattern of relationships of meanings, always stays
the same: that pattern is the scientific content of what we say or write.
The semantic resources of language are
the foundation for all our efforts to communicate science and other subjects. To
understand how communication works, and what makes it succeed or fail, we need
to analyze how we use language to mean something.
Communication, as I will use the term
in this book, is always a social process. We do not communicate by the
transmission of signs or signals, but by creating and manipulating social
situations. Communication is always the creation of community.
When we talk science, we are helping to
create, or re-create, a community of people who share certain beliefs and
values. We communicate best with people who are already members of our own
community: those who have learned to use language in the same ways that we do.
When the people with whom we are trying to communicate use language differently,
use it in ways that make sense of a subject differently than we do,
communication becomes much more difficult. Science teachers belong to a
community of people who already speak the language of science. Students, at
least for a long time, do not. Teachers use that language to make sense of each
topic in a particular way. Students use their own language to put together a
view of the subject that can be very different. This is one reason why
communicating science can be so difficult. We have to learn to see science
teaching as a social process: bringing students, at least partially, into this
community of people who talk science.
Because communication and
teaching are social processes, they depend on attitudes, values, and social
interests, not just on knowledge and skills. In every chapter of this book, we
will have to look at conflicts of interests and values in order to understand
the successes and failures of communication in the science classroom. The
classroom is not isolated from the attitudes, values, and social interests of
the larger community. Teachers and students bring these with them into the
classroom. Science education itself tries to teach certain values, and those
values may not always agree with students' values or with students' views about
their own interests.
In teaching the content of the science
curriculum, and the values that often go with it, science education, sometimes
unwittingly, also perpetuates a certain harmful `mystique of science'. That
mystique tends to make science seem dogmatic, authoritarian, impersonal, and
even inhuman to many students. It also portrays science as being much more
difficult than it is, and scientists as being geniuses that students cannot
identify with. It alienates students from science.
This mystique does not benefit science
teachers and scientists nealry as much as it benefits those whose power depends
on public attitudes towards every form of `expertise.' It is not in the best
interests of students, or of most of us, yet it is subtly built into the way
even the best intentioned teachers talk science. Analyzing how teachers and
students talk science in the classroom can help us to understand how this
mystique is perpetuated, why it is harmful, and what we can do about it.
The basic point-of-view in this
book is that science is a social process. This is true even when a scientist is
physically alone. Whenever we do science, we take ways of talking, reasoning,
observing, analyzing, and writing that we have learned from our community and
use them to construct findings and arguments that become part of science only
when they become shared in that community. Teaching science is teaching students
how to do science. Teaching, learning, and doing science are all social
processes: taught, learned, and done as members of social communities, small
(like classrooms) and large. We make those communities by communication, and we
communicate complex meanings primarily through language. Ultimately, doing
science is always guided and informed by talking science, to ourselves and with
others.
Every scientific statement we make,
every scientific argument, and all our reasoning as we do science, are instances
of talking science. In doing these things, we are marshalling the semantic
resources of a powerful and specialized way of talking about the world. This
book is about what we do, when, and with whom, when we are talking science in
the classroom. It is a case study in communication, in the analysis of classroom
teaching, and in the semantics of science. It is necessarily also about science
and science education as social processes in the context of the larger society,
and therefore about attitudes, values, and social interests.
Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the specific
themes and methods of the whole book. Each analyzes a brief classroom episode,
looking from two different points of view at how teachers and students talk
science. The first point of view
focuses on the patterns of social interaction in the classroom. Because
communication is a social process, we need to understand how it creates and
sustains a social situation: a set of relationships and expectations among its
participants. Everything else that happens in communication depends on this
basic framework of "who does what to whom." The second viewpoint emphasizes how science content is
communicated in classroom dialogue: What
are the semantic patterns of each science topic and how are they put into words?
The episode in Chapter 1 is a fairly
`normal' example of classroom dialogue. In it, communication is working
reasonably well. This episode provides a background against which we can view
more unusual and revealing ways of talking science. The episode in Chapter 2
provides a first example: it is a debate in which students challenge a teacher's
scientific explanations. This episode shows very well how communication breaks
down when participants don't share the same ways of talking about a subject.
Chapter 3 is about the unwritten rules
of the classroom. It is about the social situations that actually occur in
classrooms and teachers' and students' strategies for attempting to control each
other's behavior and the course of classroom events. I argue that there are
important classroom rules which, even though students must violate them in order
for learning to continue, are nonetheless maintained as rules because they help
to preserve important mechanisms of social control that have implications well
beyond the classroom. Chapter 3 describes the social contexts in which students
and teachers talk science. It is about power, interests, and values in the
classroom.
Chapter 4 describes in detail how the
semantic resources of language are used in talking science. Specific examples
from actual lessons illustrate the variety of strategies for communicating
complex conceptual relationships through classroom dialogue. In many ways this
chapter is the heart of the whole book.
Chapter 5 ties the language of the
classroom to larger social issues of attitudes, interests, and values. It
discusses the mystique of science, students' alienation from science, and a
number of harmful myths about how science must be talked, how difficult it is,
and what kind of truth it provides. This chapter also describes what students do
and do not pay attention to in classrooms.
Chapter 6 is a brief discussion of the
similarities and differences to be expected when applying the arguments of this
book to subjects other than science. It raises critical issues for the analysis
of curriculum in science and other subjects.
Chapter 7 summarizes many of the
arguments made throughout the book by providing a succinct list of practical
recommendations for changing the way we teach. It also points out that
educational policy must always be based on value choices and honest recognition
of conflicts of interest, not just on research findings, even those in this
book. It tries to look beyond merely `technical' solutions to the more
fundamental social causes of educational problems.
The main argument of the book really
ends with the recommendations in Chapter 7, but it has been guided and informed
all along by a general theory of meaning and social action. That theory, known
as social semiotics, provides a number of alternative ways of looking at basic
issues in education. For readers who are explicitly interested in theory as well
as practice, I give an overview of social semiotics in Chapter 8.
I hope you will find these new
perspectives on communication, science teaching, and language exciting. I also
hope you will find them useful.