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science’11 is shown in Table 1. One thing that needs to be noticed is that these ‘fourteen ideas about science’ are written in terms of scientists, i.e. adult professionals who are usually paid for ‘doing science’. We shall return to this point below. Comparing the two catalogues in Table 1 is interesting. While some elements are seen to be enduring (for example, “science demands evidence”), the differences cut much more deeply than an exercise in merely updating (“contemporary”) and localising (“New Zealand-relevant”) the language. The relationship between science and society is the biggest mover. This reflects the huge number of initiatives since 1990 from educators, the public and scientists themselves that have sought to explore, enrich and promote cross-cultural understandings between professional science and the rest of society. A few of these initiatives, each with their distinctive acronym are: The Public Understanding of Science (PUS); Science, Technology and Society (STS); the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), and Community Research Networks (CRNs). In the words of authors Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon, “science has become just too important to be left to the scientists and those who manage their work and control their products. Citizen participation at almost every level of the scientific enterprise has become essential”.12 But such an exploration of ideas about science is of little use to teachers if it floats free of the science curriculum. Just as Rutherford and Ahlgren’s work was in the context of the American ‘Project 2061’, so do we need to ask how far our ideas about science resonate with The New Zealand Curriculum, in particular with the science essence statement (p.28) and with the Nature of Science achievement objectives for levels 1/2, 3/4, 5/6 and 7/8.13
Analysing the Nature of Science in our science curriculum Table 2 shows how a reading through of the essence statement can reveal explicit links to each of the fourteen ideas about science. There is, however, a significant difference between the orientation of the statement and of the fourteen ideas. The difference relates to the two populations we are thinking of when we talk about people ‘doing science’: on the one hand, as mentioned above,
there are scientists (and both columns in Table 1 are clearly couched in terms of scientists) and on the other hand, there are teachers and students in schools. The essence statement, by contrast, deliberately expresses ‘doing science’ in terms which are population non-specific; it is (laudably, I think) non-committal about WHO (scientists or teachers and students) is ‘doing science’. The Nature of Science strand in levels 1/2, 3/4, 5/6 and 7/8 of our science curriculum is the reverse − it is population-specific: whilst the subset ‘Understanding about science’ is always couched in terms scientists, the other three subsets (‘Investigating in science’, ‘Communicating in science’ and ‘Participating and contributing’) are clearly intended to apply to teachers and students in schools. This situation has given rise to both a constraint, and to a liberating possibility. The constraint is the fact that the essence statement, in being generic, has had to omit many things that are crucial to ‘doing science’ but which apply EITHER to scientists OR to teachers and students in schools, but not to both. These differences are things like prior life experiences, tools, knowledge structure, knowledge generation, and product evaluation. For professional scientists, doing science is centrally about the quality of one’s prior tertiary training; about accessing costly specialised equipment; about a fluid and flexible approach to knowledge structures; about the creation of what has not been previously known; and about rigorous peer review. By contrast, for teachers and students in schools, doing science is about the significance of everyday concepts brought to science lessons from the wider world; about standard-issue materials in school labs; about traditional categories of knowledge (physics, biology, and so on); it is mainly about apprehending what is already known by other people; and it is about NCEA results. In a word, the essence statement is culture-free and, as a consequence of this constraint, it has little to say about what I have suggested above has been the growth area in science education internationally over the past twenty years: the perception of science as a culture and the relationship between science and society. But there is also a liberating possibility here. True, writers
The Science Essence Statement What is science about? Science is a way (3) of investigating, understanding (1) and explaining (7) our natural physical world and the wider Universe (11). It involves generating and testing ideas, gathering evidence – including by making observations (10), carrying out investigations and modelling (4), and communicating (13) and debating (8) with others (9, 14) – in order to develop scientific knowledge, understanding and explanations. Scientific progress comes from logical, systematic work and from creative insight (6), built on a foundation of respect for evidence (5). Different cultures (12) and periods of history (2) have contributed to the development of science. Key: The Fourteen Ideas About Science 3. Science cannot provide complete answers to all questions. 1. The world is understandable. 7. Science aims to explain and predict. 11. Scientists often study complex interrelated systems. 10. Scientists’ observations are influenced by their existing ideas. 4. Many science explanations require specialist language and symbols and are in the form of ‘models’. 13. Informed citizenship entails applying rational argument and scepticism to science text. 8. Scientists try to identify and avoid bias. 9. Scientists work together. 14. Participating in informed decision making about socio-scientific issues is a civic responsibility. 6. Science is a blend of curiosity, imagination, creativity, logic and serendipity. 5. Science demands evidence. 12. Issues of ethics, values, economics and politics operate between science and the rest of society. 2. Science ideas are evolving.
Table 2: An analysis of the wording of the science essence statement (see page 28, The New Zealand Curriculum), identifying explicit linkages to the fourteen ideas about science. 34
New Zealand Association of Science Educators