Integration: An approach to Science in primary schooling

Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 2, Issue 1, Article 10 (Jun., 2001)
Peter J FENSHAM
Integration: An approach to Science in primary schooling

Previous Contents Next

INTEGRATION WITH LANGUAGE
- Science as discourse
Another answer to the questions stems from the burgeoning interest over the last decade in interpreting learning in terms of discourse. To learn a discipline is to be able to participate in its discourses. From this dictum as the frame, there has been no shortage of interest among linguistic scholars in Science as a source of a particularly rich set of discourses. Among the scientific discourses that are being considered are explicating a scientific question, issue or phenomenon, asking scientifically investigable questions, explaining observations with the use of different level of ideas, and argumentation involving assumptions, claims and evidence.
This is rather a new view of school science and it extends very considerably the earlier appreciation in the 1970s and 1980s when Words in Science or the role individual words play in science was an important subject for research by science educators. The new concern is not just with the fact that many words are used with precise meanings in science, that are different from the looser meanings they have in other contexts. Nor is it limited to how well students appreciate logical connective words such as in English: because, thus, therefore, and so. The new interest is concerned with how the scientific status of the ideas, claims and evidence that lie on either sides of these connective words is presented in language.
Studies of each of the above scientific discourses among school age children (including those in the primary years) are now quite regularly being reported by science education researchers. They are not finding it difficult to collaborate with interested teachers in establishing lively oral discussions among the students in a classroom. Furthermore, they are showing that skilful scaffolding by the teacher, can assist students to become aware of the epistemological features that makes these discourses scientific, as distinct from the discourses that they may use in other subjects and genres of language. In like manner, there has been parallel interests among linguists and science educators in the discursive ways in which science is reported in text and how students can be helped to acquire the skills involved in writing their experiences in science.
It must be noted, however, that these discursive aspects of Science, and their mirroring in school, science are quite different from the so-called content-free "science processes" that I have described earlier as the unsatisfactory answer the 1960s reforms gave to What is Science in primary schooling? In the case of these discourses the science content is integral and essential. There is no generalised "explaining" or "argumentation" in Science. An explanation of plant growth intimately involves the specific features of this growth, and the particular conditions under which this growth does and does not occur. A scientific argument about the association of the widespread use of CFCs in refrigeration and aerosols with increased ultra violet radiation, involves empirical investigation of the properties of these substances, this particular form of energy, and how interaction between them may be occurring.
The implication of the content embededness in these scientific discourses is that that not only the science knowledge of a topic needs to be known, but also how that knowledge was arrived at, and how the knowledge can be related in different contexts to other pieces of knowledge. A study of the science knowledge of primary teachers a few years ago made the interesting suggestion, that the latter two aspects of the science knowledge of a topic may be the clue to the confidence aspect of these teachers with respect to Science and its teaching (Osborne and Simon, 1996). In other words, the end product knowledge of a science topic that a textbook gives is necessary, but insufficient as knowledge in itself, to enable primary teachers to engage with their students in the open discussions and text compositions that Science as discourse requires.
Both Science as narrative and Science as discourse require the content of the primary science curriculum to be specified in terms of a deeper study of a small number of topics, that are both socially and scientifically important, rather than in terms of the many smaller topics that can only at best be treated in a superficial way as far as teaching/learning is concerned. This assumes we can be very clear about what the aim of primary school science is - that is, we have to answer the two questions above - and then we will have to use this aim as a ruthless criterion to select just which topics, from among the many possibilities, and those already in the current lists, will best achieve this aim.