Microsoft Word - Pelechcorrectedproof.docx Corresponding Author: Sharon Pelech Doctoral Candidate, University of Calgary Assistant Professor, Memorial University Email: spelech@mun.ca Journal of Applied Hermeneutics March 8, 2013 The Author(s) 2013 Teaching Science as a Hermeneutic Event Sharon Pelech Abstract In this article, the author explores the need for science education to be taught as a hermeneutic event, as opposed to a book of facts to be memorized. The fragmented, passive transmission of facts does not allow students to have a clear understanding of science, its’ traditions and how science lives in the world. Reconnecting biology back into the world, and recognizing its creativ- ity and uncertainty, will help students understand how science impacts their lives and the world. The author explores how, through hermeneutics, students can experience the living discipline of science, as opposed to learning about science. Keywords curriculum studies, hermeneutics, high school biology, learning, philosophy of education, sci- ence education Upon returning from their immersion week, the first year pre-service teachers in my sec- ondary science curriculum course were ex- cited to talk about their teaching experience, what went well, as well as some of the sur- prises and learning opportunities that arose for them. After 15 minutes of discussion, Megan (pseudonym) spoke up and said “I asked my partner teacher whether I could talk to the biology students about the recent earthquake and Tsunami in Japan (that hap- pened only days earlier). The teacher re- sponded, ‘No, that is not biologically rele- vant; it is not in the curriculum.’” The class of pre-service teachers gasped and then a stunned silence settled onto the classroom. There was something in this incident that we knew did not feel right; the living discipline of biology that has been entrusted to us as teachers was not being honored (Jardine, 2006). If we simply look at a few of the pic- tures displayed by the news stations from the Japan disaster, we can easily see that Pelech Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 1 2 events such as this that address us are the reason why we teach biology, so that we can understand and be part of the world in which we live. An investigation of the Alberta Pro- gram of Studies demonstrated direct links to the skills, attitudes, and content found within the mandated curriculum. Instead, Megan gave her notes on the respiration system and then a set of questions from the textbook, while the opportunity to root what we know about biology in the world was left behind. Yet, at the same time as an experienced biology teacher, I could understand the re- sponse of that teacher. In a highly pressured world of heavy curricula, student/parent ex- pectations, and the ever-present standardized test, this response was familiar to me. This moment made me wonder what makes it so that a teacher would feel necessary to re- spond this way. What is this saying to us about how science is seen in the school? “Hermeneutics suggests that these striking incidents make a claim on us and open up and reveal something to us about our lives together and what it is that is going on, often unvoiced, in the ever-so commonplace and day-to-day act of being and being a teacher.” (Jardine, 2006, p. 280). In this paper, I explore how science is commonly presented in schools and the im- pact this has on students in terms of their immediate understanding of science as a subject and, even more importantly, how this way of teaching ignores the urgent need to recognize that school science is perpetuat- ing the conditions that contribute to the cur- rent ecological crisis. Pretending that there is no ecological crisis is ignoring the inevi- table where Earth as a system will no longer be able to sustain life. Orr (2004) argued that we are educating students as if there is no planetary emergency, or as if environ- mental problems will be solved by technolo- gy. Taking science up as a hermeneutic ex- perience can offer the opportunity to explore the complexity and interconnectedness of science with the world and allow student questions to be an opening to new under- standing. Hermeneutics recognizes that all understanding, including scientific, is “his- torical, linguistic and dialectical” (Palmer, 1969, p. 212). Through participation in the experience of science being a hermeneutic event, students may begin to be able to take up science as something more than “deadly dull information that [they] must consume” (Jardine, 2003, p. xiv) and begin to under- stand science connected in its ancestry, tra- ditions, interdependence, conflicts, ethics, and belonging in the world (Jardine, 2003). Common Image of School Science According to a study completed by Ai- kenhead (2003), one of the key concerns re- garding traditional science teaching is the “dishonest and mythical images about sci- ence and scientists it conveys” (p. 12). Sci- entists are often presented as being objective and science and its methods provide abso- lute proof (McComas, 1998). What is often lost with this vision is the tentativeness and creativity which are both key components of the process of science. One of the main cul- prits of this vision is the way laboratories and the scientific method is presented in sci- ence classes. In most science textbooks, a linear, lock-step, approach to the scientific method is provided that implies that all sci- entists follow a common series of steps to do research (McComas, 1998). Many students, in fact, are disappointed when they learn that scientists do not have a framed copy of the scientific method posted above their work- bench (McComas, 1998). The scientific method is presented in classrooms as prede- termined, tidy, linear activities students must follow, and then write up to hand in for as- sessment. There is no imagination, creativity, or opportunities for discovering new ways of Pelech Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 1 3 understanding a concept. Instead, students go away with an image of science that does not bear any relation to the lived world of science (Blades, 2001). Through a comparative analysis of three research projects conducted in England, Sweden, and Australia, Lyons (2006) found that science students held three common views of science education. The first view is that science pedagogy is simply passive transmission of facts from teachers or text- books to students. The second vision is that the content is irrelevant and boring. Dewey described this in his article, Child and the Curriculum, in 1902. When science is pre- sented as facts without any connection to students lives, it condemns the fact to be a hiero- glyph… the most scientific matter loses this quality when presented in external ready-made fashion - those things that are most significant to the scientific man, logic of actual inquiry… drop out. (p. 202) The third vision of science education that students commonly hold is that science is a difficult subject. This is not because the students found science intellectually stimu- lating, instead they described how science is full of terminology and, more importantly, that difficulties arise from the passive learn- ing, memorization of facts, and the irrele- vance of the content. Lyons (2006) saw the- se common views as the primary reasons why students are disengaged in science, which has led to a dramatic decrease in en- rolment into scientific fields throughout the western world. School science does not engage students in the living field of science as long as the curriculum remains content-driven and ped- agogy is driven by standardized testing. Blades (2001) described how, as a result of heavy amounts of content-laden curricula and a focus on testing, students’ questions are not allowed to be part of the process of learning science, that the only questions are the ones that are already provided by the teacher. Capra (1996) argued that as long as we see information as something that is “ly- ing out there to be picked up by the brain,” that we will miss the “whole network of re- lationships, a context, in which it is embed- ded and which gives it meaning” (p. 272). Capra’s argument requires a break from the traditions of science education in which sci- ence classes are deeply entrenched. Herme- neutics offers ways to connect science back to its field of knowledge by allowing stu- dents to become part of the conversations, traditions, and complexities of science as an event in understanding the world. [Hermeneutics] provides a way to re- think what we experience in our day to day lives as teachers, what we under- stand teaching to be, … what we under- stand knowledge and tradition and lan- guage and conversation and … the methods of the sciences to be. (Jardine, 2006, p. 269) A Shift to Hermeneutics By focusing on the ontology of teaching sci- ence, hermeneutics asks: How does science live in the world as an ongoing emerging discourse, and what traditions are a part of science education? Furthermore, hermeneu- tics asks what does this conversation de- mand of me in regards to how I take up teaching science? “Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as a participating in an event of tradition, a pro- cess of transmission in which past and pre- sent are constantly mediated” (Gadamer, 2004, p. 291, original italics). Understanding is both the goal and the path, so while sci- Pelech Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 1 4 ence education often wishes to come up with a final, complete understanding, hermeneu- tics allows recognition that the process of understanding is never complete. The ques- tion then becomes: How do I proceed peda- gogically when I understand that science education is not a thing with a final and de- finitive definition, but always in the process of becoming (Smith, 1991)? In many current biology classes, infor- mation is given to students, and a predeter- mined set of questions are asked with pre- dictable, predetermined answers expected. Science is often mischaracterized as the ap- plication of techniques or calculation meth- ods disconnected from the traditions from which they have come (Crease, 1997). Find- ing ways to bring these concepts back into the world, which includes their ancestry, memories that they evoke, and what truths they say about the world is essential to begin to understand the complexity behind why students seem disengaged in science. How can students connect with ideas that are un- connected to the world in which they be- long? This is where hermeneutics can speak profoundly to science, by helping to find ways to root these scientific concepts back to the habitat from which they are part of, into what Heidegger would call “being in the world” (as cited in Kozoll & Osborne, 2004, p. 158). Being immersed in science as a living field means problems are to be understood more deeply, allowing a spontaneous and yet informed response to a question so that the knowledge can be used to respond to a question in a new and unanticipated way. By exploring in depth the many questions that emerged from the tragedy in Japan, biology as a living discipline would open up possi- bilities and students would be able to see why this information is important and how it lives in the world. Hermeneutics frames the possibility of teaching science as a dialecti- cal perspective, where science is treated more as breaking open of questions (Gada- mer, 2004), as opposed to closing down the conversations by presenting science as a “celebration of closure... and of the end of interpretation” (Donnelly, 2002, p. 147). The term Bildung has a variety of meanings which imply formation, cultivation, and ed- ucation (Davey, 2006). Bildung stresses that hermeneutic understanding does not find the end to a topic, but allows for a deepening of the experience which opens up the possibil- ity for more questions and more demanding experiences. It is within this process where the rigour of the facts and information are required and are able to show how they be- long in the world (Davey, 2006). Hermeneutics can replant the teaching of science back into the world in which the students and science as a field of knowledge are a part. It can help students explore how science presents a particular truth about the world and how they can explore the “perils and challenges of a materialistic account of the world” (Donnelly, 2002, p. 149). Ac- cordingly, students can recognize how sci- ence lives as part of the world, and that it is not simply “storage of knowledge as is ac- complished in a dictionary, a catalogue, etc.” (Gadamer, 1992, p. 44). The historical, po- litical and sociological aspects are all rooted within science itself, not as something sepa- rate to the body of knowledge that is consid- ered science. With this, there is an opening and uncovering of "the ruling preconcep- tions of the moment [that] uncover new ave- nues of inquiry and thus indirectly be of ser- vice to the work of methodology" (Gadamer, 1988, p. 289). Hermeneutics also provides an opportunity to recognize “the inner in- terwoveness of one field of research with another” (Gadamer, 1992, p. 45), which al- lows students to see how science as a field of knowledge is connected to the world and Pelech Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 1 5 invites students to become part of the con- versation of science. “The history of math- ematics or of the natural sciences is also a part of the history of the human spirit and reflects its destinies” (Gadamer, 2004, p. 284). Science and the students are both root- ed within the same world, which means that science education becomes an opportunity for students to take part of the conversation as well as part of the understanding that is always already ongoing (Gadamer, 2004). In my current doctoral research, which explores the question “What does it mean to teach biology well,” I interviewed both teachers and students to explore their expe- rience of high school biology using a her- meneutic framework. One of the questions I asked both teachers and students was: “If teaching biology is mainly about memoriz- ing facts then is teaching biology becoming redundant in the age of instant information through Googling? What is the role of biol- ogy classrooms?” The responses from both students and teachers indicated that, in a good science class, there was something more happening than just amassing knowledge. There was the connection be- tween ideas and theories and their lives that helped them understand the world of biology. They described how biology became a nar- rative that helped understand appreciate the complexities of the world. At the 2011 National Science Teachers Association conference in San Francisco, keynote speaker astrophysicist Dr. Jeff Goldstein, Director of the National Centre for Earth and Space Science in Washington, DC, described how science taught as a “book of knowledge” did not do it justice, and in fact, was allowing the inheritance of science to be lost. Instead, he argued that in order to continue the legacy of science ex- ploration, we need creative imaginative peo- ple who wonder about the world. Science teachers have to teach not only what we know about our world, but more importantly, how we have come to know it. The journey is where the science lives, and not in the iso- lated facts that have resulted from the jour- ney. We need to understand where we came from and explore how each generation has added to the book of knowledge, which can then be passed onto the next generation. (Re)visiting the Biology Classroom If we return to the classroom with the young student teacher but this time she was al- lowed to go ahead and talk to the students about the tsunami in Japan, what would a classroom that takes up science hermeneuti- cally look like? Jardine (2003) asked us to recognize that the living discipline of biolo- gy goes beyond “fixed and finished givens that are beyond question and simply indoc- trinate the young into such acceptance” and instead take up the discipline as “not fixed and finished but is rather, ongoing, still ‘in play’, still ‘open to question’ in our human inheritance” (p. 85). One way this could have been experienced is if Megan had tak- en a picture on the internet of the Tsunami as it hit Japan and displayed it to the stu- dents, questions about the impact that this would have on the biological systems could emerge. For example, one picture shows an agricultural field, carefully manicured, with straight, well organized rows of crops grow- ing beside large covered cultivated crops. The top half of the picture shows a black thick sludge of water filled with houses, ve- hicles and other debris sweeping over and swallowing the pristine fields. Allowing the students to begin to ask questions about that one picture would open up the opportunity to understand the impact of that one moment of the tsunami on the ecosystems of Japan. In many science classes, student questions are seen as a disruption. In a classroom where science was taken up hermeneutically Pelech Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 1 6 the questions would come to life and be- come a part of the discipline of science. As these questions emerge, the teacher’s role would be to pay attention to which questions were meaningful and rich to explore, and through this process, introduce the students to the field of biology emerging from their questions and their understanding of the world. Often child-centered inquiry projects be- come shallow when a topic is given. Stu- dents are asked select something that they are interested in and to go off on their own, research, and return to share this information. The students are fragmented into their own area of interests and often their inquiry re- mains superficial. To take up the topic her- meneutically, the focus has to be topic- centered, where students can take up the top- ic in multiple ways in order to understand the topic. The topic demands that the stu- dents and teacher pay attention to the disci- pline of biology it demands an academic rigour in order to understand and contribute to the ongoing conversation that this event calls up. As the questions surrounding the impact of the tsunami emerge from this one picture and as the teacher and the students explore the topic, it allows them to become part of the discipline of biology that is always al- ready in the world, as a result the curriculum outcomes become re-rooted into the world in which they live. For example, the Biology 20 Alberta Program of Studies (2009) knowledge outcomes include biogeochemi- cal cycles, ecosystems, and population change and equilibrium as a few examples that need to be understood in order to make sense of what is happening in Japan as a re- sult of the Tsunami. A teacher who is open to allowing ambiguity, messiness, and com- plexity to live within the classroom, as op- posed to being focused on finality and find- ing definitive answers would allow student questions to find a voice and a life in the discipline of science. As Caputo (1987) re- minded us, hermeneutics “does not lead us back to safe shores and terra firma; it leaves us twisting slowly in the wind” (p. 36) this is rooted in the complexity of where biology lives in the world. If students’ questions lead to the result- ing nuclear plant destruction, the part of the Program of Studies (2009) that asks students to understand that “Science and technology have both intended and unintended conse- quences for humans and the environment” has meaning and context from which to take up this understanding. Questions on how we could come to the point where a nuclear power plant would be built on a major fault line in a country that experienced the bomb- ing of Hiroshima would emerge as part of the greater understanding of science. The connection of the curriculum to the world would, out of necessity, allow the students to: experience, to suffer, to endure, or un- dergo the arrival of an unfixed future and the questions it might hold, ques- tions we might not have even imagined or desired. This open, living endurance, we suggest, is basic to the disciplines taught in schools. (Jardine, 2003, p. 85) Students would have the opportunity to real- ize that “even in the arena of making sense of the natural world, science is a limited dis- course” (Blades, 2001, p. 86). Conclusion Gadamer argued that the disciplines that we have been given responsibility for “live in their openness to being handed along” (Jardine, 2006, p. 85) and are still open to questions, not only as part of our inheritance Pelech Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2013 Article 1 7 but also where new understanding and learn- ing emerges. Clifford and Friesen (2003) argued that “far too little of what most stu- dents do in school engages their imagination, fuels their passion to learn, connects them deeply with the world, or wins their hearts and minds” (p. 93). The work our students do is “memorizable… but it is rarely espe- cially memorable” (Jardine, 2006, p. 87). The implications of this goes beyond the classroom and trying to increase engage- ment which, although important, is only one piece of the interconnections that need to be explored as a teacher and a researcher. Looking at the ecological implications of students being immersed in the discipline of science also helps the students to experience the interconnectedness of the world, so that they learn not about the earth but how they are part of the earth. Capra (1996) wrote that the major world crises of our time are interconnected and interdependent, and recognizing that we cannot study these issues in isolation is es- sential. Education is part of the perpetuation that allows the individualization and pro- gress to be the primary discourse of the “de- veloped” world. Education, as it stands to- day, helps equip people to be more “effec- tive vandals of the earth” (Orr, 2004 p. 6). The tsunami disaster in Japan is not just an interesting topic to help students become engaged in science, instead it demands that we bring forth the world of science and the understanding that emerges to help make sense of what is happening and where to go from here. This means that the topic de- mands the academic rigour and clarity that we, as science teachers, want the students to be able to leave the class with which in- cludes not only the content, but the skills and attitudes that are part of the Alberta Program of Studies. 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