Knowledge, beliefs and pedagogy

Knowledge, beliefs and pedagogy: how the nature of science should inform the aims of science education (and not just when teaching evolution)

One of my publications is

This article is open-access and may be freely accessed and downloaded at the journal website

Abstract

Lisa Borgerding's work highlights how students can understand evolution without necessarily committing to it, and how learners may come to see it as one available way of thinking amongst others. This is presented as something that should be considered a successful outcome when teaching about material that many students may find incompatible with their personal worldviews. These findings derive from work exploring a cause célèbre of the science education community–the teaching of natural selection in cultural contexts where learners feel they have strong reasons for rejecting evolutionary ideas. Accepting that students may understand but not commit to scientific ideas that are (from some cultural perspectives) controversial may easily be considered as a form of compromise position when teaching canonical science prescribed in curriculum but resisted by learners. Yet if we take scholarship on the nature of science seriously, and wish to reflect the nature of scientific knowledge in science teaching, then the aim of science education should always be to facilitate understanding of, yet to avoid belief in, the ideas taught in science lessons. The philosophy of science suggests that scientific knowledge needs to be understood as theoretical in nature, as conjectural and provisional; and the history of science warns of the risks of strongly committing to any particular conceptualisation as a final account of some feature of nature. Research into student thinking and learning in science suggests that learning science is often a matter of coming to understand a new viable way of thinking about a topic to complement established ways of thinking. Science teaching should then seek to have students appreciate scientific ideas as viable ways of making sense of the currently available empirical evidence, but should not be about persuading students of the truth of any particular scientific account.

Keywords

• Beliefs in science
• Cultural border-crossing
• Scientific knowledge
• Teacher as intellectual tour guide
• Teaching evolution

Contents:

Knowledge, beliefs and pedagogy: how the nature of science should inform the aims of science education (and not just when teaching evolution)

• The case of teaching evolution
• Learning science as cultural border-crossing
• Science teaching as guiding not persuading
• Cultural border crossing should not be seen as a compromise but the model for science pedagogy
• Science is not about belief
• The teacher as intellectual tour guide in the light of the nature of personal knowledge

This article is open-access and may be freely accessed and downloaded at the journal website

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Endorsement?

I received the following message about this paper, in an email form "Dr. Gisela Steins >chiefauthor@socialscienceresearch.org<",

"I came across your research paper "Knowledge, beliefs and pedagogy: how the nature of science should inform the aims of science education (and not just when teaching evolution)" and felt that your work is remarkable and significant. This research can indeed prove to be vital for fellow researchers and scientists working in the same domain."

Dr Gisela Steins

However, as the email went on to invite me to submit my articles to "our journals", this rather undermined by confidence in the authenticity of the praise!

Read about academic standards and scholarly values

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