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.

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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