Extending primary students in science through sustainability themes

I have been invited to run an extension program this year for Montagu Primary School in the area of sustainability - exploring it with mainly a science focus as well as incorporating art. I will be attending the school one day per week, taking 3 groups of 10 students for an eight week period.

I am at the planning stage... doing some thinking and talking with the teachers... so I thought I would share with you my process as I try to approach this task.

Well sustainability is a hot topic and close to my heart. I am sure many primary schools are already doing something about it.... water monitoring, organic gardens, marine studies, recycling, landcare projects etc. So what might it mean to extend students in this area? My scientific expertise is not in the environmental/biological field, rather it is as a physicist and paper scientist/engineer - I worked in the paper industry for 4 years before moving into economic research. Can I use this as a focus?

I guess a big idea for me is the notion of systems and connections... there are natural systems, manufacturing systems, economic systems, social systems... and what is most interesting is the way these interact. How well do we really understand what goes on in creating a product such as paper or packaging? If we did understand the complex industrial, social and environmental systems that supports our throw-away items could it change the way we use products - help decrease consumption?

So now I wonder... could I expose students to the paper making trail - forestry, sawmill, pulp, paper making, printing, packaging, shops, homes, recycling/rubbish... and trace the inputs to each aspect, the waste, the impact socially and environmentally? Can I introduce students to the triple bottom line? So imagine excursions, questions, hands on paper making activities, scientific investigation of pulp materials, dyes, bleaches, glues. Hmmm.

I had never seen a manufacturing system before I entered the paper industry on leaving university and I can tell you it was a huge shock - big, noisy, smelly, polluting, relentless... yet exciting and intriguing. I was fascinated with the ingenuity of the processes, how everything fit, the feedback loops, the complexity of variables, how waste for one process became inputs for another. I wanted to understand it; not just how the mechanisms worked but the way the machine interacted with the operators, the supply process, the economics (tariffs, quotas and competition from overseas).

As a research scientist during my time in one paper making company I was able to contribute to a 30% increase in machine productivity. What happened now to the excess product? It was competing against slashed price imports from Finland... so the company sold it in Indonesia much cheaper than their own paper making industry could make it, thus suppressing prices for the forest logs... thus causing the private owners to seek new markets (Japan mills mainly) and deforest the equatorial rain forests much more quickly. So while I was feeling satisfied on scientifically nailing the problems of productivity, on the other hand I was responsible for deforestation in Indonesia.... something I only found out much later.

So that discloses my own sense of responsibility in this issue. Interestingly enough Montagu Bay Primary has developed a very forward thinking approach to the different strands of curriculum - having some big ideas which go across all discipline areas - change, form, function, responsibility, causation and connection.

In teasing out the possible program today with the principal and assistant principal, we were asking which of these might be key lenses in the program we are envisaging. We talked a lot about ethical reasoning (responsibility theme) as something that might be developed with staff as well as students... providing frameworks for students to talk about different ethical stances. (eg. a care-based point of view, principle-based, or ends-based.) We would listen to the conversations students were having about the issues and understand how students' ethical reasoning might be situated within their development stage, culture, or particular style of ethical reasoning. The project could help students experience alternative stances through asking them to project into stake holder's positions. Asking them how they might modify their own consumption or could encourage others to modify would give opportunities for students to come up against alternative ethical views.

The hands-on paper making activity becomes the concrete aspect...with students developing experimental inquiry skills. The tracing of the product from trees to recycling is more conceptual (research-based) where students develop understanding of systems and connections and use various ways to represent the whole trail. And a key personal development aspect is in the area of ethical development.

We are planning for the students to run workshops with other classes in the school on making paper, with different inquiry or ethical issue focuses. There would be an expo at the end of the program for teachers, students and parents which would hope to educate people in consumption issues.

I can see the students perhaps producing paper which represents all aspects of the paper trail - paper with eucalyptus scent and leaves and insects (for the forest side), paper with grease, bleach, dyes, machinery bits for the industrial paper making process, paper with products that kids use (Pokemon cards, birthday wrapping etc), paper that is being recycled (milk cartoons, magazines, newsprint), paper that is in the tip (very smelly and putrid!!!).

I am also thinking about one group being encouraged to create a cartoon video which shows the different processes - see the story of stuff as a useful starting point.

World Science Conferences say science education is in crisis

I have just come back from the CONASTA / ICASE / ASERA science education conferences in Perth. While the theme was supposed to be on environmental sustainability it seemed to be more about the sustainability of science education.

It was a concern of many speakers that the number of students continuing to study science once it becomes optional is declining, with a resulting decline of science literacy in the community and less people training in science related careers. Many different reasons were suggested from low numbers of science teachers to the ease of getting tertiary entrance scores in non-science subjects. Lord Robert Winston suggested a key reason could be:

"the overclaiming of scientists and their sense of
certainty are giving science a bad name."

I heard people passionately say how we need to teach science in terms of interesting contexts - industrial examples, problem based learning, rather than the dry traditional ways.

The Primary Connections program leaders saw providing Professional Learning to primary teachers and tested resources as a way of building teacher confidence in helping students discover the power of inquiry and big ideas.

New Zealand was introducing science curriuclum based on competencies rather than content, emphasising inquiry and science literacies.

So with a key question being "How can we engage students in science?" perhaps we should be asking what is the purpose of a science curriuclum. For many delegates, science education seemed still to be about inducting students into a scientific paradigm - building scientific understandings of the world, building knowledge and practice of scientific ways of inquiring, and developing a facility for objective decision making from which to take action as citizens of the world.

But perhaps this limited view of science education is part of the problem of engagement. It doesn't matter how interesting we make particular experiments or contexts, or how much we are asking students to think for themselves if we are not engaging students as whole human beings.

At the conference there were a number of other voices coming from indigenous perspectives which may provide a clue to engagement. Perhaps it is about bringing culture and "self" back into science, including other ways of knowing like heart, spirit and body to accompany science's focus of just using the mind.

See full report

Contents -

• Where is science education heading?
• Broadening our notion of sustainability
• Multiple intelligences with Howard Gardner
• Nature of science
• Indigenous perspectives
• Art and science
• Reclaiming our cultures,
• Integrating science and soul

Symbiotica - where art meets science

What happens when you put artists in residence in a science laboratory? Does soul emerge? How might scientists see themselves and their work differently? That is something I was keen to find out when I visited SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia.

I enter the human biology and anatomy building tentatively. I can't help noticing art work. Brightly coloured large screen prints of things you might expect to find under a microscope... later the scientist director in charge of SymbioticA, Stuart Bunt, tells me this was their early approach to marrying art and the biological sciences - "the ooh aah" stuff. He takes me on a tour of the building, pointing to the 3-dimensional objects - foetuses made from casts with objects carefully integrated into them....stories of evolution, birth, transformation. He introduces me to the artist, Hans, who curates the displays as well as being the departments cast maker of teaching skulls and body parts. He has his own little cubbyhole, lots of shelves filled with found objects and ongoing projects - a treasure trove.

"But", says Stuart, "the stuff we are doing now, is not something you can put on a wall... we are creating art with tissues and cells and they are only transient. For example, one artist created pig wings out of tissue."

This is intriguing and I want to find out more. But first I ask how the biology students respond to the art work around them. "Mostly it is ignored," says Stuart, "The students are focussed on the science - they can't see how artistic creativity might help with design and thinking. Even visiting teachers are impatient with the art program - they just want to learn about our scientific research and procedures."

Hmmm, I wonder, so who actually benefits from the artist in residence program? Do the scientists? How might it be possible to help people see the intrinsic benefits of artistic thinking within science? But are there any?

Stuart is concerned now that the seminar which I am here for is about to start and leads me up the stairs, out the back to a large room under the eaves, full of desks, computers, art magazines, a sofa and people. I am introduced to the artists in resident here - some working on tissue culture projects. One lady, with her assistant, is a famous artist from France. SymbioticA has just won a major international award and is renown across the international art world. A Finnish attache to the cultural department is here to set up a sister facility in the northern tip of Finland and is giving a seminar.

The ensuing discussion is vibrant - discussions about the ethics of tissue art, do cells have consciousness, what is the purpose of this sort of art, what it feels like as an artist to be doing it, does soul exist in tissues or even in humans? It is clear that growing cells taken from your own body is not a simplistic art form.

Oran, who has been the artist manager of the group for seven years, explains to me a bit more about the program. How artists initially put in a concept proposal for their art project, then when they come they are teamed up with a scientist mentor and taught the scientific procedures. As they gain hands on understanding their concept changes. Prior to starting their art they are required to put in an ethics proposal to the university ethics committee. Oran explains how important this is in the artistic journey - and usually ethics is a theme that comes strongly out of the art.

Because there might be between three to seven artists at any one time, the artists have a place where art culture and ways of thinking, being and talking is alive and vibrant. Walking through a set of doors then puts them into the culture of the scientist (as well as tissue culture.)

But what is the effect on the scientists? "Most of the older scientists are not that interested in the program. Our mentors are the younger postdoc scientists, who are still curious... just finished their PhD and now are being locked into more applied research. They still want an outlet for their curiosity. They are the ones who are likely to come to our weekly sessions."

Oran explains to me how funding has constrained biological research into quite tight outcomes - that the pure science that scientists used to do is no longer possible - scientists don't have the luxury to just play and see what emerges. But the artists can - that is their job - to play. Not necessarily to play in the sense that a scientist might play - which results in innovation - but to play with the meaning of what the scientists are doing. As a result it helps the scientists see the possibilities and the consequences of where their research might be leading. It adds a cultural awareness, an extra perception.

This now seems to me the punch line... why art in science is important. We tend to think of "foresight" as something that comes from scientific prediction, system awareness and modelling. But this can only lead to seeing what the paradigm you are using allows you to see. Postmodern art has the capacity to "see" in different ways. When conversations happen between artists and scientists new perceptions emerge. Are they productive, and do they earn money? Possibly not, in the way that pure research play might have yielded money making inventions.

But today where our concern is sustainable living in a fragile world this exploration of the meaning of the very building blocks of physical life could be an important contribution in helping us develop sustainable consciousness.

SymbioticA offer undergraduate courses for science and humanity students in the biological arts. So far no science students have taken this up. Why not? What might a high school science education be like that develops curiosity, creativity and desire to explore meaning, rather than students totally focussed on career pathways?

Can science be feminine?

I am sitting in a workshop for Playback Theatre. We are invited to tell our stories about Women's Business/ Men's Business. I find myself saying I have a story, even though I have no idea what it is...

I surprise myself as I explain how for many years I worked in a man's world of science, engineering and industry and how I strove to fit into this world earning the respect of its inhabitants. But then I began to realise that in embracing this scientific modernistic economic rational perspective and ways of doing and being that I was supressing a really important part of myself.

When I started creating sculptures of femine forms I realised that I was beginning to reclaim this part of myself - my women's ways of knowing and being. My further research into women's ways of knowing (Belinky et al) helped me to see that I wasn't alone in wanting more from science - I wanted to come to know the world in rich interconnected ways, marrying objectivity with intuition, relationships and history - and this is what women want!

As the actors play back my story showing the conflict between the masculine and feminine I wonder why this story came to the surface. After all, the research on women's ways of knowing has been around since 1982, and formed part of feminine discourse for last 20 plus years. But has it really filtered down into everday science education that we see in schools?

What is science anyway? At the core of its meaning is the verb "scire" - to know.... to inquire into something.... and over time this has become associated with a particular way of coming to know.

While we see more ethical issues, more stories about science and more relevant contexts to appeal to girls in science classes, modernist science seems to still dominate the way students discuss and think about science - dispassionate debate, creating assertions and defending them. Does this turn off the female students? Mine certainly have said so. Perhaps we need to allow students to be in three minds about something, to admit to uncertainty and change in thinking, to role play possibilities, consider other ways of knowing, get inside the thinking of the scientist, and to reflect on their own ways of knowing and being that they are bringing.

So are these different approaches a result of the gender divide? Is there a mens science and a womens science? Perhaps they also reflect the difference in modernism (a more masculine voice) and post-modernism (a more feminine voice)? What might then be an integral voice?

As we see english curriculum move to embrace post-modernist sensitivities, should science be doing the same? After all this generation have only grown up in a post-modern world... perhaps relevance to them is more than providing current contexts, it is also being congruent with the very knowledge paradigm that they are living in.

So what might an integral science be like and could this honour both men's and women's ways of knowing the world?

Oops, I forgot the unfoldment of the soul!

I have just spent a little while putting together a presentation for science teachers about how to integrate soul in science (see previous post) and I think I have completely forgotten to say a key aspect of a soulful education.....unfoldment (sue bangs her head!)

I looked at how science might help develop the individual - creating wise, ethical beings who are able to create sustainable futures - and how teachers can be more mindful of the different development lines that contribute to this, seeing ethics as founded on a much wider base than engaging in ethical discussion. E.g. ethics comes from a development of caring, aesthetics, connection, cognition, foresight, spiritual practice, self-understanding as well as values and ethical dilemmas and actions.



But the very notion of developing "ethical and wise beings" is based on an assumption that education is about "developing". What about the unique unfolding of the individual? What is the difference between education which might "lead out" and education which aims to "develop"? Do I have what an ethical/wise being looks like in mind when I say this? Is there a fixed endpoint?

I think I would like to value-add science by showing how it can be involved in development of the whole child as well as just teaching "stuff", skills or thinking capacities. But as soon as I try to construct logical arguments that can fit within a 30 minute power point presentation for a specific audience a whole lot of bigger issues slide out of view. The very use of graphical organizers puts us into a certain headspace, and leads to perhaps unwarranted assumptions of learning, evolving and the nature of what it means to be human, despite my intentions of addressing just these concerns! Hmmmm.

I guess that is why my thesis is 180,000 words (about twice the size of a normal one) - I needed that many words to second guess myself all the time!

So I would be really interested in people's comments on the presentations - how might they lead into possibilities as well as corral thinking in limited ways?

Integrating Science and Soul presentation

What are some key ways that we can integrate science and soul in education?

Here is a PowerPoint presentation, with narration, that I have put together for the CONASTA / ICASE conference in July in Perth.

In Part 1 I introduce some key ideas from my thesis and provide some conceptual frameworks using lenses from Integral Theory. I try to show how engaging soul can be an integral part of curriculum design.

In Part 2 I look at a current concern of science educators - sustainability. How might we help to develop ethical and responsible citizens for sustainable futures? What does it mean to develop ethics in science and what can we learn from taking a holistic approach to this?

The presentations take about 30 mins in total.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Science is now on the curriculum agenda

Can science have soul? Certainly!

But can science curriculum frameworks have soul? That is my big question at the moment. I am particpating in the writing up of a Tasmanian science curriculum framework. It is being done in a hurry as a response to backlash from parents, community and teachers of the perhaps too visionary curriculum Essential Learnings. The Essential Learnings were an integrated curriculum for K-10 with no mention of traditional learning areas such as science or history.

The Australian Govt and the opposition are pushing an agenda of Back to Basics, of ensuring students experience the great disciplines. But now what falls between the cracks of discipline boundaries? What is the purpose of teaching disciplines? It seems the focus becomes more on inducting students into a discipline - being inducted into the discipline knowledge and way of knowing and thinking, rather than the discipline seen as a context for development of the whole child.

What is science now, and how do we see it? How might we value-add it to include a greater purpose of education... the integral development of the child?

Can a curriculum framework for science capture this, or can it only describe what is needed to induct the child into the world of science?