PETER J. FENSHAM

Sciencefor AllTo create a scientifically literate

populace, curriculum developersmust downplay the conceptualstructures understood by the

scientific elite and instead emphasizeexciting examples and everyday

applications.

Aaob sc a-c uhan nrced g a be 196o and 70s bae soiad ihe problem of an inadequate su,ly of sen c pesonnel, deprice of t.b acbieveme in science ducation bas been at the great majority of students bave leaned that they ae unabl to do science tatscence is notr tiem.

18EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP

fter a decade of stagnation, sci-ence education in many coun-tries is seeing renewed interest

and nationally supported curriculumefforts.

In 1983 new funds in the U.S. initiat-ed a number of projects. In Britain, thefirst major project since the '60s, theSecondary Science Curriculum Re-view, was established in 1982. Evenearlier, New Zealand set up a Learningin Science Project in 1979 and, in 1982,a corresponding elementary schoolproject. This new activity extends be-yond developed or industrializedcountries. In 1984 the Asia region ofUNESCO, which ranges from Iran toJapan, endorsed a science educationprogram as one its few priorities forthe rest of the '80s.

In both rhetoric and rationale, theseprograms share in common a strongemphasis on Science for All. This slo-gan is a compelling and attractive onein societies where applied science andtechnology are evident in new prod-ucts and new forms of communica-tions. New jobs emerge and old, famil-iar ones disappear. There is a cry fornew skills and expertise and a chronictoll of unemployed persons who lacktechnical skills.

The Science for All slogan has ademocratic ring about it that impliesthere's something in it for everyone. Italso acknowledges that science educa-tion in the past has not been sciencefor all, that large numbers of personshave indeed been failed or passedover by the science curriculum. How-ever, it should not be interpreted as anew educational intention or goal. Theearly 1960s are too recent and too welldocumented to be forgotten so easily.There was much in the writing andhopes of that massive wave of sciencecurriculum endeavor around theworld that spoke, in the language ofthose years, of science education thatwas to enrich the minds of all students.Although the activity of that decadeinitially focused on education in themore specialized disciplinary sciencesof chemistry, physics, and biology,many projects then and in the early'70s aimed at mass education in ele-mentary and junior high schools.

Simultaneously, this wave of curric-ulum development had affected coun-tries all over the world, and the activityand exchange of ideas and materials

for science education was quite un-precedented in any other field of thecurriculum.

Historians of curriculum can take usfurther back to the 1860s in GreatBritain and to the 1880s in the U.S.when a very promising approach to ascience education for all was quitedeliberately and ruthlessly obliteratedbecause of the threat it held for anumber of sectors of society. If we areto achieve anything in the presentmove for Science for All, we must seewhat we can learn from these earlierfailures and from the ways in whichthey, in fact, succeeded in providingan education in science, not for all, butfor a few.

Society's Demands onFunctions of the CurriculumSchools are established by society tofulfill a number of educational func-tions. The curriculum, in its parts andin its totality, is the instrument to servethese functions as well as the fieldwhere competing societal demandsare resolved (see fig. 1).

The sciences, particularly the physi-cal sciences in many societies, aregateway subjects that filter through therelatively few students who are al-lowed to move into professions ofstatus, social experience, and econom-ic security. Because of the social pow-er associated with these positions, wecan call this function a political func-tion of schooling.

Again, a limited but definite numberof persons with scientific skills andexpertise are needed in any society tomaintain and expand a variety of as-pects of its economy. This limited pop-ulation performs an economicfunction.

Scientists, particularly in researchinstitutions and universities, are now apowerful faction with a major interestin maintaining their subject as an eliteand important field They are keenlyinterested in having the schools beginthe process of reproduction of thesciences as those in higher educationdefine them. This is the function ofsubject maintenance.

Fig. 1. Competing societal demands on schooling and science education

DECEMBER 1986/JANUARY 1987

I

In addition, there are clearly a num-ber of ways in which all cubures andsocdal life are now influenced byknowledge from the sciences and itsapplication. Human inventions in thesciences offer much potential for ful-filling the function of individualgrowth and satisfaction.

The first three of these social de-mands will be met, provided that onlya relatively small number of studentsare successful in learning the sciencesat school. Indeed, if a large numberwere successful, these social needswould be threatened by oversupply.Oversupply is an undesirable situationthat has existed in many countriessince the 1970s, when high schoolgraduates' demand for places in high-er education succeeded their availabil-ity and when persons with specializedtraining in science were unable to findappropriate employment.

The other three functions, on theother hand, are ones that relate to thewhole population and will be met onlyif the majority of students successfullymaster the science curriculum.

Hence, these two demands are notsimply competing but, in fact, are con-flicting. Unless this is recognized andallowed for in the curriculum designfor science education and in its imple-mentation, there is no doubt one de-mand will win at the expense of the

other. Indeed, there seems little doubtwhich will win since one has the back-ing of national imperatives like theeconomy and spheres of political in-fluence, and the other, in comparison,may be seen as an essentially indul-gent desire of the masses to improvetheir quality of life rather than fulfillspecific, urgent needs.

Science Educationfor the Elite FewLet me now turn to an analysis of thescience curriculum movement of the1960s-70s, and hence of much of ourpresent science curriculums, to identi-fy some elements that were quite con-trary to our Science for All slogan andin the interests of educating an elitefew in science.

1. The first curriculums to be rede-signed in the U.S., Great Britain, Aus-tralia, Thailand, and Canada werethose for the upper levels of second-ary school where disciplinary scienceswere taught, where only some of theschool cohort studied them, andwhere they clearly existed as a preludeto further possible study in science.

2. This curriculum reform was verymuch in the hands or patronage ofwell-meaning academic and research-oriented disciplinary scientists, such asPimentel at Berkeley for CHEM studyand Nyholm at University College forNuffield Chemistry, and similarly distin-

guished figures in physics and biology.To consider the nature of the reformthese project teams brought about, it isimportant to have a measure of whatactually resulted in classrooms, ratherthan what the rhetoric said was sup-posed to happen.

Descriptions of these courses andtheir guiding papers emphasize thestructure of the knowledge of thesesciences and the role of laboratory orempirical studies in its development.The courses were also designed withthe very clear intention that both thesefeatures of natural science should bevery explicit in the teaching and learn-ing of science.

As a result, the direct uptake ofthese new courses and materials inGreat Britain and the U.S. was notnearly as widespread among localschool systems as was hoped. Further-more, in practice in these countriesand in many others where evaluativereports are available, there has been aselective emphasis on parts of thesecourses to the detriment of the newcurriculum's intentions as a whole.The role of the laboratory, as part ofthe nature of science or as means oflearning factual and conceptual knowl-edge, has been a major area of neglect.Most teachers and most examinationsystems seem also to have been un-able to adopt the grand structuralviews of these science curriculums.Instead, they have turned them intoconceptual statements, rules, and for-mulas to be learned without an ade-quate balance of the facts or realitiesof the natural phenomena to whichthey relate.

3. The teaching approach to thisnow heavily conceptual knowledgehas too often followed a logical se-quence determined by the signifi-cance of the knowledge in the disci-pline, and not by considerations ofhow it could be best learned. A con-cept is introduced, defined, quantified,refined, and then applied to moredifferentiated examples of the originalconcepts, and so on. This sequence ofteaching is shown in Figure 2, inwhich each step is essential for thenext but makes no sense of itself with-out a grasp of the steps that comeearlier.

Such a teaching sequence turns outto be well suited to the tasks of sievingand sorting science students into an

20Eoucsiios�c LFsoucsHie

Fig. 2. The teaching/learning sequence for conceptual knowledge in many science curriculums

20 EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP

elite few, who become regarded assuccessful, and a majority, who areseen as failures and who reject scienceas being full of abstractions havinglittle to do with phenomena in whichthey may indeed have an interest.

4. SCience curriculums for the jun-ior high and elementary levels weredesigned in a derivative way from thisnew thinking about the nature of sci-ence and its content for learning at thehigh school level.

Thus a number of projects aroundthe world emphasized (a) the learningof science concepts at even very youngages (i.e., Concepts in Science, theScience Curriculum ImprovementStudy), and (b) the learning ofprocess-es of science-intellectual operationsthat scientists certainly use in theirwork but which in real life are neverdisembodied from the content of actu-al scientific phenomena in the waythey were by these student projects.Numerous projects-ESS and AAASScience (a process approach in theU S.) and their derivatives around theworld, Nuffield Primary Science and itsderivatives, Science 5-13 Britain, andmany other international projects-sought to provide meaningful learningfor all through a curriculum that wasbased on these intellectual processes,which were then largely ignored bysecondary school science teachers,who did not see them as useful toolsfor transmitting large amounts of fac-tual and conceptual knowledge. Theywere also quite misunderstood by par-ents and elementary school teachers,who generally perceived science to bea body of scientific information theyhad failed to master during their owneducation.

Consequences of the 1960sand 70s CurriculumsThe inadequacy of the earlier attemptsto find a meaningful science for alllevels of students is highlighted bycomparing them with the situation inmathematics.

In mathematics, there is universalagreement that facility and under-standing of elementary number opera-tions are appropriate and highly desir-able goals of the elementary schoolcurriculum. Secondary school teach-ers want their students to have thesefacilities. They enhance the students'

ability to learn not only the mathemat-ics that secondary teachers want toteach, but also the learning of othersubjects in the high school years. Fur-thermore, secondary teachers are nottrained for, nor do they want to teach,these elementary operations. Parentsrecognize these number operations asfamiliar and important for their chil-dren, both now and in the future.Society and employers add their en-dorsements to this sort of elementaryschool mathematics, perhaps morethan they should in these days of readyaccessibility to other forms ofcalculation.

No such external recognition andsupport systems existed for the sci-ence curriculums that were intro-duced in the 1960s and '70s. Hence,those curriculums can be faulted for:

* encouraging the rote recall of alarge number of facts, concepts, andalgorithms that are not obviously so-cially useful;

0 providing too little familiarity withmany of the concepts to enable theirscientific usefulness to beexperienced;

* including concepts that scientistshave defined at high levels of abstrac-tion that are inadequately acknowl-edged in the school context and henceprevent appropriate explanation oftheir consequential limitations in realsituations;

* involving an essentially abstractsystem of scientific knowledge, usingexamples of objects and events to il-lustrate this system, rather than thoseaspects of the science of actual phe-nomena and applications that facilitatesome use or control of them;

* using life experiences and socialapplications only as examples or mo-tivation rather than as the essence ofthe science learning;

* regarding practical scientific activ-itv (if it is substantial at all) as a wav toenhance conceptual learning ratherthan as a resource for learning essen-tial skills; and

0 giving high priority, even in biolo-gy; to the quantitative aspects of thesciences.

These curriculums are quite suc-cessful in meeting the societal needs Ihave associated with elite science. Incountry after country where reformedcurriculums have been implementedsince the 1960s, the problem of an

"It is incredible thata report written In1983 ['EducaingAmericans for the21st Century'] onthe need for androle of scienceeducation couldrefer not once to thestate of the worldenvironment. Itwas as if acidrain, dioxin, andcontinued nucleartesting didnot exist."

inadequate supply of scientific andtechnical person-power has beensolved. This is true in developingcountries as well as in more industrial-ized and developing ones. A numberof fields are oversupplied.

The main price of this achievementin science education has, however, notbeen just neutral for the great majorityof students who are not, in the end,involved in this elite group. It hasbeen that the majoritv of students havelearned that they are unable to learnscience-that science is not for them.

There are other prices also, such asthe degree to which the elite have toconcentrate their later school vears onthe studv of mathematics and the sci-ences to the exclusion of a broadercurriculum. I would contend also thatthe elite, despite their concentratedlearning of science. are also deprivedof many aspects of learning sciencethat have been excluded from theirschool science courses.

DECEMBER 198W6JANUARY 1987----

The Science Curriculumof the PutureThis son of analysis of the curriculummovement of the '60s and early '70 andhence of the present state of science inour schools can be used to begin todefine characteristics that may be es-sential if science education is to beeffective as Science for All and othercharacteristics that are at least worthtrying.

First, elite or traditional scienceeducation must be confined to andcontained within an upper level ofschooling. It needs to be identified forwhat it is: a form of vocational prepara-tion. Containment is not achieved byoffering alternatives at the levels ofschooling where Science for All is tobe achieved. It is no good having aproper science for the few and a sci-ence for the rest.

Second, science must be reexam-ined and recognized as a variegatedsource of human knowledge and en-deavor. A wider range of appropriateaspects of science needs to be selectedfor converting into the pedagogicialforms of a science curriculum that willhave a chance of contributing to effec-tive learning for the great majority ofstudents. This is an epistemologicaltask of a major order. It is, I suspect, avery radical undertaking that is quitebeyond the science professionals towhom we have traditionally entrustedit. It is almost impossible to step asidefrom the intense socialization into sci-ence that any of us who are scienceprofessionals have experienced. Ourensnarement into science and scien-tific ways of thinking about the worldis too great. For one thing, we havebeen specialized into only one or twoof science's many forms. In addition,our success has transformed us intopersons who think about the worldand natural phenomena in ways thatare quite different from the child atschool or the nonscientific adult whomay or may not be very successful inour highly technological society.

In order to try to think afresh aboutchemistry, the area in which I wassocialized, I have made a three-dimen-sional model of the rich corpus ofchemistry.

The facets of the model are all as-pects of chemistry that chemists recog-nize as clearly within the confines oftheir subject. I can walk around it,

stand back from it, and look at it. I caneven cut through it and look inside. Ican see it is about products and rawmaterials, rich colors and materialstructures, and involving people atmany levels and over time. It affectsjobs and careers and materials thatclothe and shelter and feed and heal. Itinvolves ideas and concepts and num-bers and symbols.

What have we made of this richcomplexion of chemistry for school-ing? By and large we have reducedchemistry to one of its least excitingtwo-dimensional transects. Schoolchemistry, apart from occasional visitsto the laboratory, is the conceptualtransect of this pulsating human ad-venture with colorful material sub-stances. It is presented black and whiteon two-dimensional pages of text-books or on chalkboards. Its learningis checked by students' two-dimen-sional responses to questions that arepresented on two-dimensional testpapers.

I have argued that present sciencecurriculums are really an inductioninto science. The ones that might pro-vide Science for All must involve muchmore learning about and fromscience.

These curriculum processes arequite fundamentally different. For in-stance, in the first we use teachers whohave themselves been inducted intoan acquaintance with some of the ba-sic conceptual knowledge of an area ofscience to repeat the first steps of thisprocess with their students. Since theteachers usually have little experienceof the exciting practical applications oftheir knowledge or of Mhe process oftrying to extend the knowledge of ascience, the induction they offer intothe corpus of science is through thesame abstract route they followed aspart of a former elite who could toler-ate it and cope with its learning. Fewof their students are interestedenough to follow.

In the alternative that I envisage forScience for All, students would stayfirmly rooted outside the corpus intheir society with its myriad examplesof technology and its possibilities forscience education. Science teachers, aspersons with some familiarity and con-fidence with the corpus of science,will need to be helped to be notinductors but couriers between the

rich corpus and their students in soci-ety. As students move through school,their experiences in society (school,home, community) will change, andthey will encounter new situations towhich science can contribute. Theirteachers should dip into the relevantparts of the corpus and, from it, bringto their classrooms the science educa-tion that will enable their students tounderstand their world better and tobelieve increasingly that science andtechnology are great human inven-tions in which they can participate fortheir own and society's well-being.

Third, some clear criteria must beestablished for selecting the sciencethat is to be the learning of worth.These also will need to be definedfrom outside rather than inside andthen be ruthlessly applied so that thepressure from the traditional views ofconceptual, scientific knowledge canbe resisted.

Such criteria should include, forexample, (1) aspects of science thatstudents will very likely use in a rela-tively short time in their daily livesoutside of school; and (2) aspects ofnatural phenomena that exemplifyeasily and well to the students theexcitement, novelty, and power of sci-entific knowledge and explanation.

At a recent international curriculumworkshop in Cyprus these two criteriawere used to spell out a skeletal con-tent for a quite new sort of sciencecurriculum. They were found to belogically applicable in a range of broadtopic areas such as senses and mea-surement; the human body; health,nutrition, and sanitation; food; ecolo-gy; resources; population; pollution;and use of energy.

In like manner we shall need toexplore in the curriculum of Sciencefor All what sorts of pedagogy areappropriate for the sorts of learningthese much more variegated aspects ofscience require. Again we must startfrom outside science for these peda-gogies and consider much more thelearners themselves and the construc-tions they already possess about thenatural phenomena we want to teach.Fortunately, this is now a strong fieldof research in science education, andmany of its findings are available.Again there will be an intense andinteresting competition if the supportteachers need for this type of pedago-

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gy is to get its share of the new scienceprojects' resources.

Learning in ScienceLet us consider briefly what we alreadyknow of the shape of the new era ofscience curriculum development, andapply to some of its projects the crite-ria I have developed for Science forAll.

New Zealand science educators inrecent years have contributed greatlyto our understanding of how childrenlearn science. Unfortunately, in usingthis as a base for reforming their sci-ence curriculum, the New Zealandersseem to have confused science con-tent that was useful to elucidate theselearning processes with content that isworth learning as Science for All.Their emphasis on preconceptualknowledge as the learning of worth inthe compulsory lower levels ofschools will, I am afraid, take its placealongside the conceptual processes ofscience from the '60s that have beensuch failures.

In the U.S., the new reform got off toa somewhat disastrous start from theviewpoint of Science for All. The Na-tional Science Foundation report onscience educationI that followed A Na-tion at Risk contained some rhetoricof Science for All, but its substance wasabout the improvement of elite techni-cal education.

It is incredible that a report writtenin 1983 on the need for and role ofscience education could refer notonce to the state of the world environ-ment. It was as if acid rain, dioxane,and continued nuclear testing did notexist. It had, internationally, a some-what offensive but perhaps nationallynecessary subtitle about making Amer-ican students' achievements in scienceeducation the best in the world by1995.

This, of course, implies that Ameri-can science education is not the bestin the world now, and that is a refresh-ingly humble note on which to start.However, to which countries does thereport look for its comparisons andtargets? To Thailand, which seems tohave solved the structural problems ofscience curriculums better than mostand where girls do as well as or betterthan boys in chemistry and physics? ToTanzania and Kenya, where the idea ofpersonal technology is being used

very effectively in school science cur-riculums? To the Netherlands becausethey are in the forefront of relatingphysics learning to society? To Nepaland Sri Lanka, where elementaryschool science is being used as aneffective instrument to enhance thelives of entire families?

No. The comparison that the NSFreport contains has a strong sense ofdenj vu about it. It is 1957 revisited, butthe comparison now is not with theSoviet Union but with Japan, becauseof the technological and economicthreats theJapanese are posing for theU.S. So much for Science for All.

I have not examined in detail all thenew curriculum projects that havebeen sponsored by the National Sci-ence Foundation. One entitled Project2061 does have a strong emphasis inits rhetoric on Science for All. Alas, itsmechanism and procedures seem tobe yet one more attempt to use theprocesses that failed in the 1960s.Teams of scientists (excluding scienceteachers!) are being brought togetherto try to answer from their blinkeredperspectives, "What science do stu-dents need to learn?" No nonscientistsare included; there is no voice fromthe many successful people in the U.S.who, in scientific terms, are scientifi-cally illiterate. There is no voice of thedispossessed. It appears again to be awell-intentioned look outward, fromwell within the corpus of science.

The Secondary Curriculum Reviewin Great Britain has used as its basicsource of ideas and pedagogy the ex-emplary work of innovative scienceteachers who have been successfulwith broader groups of students. Thisapproach seems to have a better pros-pect of tapping into those outside-of-science views that I see as essential forScience for All. The greater problemfor that country, with its propensity forsocial stratification, is likely to be howto provide recognition that this sort ofscience is important for all and not justan alternative for those who cannotcope with the "real" sciences of tradi-tional school chemistry, physics, andbiology.

Reading the Realities fromPast and PresentScience for All is a vision splendid.Like any worthwhile vision, it recurs tolift the spirits of those who have be-

come depressed with what they andothers are achieving with current waysof doing things. In the 1930s, LancelotHogben's book, Science fbr he Mil-lion,2 offered a vision to educatorswho began what has been called "thegeneral science movement" In thelate 1950s the vision came again andscience educators tried again-as partof the science curriculum movementof the '60s and 70s. In the 1980s thevision is clearly before us once more.The shape of the responses to it in thenext decade are now being formedTheir adequacy will depend very con-siderably on how clearly we can readthe realities of the earlier attempts andrealities of the very different social andeducational situations of the currentday.

A fundamental difference betweenthe sort of science education (andhence curriculums) that we have hadhitherto, and what may be needed fora genuine Science for All is the factthat the "All" must be thought of asexisting outside of science. In otherwords, science is an institutionalizedpart of all our societies in very definiteand varied ways. On the other hand,even in the most highly technical, sci-entifically advanced societies no morethan 20 percent of the populationcould be even remotely identifiedwith the institutionalized part The re-maining 80 percent are, and for theirlives will be, outside of science in thissense. Furthermore, the 20 percentwho may, or do, belong within theinstitutionalized aspects of sciencealso spend much of their lives inspheres of society that are outside ofscience.

It is this sense of "outside of sci-ence" that I think we must understandand translate into curriculum terms ifScience for All is to succeed from ourpresent opportunities.-

1. The National Science Board Com-mission on Precollege Education in Mathe-matics, Science and Technology, Educat-ing Americans for the 21st Centwur(Washington, D.C.: National Science Foun-dation, 1983)

2. Lancelot Hogben, Science for theMi/ions, 4th ed. (New York: W. W Norton& Co.. Inc., 1968).

Peter J. Fensham is Dean. Faculty ofEducation, Monash Universit', Clayton, Vic-toria 3168. Australia.

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Copyright © 1986 by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. All rights reserved.