Science education as a pathway to teaching language literacy: a critical book review

In this paper, I present a critical review of the recent book, Science Education as a Pathway to Teaching Language Literacy, edited by Alberto J. Rodriguez. This volume is a timely collection of essays in which the authors bring to attention both the successes and challenges of integrating science instruction with literacy instruction (and vice versa). Although several themes in the book merit further attention, a central unifying issue throughout all of the chapters is the task of designing instruction which (1) gives students access to the dominant Discourses in science and literacy, (2) builds on students’ lived experiences, and (3) connects new material to socially and culturally relevant contexts in both science and literacy instruction—all within the high stakes testing realities of teachers and students in public schools. In this review, I illustrate how the authors of these essays effectively address this formidable challenge through research that ‘ascends to the concrete’. I also discuss where we could build on the work of the authors to integrate literacy and science instruction with the purpose of ‘humanizing and democratizing’ science education in K-12 classrooms.     

Transforming Elementary Science Teacher Education by Bridging Formal and Informal Science Education in an Innovative Science Methods Course

We investigated curricular and pedagogical innovations in an undergraduate science methods course for elementary education majors at the University of Maryland. The goals of the innovative elementary science methods course included: improving students’ attitudes toward and views of science and science teaching, to model innovative science teaching methods and to encourage students to continue in teacher education. We redesigned the elementary science methods course to include aspects of informal science education. The informal science education course features included informal science educator guest speakers, a live animal demonstration and a virtual field trip. We compared data from a treatment course (n = 72) and a comparison course (n = 26). Data collection included: researchers’ observations, instructors’ reflections, and teacher candidates’ feedback. Teacher candidate feedback involved interviews and results on a reliable and valid Attitudes and Beliefs about the Nature of and the Teaching of Science instrument. We used complementary methods to analyze the data collected. A key finding of the study was that while benefits were found in both types of courses, the difference in results underscores the need of identifying the primary purpose for innovation as a vital component of consideration.     

Ernst Mach, George Sarton and the Empiry of Teaching Science Part I

George Sarton had a strong influence on modern history of science. The method he pursued throughout his life was the method he had discovered in Ernst Mach’s Mechanics when he was a student in Ghent. Sarton was in fact throughout his life implementing a research program inspired by the epistemology of Mach. Sarton in turn inspired many others (James Conant, Thomas Kuhn, Gerald Holton, etc.). What were the origins of these ideas in Mach and what can this origin tell us about the history of science and science education nowadays? Which ideas proved to be successful and which ones need to be improved upon? The following article will elaborate the epistemological questions, which Darwin’s “Origin” raised concerning human knowledge and scientific knowledge and which led Mach to adapt the concept of what is “empirical” in contrast to metaphysical a priori assumptions a second time after Galileo. On this basis Sarton proposed “genesis and development” as the major goal of Isis. Mach had elaborated this epistemology in La Connaissance et l’Erreur (Knowledge and Error), which Sarton read in 1913 (Hiebert 1905/1976; de Mey 1984). Accordingly for Sarton, history becomes not only a subject of science, but a method of science education. Culture—and science as part of culture—is a result of a genetic process. History of science shapes and is shaped by science and science education in a reciprocal process. Its epistemology needs to be adapted to scientific facts and the philosophy of science. Sarton was well aware of the need to develop the history of science and the philosophy of science along the lines of this reciprocal process. It was a very fruitful basis, but a specific part of it, Sarton did not elaborate further, namely the psychology of science education. This proved to be a crucial missing element for all of science education in Sarton’s succession, especially in the US. Looking again at the origins of the central questions in the thinking of Mach, which provided the basis and gave rise to Sarton’s research program, will help in resolving current epistemic and methodological difficulties, contradictions and impasses in science education influenced by Sarton. The difficulties in science education will prevail as long as the omissions from their Machian origins are not systematically recovered and reintegrated.     

Uncovering the Potential: The Role of Technologies on Science Learning of Middle School Students

There is, no doubt, untapped potential in using technological tools to enhance the understanding of science concepts. This study examines the potential by observing 7th and 8th grade middle school students’ (n = 23) use of portable data collection devices in a nine-week elective class, Exploring Technologies. Students’ use of the data collection devices and subsequent interactions were traced through audiocassette and videocassette recordings, field notes, and student artifacts. The culminating activity for the course was a scientific investigation that required students to use the technologies to answer student-selected research questions. To illustrate the use of technology as a mediatory tool, an inquiry investigation of three student groups is described. In examining the three groups of middle school students the researchers encountered specific evidence of technology maximizing students’ science learning. The students were able to use the portable data collection devices in their investigations as they discussed scientific ideas related to temperature and heat. The study’s findings indicated that the three student groups were able to use the tools to conduct scientific inquiry and engage in scientific discourse. Further research on instructional approaches that allow students to develop expertise by using technology as tools to construct knowledge about complex phenomena is encouraged.     

Surviving Rescue: A Feminist Reading of Scott O’Dell’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Island of the Blue Dolphins</Emphasis>

Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins tells the archetypal story of the young, virgin, orphan girl who is vulnerable to either debauchery or rescue. That such a girl must succumb to either one or the other is a necessary element of the archetype. In O’Dell’s work—one intended, after all, for children—the heroine is rescued by a paternalistic figure and re-inscribed into the patriarchal world. Yet, in the hands of young readers, Island—part fairytale, part rescue narrative, part feminist parable—becomes a story of independence and survival, despite the heroine’s “rescue” at the end.

From Peasant to Princess: A Standards Conversion Story with a Twist

The first author, a student in a graduate children’s literature class, designed a project to locate “good” mathematics-based children’s literature selections. However, the reference tools usually consulted (e.g., Books in Print) to locate books by topic were of little help, and those she located under individual mathematics topics were mostly traditional mathematics books rather than good read-aloud selections. Consequently, she perused the university library’s sizeable juvenile collection to find books that would meet her selection criteria. This article describes the influence of two landmark documents for mathematics teaching and learning—Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 1989) and Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000)—as she engaged in the process.

Psyche and Society in Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen

While Where the Wild Things Are may be Maurice Sendak’s most popular book, In the Night Kitchen is arguably the greater work. Though his journey in Wild Things shares many of the elements of Mickey’s adventure in Night Kitchen—swinging between the protagonist’s initiatory verbal assertions and silent, completely pictorial spreads that indicate his eventual dominance over his environment—Max’s story is ultimately only a narrative of the self. Where the Wild Things Are is a beautiful exploration of how Max (the maximum boy) is able to use an imaginative journey to create an individual personality that fills the world around him. But Mickey must confront something more than merely a projection of his own desires. Mickey, unlike Max, is diminutive in his fantasy world, and his adventure is a true dream shaped willy-nilly by his lived experience, not a daydream tailored to defend the ego. The story told as Mickey learns to navigate the Night Kitchen is essentially a social narrative—more realistic, more challenging, and with greater overall dividends than Max’s adventure. We can see this in the ways In the Night Kitchen combines four sorts of ingredients—Sendak’s own life, the psychology of dreaming, popular culture, and the immigrant experience—into a subtle, captivating tale of the self and society.

Teaching Practices that Promote Motor Skills in Early Childhood Settings

Early childhood educators, especially those in preschool centers, are often expected to design and implement movement programs. However, these individuals may not have been taught these skills during their education. The purpose of this study was to determine if early childhood majors could successfully be taught to implement a mastery climate instructional approach to promote motor skill development to preschool-age children. Twenty undergraduate Early Childhood Education majors, who completed a Motor Development Across the School Years course, designed and implemented a movement program to develop preschoolers’ locomotor and object control skills. Fourteen preschoolers participated in an 11-week movement program. Preschoolers’ motor performance was assessed with the Test of Gross Motor Development—2nd Edition prior to and following the intervention. Results indicate significant improvements in total performance (p < .05) and locomotor skills (p = .037). Findings indicate that with guidance and training, early childhood majors can effectively design and implement a mastery-based movement program that enhances motor skill competence. The findings also demonstrate the need and value for early childhood majors to receive training in the design and implementation of movement programs. This paper provides a conceptual framework and practical recommendations to assist teachers and educators with implementing a mastery climate movement programs.     

Teasing out repetition from rote: an essay on two versions of will

In some circles of mathematics education, repetition and rote are somehow conflated in terms of their pedagogical uses and ramifications. In this paper, I argue for the separation of the two, relying upon a framework suggested by Martin Buber’s I–Thou ontology. In the presentation of Buber’s ideas, I highlight the notion of will-as-would-join-with-grace, to be contrasted with plain will. The merit of repetition in teaching and learning, as I argue, is not in automaticity—the common rationale—but in fostering and supporting a deepened sense of connection and/or intimacy to the object under study.     

Sir Bob Edwards: Salute to a giant

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Dr. Robert Edwards for “the development of in vitro fertilization”. The Nobel Assembly stated that the vision Edwards had of discovering a treatment for infertility is now “a reality and brings joy to infertile people all over the world”. Indeed, looking back over my own familiarity with Edwards and with the treatment of infertility by in vitro fertilization (IVF), I can think of only very few — if any — disciplines in medicine that owe their origins and their progress so much to just one man. For Edwards it was his controversial experiments in oocyte maturation and fertilization that paved the way for IVF. With the gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe, he successfully pioneered the birth of the world’s first IVF baby in July 1978, and thereby, in that single event, opened the door to IVF for so many individuals and clinics around the world.     

An exploratory study into the complexity of relations between physics lecturers’ crafting of practice and students’ expectations of quality teaching

This study contributes to research that characterises the affective learning that is evoked and taken on by students in response to their perceptions of their contextual learning environments. Interview-discussions were held with lecturers of both introductory and higher-level physics courses (n = 3) concerning how they formulated their patterns of teaching in terms of a particular conceptual framing that they considered to best optimize making learning possible. Subsequently their students (n = 212) were asked with written questions, and some select follow-up interview-discussions, to describe what they expected from ‘a good physics lecturer’. The relationships between these two things—the lecturer’s crafting of practice and the students’ expectations of quality teaching—were investigated. Results show that students’ expectations tend to match their lecturers’ practice, indicating that students are strongly influenced by a contextually based appreciation of ‘good’ teaching.     

Prospective teachers’ learning to provide instructional explanations: how does it look and what might it take?

Several studies have documented prospective teachers’ (PSTs) difficulties in offering instructional explanations. However, less is known about PSTs’ learning to provide explanations. To address this gap, we trace changes in the explanations offered by a purposeful sample of PSTs before and after a mathematics content/methods course sequence. Consistent with prior research, our study reveals the limitations in PSTs’ explanations at their entrance to the course sequence. It also documents PSTs’ progress in providing explanations, thus providing existence proof that this practice is learnable. Using evidence from multiple sources, we also propose a component entailed in this learning—learning how to unpack one’s thinking through the use of representations as explanatory tools—and four factors associated with it, including PSTs’ subject-matter knowledge, active and deliberate reflection on practice, productive images for engaging in this work, and productive dispositions about engaging in this practice. We discuss the implications of our findings for teacher education and offer directions for future research.     

Science of learning is learning of science: why we need a dialectical approach to science education research

Research on learning science in informal settings and the formal (sometimes experimental) study of learning in classrooms or psychological laboratories tend to be separate domains, even drawing on different theories and methods. These differences make it difficult to compare knowing and learning observed in one paradigm/context with those observed in the other. Even more interestingly, the scientists studying science learning rarely consider their own learning in relation to the phenomena they study. A dialectical, reflexive approach to learning, however, would theorize the movement of an educational science (its learning and development) as a special and general case—subject matter and method—of the phenomenon of learning (in/of) science. In the dialectical approach to the study of science learning, therefore, subject matter, method, and theory fall together. This allows for a perspective in which not only disparate fields of study—school science learning and learning in everyday life—are integrated but also where the progress in the science of science learning coincides with its topic. Following the articulation of a contradictory situation on comparing learning in different settings, I describe the dialectical approach. As a way of providing a concrete example, I then trace the historical movement of my own research group as it simultaneously and alternately studied science learning in formal and informal settings. I conclude by recommending cultural-historical, dialectical approaches to learning and interaction analysis as a context for fruitful interdisciplinary research on science learning within and across different settings.     

Developing a ‘leading identity’: the relationship between students’ mathematical identities and their career and higher education aspirations

The construct of identity has been used widely in mathematics education in order to understand how students (and teachers) relate to and engage with the subject (Kaasila, 2007; Sfard & Prusak, 2005; Boaler, 2002). Drawing on cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), this paper adopts Leont’ev’s notion of leading activity in order to explore the key ‘significant’ activities that are implicated in the development of students’ reflexive understanding of self and how this may offer differing relations with mathematics. According to Leont’ev (1981), leading activities are those which are significant to the development of the individual’s psyche through the emergence of new motives for engagement. We suggest that alongside new motives for engagement comes a new understanding of self—a leading identity—which reflects a hierarchy of our motives. Narrative analysis of interviews with two students (aged 16–17 years old) in post-compulsory education, Mary and Lee, are presented. Mary holds a stable ‘vocational’ leading identity throughout her narrative and, thus, her motive for studying mathematics is defined by its ‘use value’ in terms of pursuing this vocation. In contrast, Lee develops a leading identity which is focused on the activity of studying and becoming a university student. As such, his motive for study is framed in terms of the exchange value of the qualifications he hopes to obtain. We argue that this empirical grounding of leading activity and leading identity offers new insights into students’ identity development.     

The Shaman and the ISness of TO BE

Russell Hoban has compared himself as a writer to a shaman—willing to admit the unseen and making himself a medium for the quality of the unseen in his novels. This article explores Hoban’s highly-regarded The Mouse and His Child (1967) with this comparison in mind. The writer interweaves Mircea Eliade’s study of shamanism with an examination of the experiences of the protagonists of the novel—The Mouse and His Child. In so doing, she reveals many elements of shamanism in the text which, it is argued, reaches a conclusion which is consistent with the central tenets of the Indian philosophical system of Advaita. Sharada Bhanu is a lecturer in the English Department of Stella Maris College, Chennai. Her research interests include establishing connections between Advaita and fantasy fiction for children and the devotional poetry of many cultures     

Promising Findings on Preschoolers’ Emergent Literacy and School Readiness In Arts-integrated Early Childhood Settings

An approach to early childhood education that integrates visual and performing arts throughout the preschool curriculum—Art as a Way of Learning—was implemented in a program (Promoting and Supporting Early Literacy through the Arts) designed to improve the emergent literacy and school readiness of at-risk young children in community-based preschool settings. A quasi-experimental pre-post treatment-only design was used to explore this program’s potential effects in a real-world setting. Preliminary results revealed improvements in young children’s emergent literacy on a number of targeted and standardized measures after participation in the program. This arts-integrated approach to the teaching of and learning in young children shows considerable promise and warrants a rigorous test of its effects.     

Qualitative Methoden der Bildinterpretation

Zusammenfassung Die erheblichen Fortschritte der qualitativen Methoden in den vergangenen zwanzig Jahren sind eng mit dem „linguistic turn“ verbunden. Dessen Konsequenzen ebenso wie die für die empirische Sozialforschung ganz allgemein gültige Pr?misse, dass Protokolls?tze, also Texte, die nicht mehr hintergehbaren Grunddaten der (sozial-)wissenschaftlichen Analyse darstellen, haben zu einer Dominanz textinterpretativer Verfahren und zu einer ‘Textfixierung’ qualitativer Methodologien geführt. Insbesondere — und dies ist gerade für die Erziehungswissenschaft besonders folgenschwer — wurde in der qualitativen Forschung nicht unterschieden zwischen einer (textf?rmigen) Verst?ndigung über das Bild und einer (textunabh?ngigen) Verst?ndigung durch das Bild, d.h. im Medium des Bildes. Den methodischen Zugang zur letzteren Ebene, derjenigen einer vorbegrifflichen oder ‘atheoretischen’ Verst?ndigung im Medium des Bildes, haben in den 1920er-Jahren bereits Erwin Panofsky mit seiner Ikonologie und sein Zeitgenosse Karl Mannheim mit der dokumentarischen Methode er?ffnet. Zwischen diesen Methodologien und denjenigen der Semiotik zeigen sich wesentliche Korrespondenzen. Aus der Einsicht, dass die lkonizit?t in ihrer Eigenlogik der Sprache nicht in ad?quater Weise zug?nglich ist, l?sst sich mit Bezug auf die genannten Autoren sowie u.a. Barthes, Foucault und Imdahl die methodologische Konsequenz ziehen, dass wir unsere Konnotationen, unser sprachvermitteltes ikonographisches Vorwissen, soweit wie m?glich ‘einklammern’, also suspendieren müssen, wenn wir der Eigenart des Bildes gerecht werden wollen. Dabei führt der methodische Weg zur Rekonstruktion der Eigensinnigkeit des Bildes über dessen Formalstruktur — insbesondere über die planimetrische Struktur.

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Summary Qualitative methods of interpreting pictures The considerable progress in qualitative methods during the last twenty years is essentially connected with the „linguistic turn“. Its consequences as well as the presumption that textual records are the basic data of all scientific research are responsible for the predominance of methods of text-interpretation and for the particular ‘fixation’ on texts in qualitative methodologies. Especially, there is a lack of differentiation between a communication about pictures and a communication through pictures, i.e. a text-independent understanding via the medium of pictures. The methodical access to a pre-conceptual or ‘atheoretic’ understanding was opened up by Erwin Panofsky in the 1920s with his iconology and by his contemporary Karl Mannheim with his documentary method. Important correspondences between these methodologies and those in the field of semiotics can be demonstrated. From the insight that the iconic character in its obstinacy is not accessible to language in an adequate way, we can — with reference to the mentioned authors as well as to Barthes, Foucault and Imdahl — draw the conclusion that to approach the peculiarities of a picture means to suspend our connotations of language-mediated iconographic (pre-)knowledge as far as possible, to put them „in brackets“. Methodologically, the iconic character can only be reconstructed by describing the formal, especially the planimetric, structure of a picture.

     

Traveling the World with Outstanding International Children’s Literature

In 2005, the United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY) and the Children’s Book Council, Inc. (CBC) formed a committee to evaluate, select and publicize books of exceptional quality which were originally published outside of the United States and subsequently released by an American publisher. This article offers brief annotations of the 2006 and 2007 Outstanding International Children’s Book Award winners for the K–2 age group—17 titles from nine different countries. In addition, the work of USBBY and the CBC, Inc., is briefly explained.     

THE EFFECT OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES ON ELEMENTARY STUDENTS’ SCIENCE ACHIEVEMENT AND SOCIAL SKILLS IN KUWAIT

This study compares the effects of two methods of teaching—teacher-centered and cooperative learning—on students’ science achievement and use of social skills. The sample consists of 163 female elementary science students in 8 intact grade 5 classes who were assigned to 2 instructional methods and were taught an identical science unit by 4 classroom teachers. The students’ science achievement was measured by a researcher-designed achievement test given to students as a pretest and a posttest. Students’ social skills were determined by a researcher-designed survey administered as a pretest and posttest. Analysis of the achievement test scores and the social skills survey responses revealed that cooperative learning strategies have significantly (p > 0.05) more positive effects on both students’ achievement and social skills than teacher-centered strategies. These results provide an evidential base to inform policy decisions and encourage and persuade teachers to implement cooperative learning methods in Kuwaiti classrooms.