FWD
------
I think this is a great initiative and I myself would be honored to help in
any way I can. I am traveling to Palestine in July and would be also willing
to network and do what I can to promote this and other productive
initiatives (please give me any advise). I would also suggest my friend Dr.
Jad Ishaq of Appied Research Institute (ARIJ.org)

I will also forward the request to the Palestinian Economy Forum and GIFTA
(http://www.gifta.net/)where we have many people interested in these issues

Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD
http://qumsiyeh.org

>From: "Fouad Moughrabi" <Fouad-Moughrabi@...>
>To: Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 15:06:48 -0400

>Dear all: I am attaching an interesting and thought provoking lecture by
>Jay
>Lemke from the University of Michigan on Science Education for your
>information just to begin a dialogue among all of us.
>
>I would like to humbly request from each of you a list of individuals, both
>Palestinian and non-Palestinian, who are prominent in the area of science
>and science education, with whom we can begin a dialogue on the issue of
>promoting science education among the Palestinian people both inside and
>outside as per our discussions during the last Board meeting of the AMQ
>Foundation in London.
>
>At some point in the future I propose that we host a small conference ( or
>seminar) on the subject with invited papers on specific topics of interest
>to us. I would hope that we can then come up with a clear vision and some
>concrete suggestions on ways to proceed at various levels: a) research to
>be
>conducted by the Qattan Center for Educational Research and Development in
>Palestine; b) any special programs we may wish to undertake and with whom?
>
>Fouad Moughrabi
>Head, Department of Political Science, Public Administration and Nonprofit
>Management
>417 Fletcher Hall, Dept 6356
>615 MCallie Ave
>Chattanooga, TN 37403
>Tel.: 423-425-4231
>Fax: 423-425-2373

Opening Plenary
VIIth International Congress on Research in Science Teaching
Granada, Spain (2005)


Research for the Future of Science Education:
New Ways of Learning, New Ways of Living

Jay L. Lemke
University of Michigan
jaylemke@...


New information and communication technologies make it possible for students
to learn about science and about the natural world across multiple media and
multiple sites of learning. Research needs to help us understand better how
to help students integrate learning through text, spoken language, graphical
images, animations, audio, video, simulations, and three-dimensional models
and virtual worlds. We must also learn how to effectively link learning in
schools and other educational institutions with learning online, in nature,
at technological sites, and through internships. With these many new
possibilities, we need to re-examine the goals of science education. Should
they be the same for all? Should we focus science education more on social
issues and students' concerns? Can we make science education more democratic
and more politically progressive?


Re-engineering science education for the 21st Century

In the 21st century, what are the most important contributions which science
education can make to students and to society? How can we make science
education better serve the interests of all people? I will argue that
science education needs more wonder, more honesty, more humility, and more
real value for most students. For the youngest students, we must work to
create a more profound engagement with the wonder of natural phenomena. For
older students, we need to present a more honest picture of the harmful as
well as the beneficial uses of science. For all students, we should offer a
science education that makes science a true partner with other ways of
viewing the world and an essential contributor to students? general
multimedia literacy and critical thinking skills. I invite you to think with
me about how to make a new science education that will not be rejected by
the majority of students.

Science education research needs to re-direct its efforts toward better
understanding: (1) how emotional and intellectual engagement with the wonder
of natural phenomena combine in younger and older students; (2) how to
promote critical thinking about the harmful as well as the beneficial uses
of scientific knowledge; (3) how to present scientific ways of knowing as
constructive partners with other human ways of knowing; and (4) how science
education can make essential contributions to students? general multimedia
literacy and critical thinking skills. We need to focus more of our research
on learning how to increase the value of science education for those many
students who have no special interest in scientific and technical careers.
We need more attention to learning that will last a lifetime, learning that
demystifies quantitative reasoning, and learning that provides the keys to
thinking with multiple representations for our new multimedia world.

Aims and Goals of Science Education: Fundamentals

Any serious consideration of how we might fundamentally change science
education for the 21st century needs to begin with some larger questions
concerning its goals. The goals of science education need to be formulated
within the context of our larger goals for education in general, and our
definition of what will make for a better society and a better life for all
people. The goals of science education cannot be merely technical. It cannot
be our only purpose to provide skilled workers and educated consumers for a
global economy that students have not learned to intelligently critique. So
let me state briefly some of my own core beliefs about the social goals of
education.

Education must aim to contribute to the improvement of social life: To give
more people in the world a better opportunity for a better life and to
safeguard minimum standards of social welfare for all. To learn to take a
global and not only a local or national perspective; indeed to place the
local and the global above the regional or national interest. Education must
also contribute to better lives for students, across the needs of many
nations and many social classes. A better life for those most in need means
provision for health, education, basic necessities, protection from
disaster, insurance against disaster, hope. For those who have these basics,
it means greater opportunities to develop their skills and talents and to
use them in the service of a harmony between global society and the rest of
our planet?s ecosystem.

How can we translate these broad goals to more specific aims for science
education across the years of schooling and learning? Here is one beginning
of an answer:

For all young children ? to appreciate and value the natural world, enhanced
by understanding, but without removing the mystery, curiosity, and magic
For middle years children ? to develop a more specific curiosity about how
technologies and the natural world works, how to design and create things,
how to nurture and care for things, basics about human health
For secondary school ? to open the potential career path to science and
technology for all, to provide information about the scientific view of the
world that is of proven usefulness for most citizens, to give some sense of
the role of science and technology in social life, to help develop skills of
complex logical reasoning and use of multiple representations, and for those
who wish it: (a) a less intensive path that keeps open the option for a
science or technology specialization, (b) a more intensive path for those
who have already decided they wish to follow this path in university or
advanced technical education

Across all the years of schooling, we also need to take science out of its
isolation. We need:

To teach for a science that tells wonderful stories about the natural world
and helps us understand and create useful and marvelous technologies that do
the least harm to people, society and the environment.
To place more emphasis on the unity of science and technology and less on
purely abstract principles, until students have selected such an emphasis
for advanced study.
To teach science in closer relation to mathematics, history, literature,
economics, politics, and moral values.
To eliminate claims that science is the one, best way of knowing, which
often alienate many students from science.
To admit to the historical complicity of science with immoral military,
political, and commercial projects and seek to change the nature and
direction of science in the future to make such complicity less likely.
To teach for a science that strives to be a good global citizen with humane
moral values.

Beyond trying to define a set of goals, about which we can and should have
intelligent and serious conversations and even disagreements, we need to
become better critics of our own work. For too long now, others have
criticized us more than we have criticized ourselves. Better than any
others, we know the shortcomings of the work of science education, and we
need to discuss them more publicly and take action to change what we can
change.

Among current criticisms of science education in the United States and a
number of other advanced societies, I would identify the following as
especially important and troubling:

That its content emphasis is too abstract for most students
That its content selection has no empirical claim to usefulness for
nonspecialists
That it is designed far too much to train future technical workers
That it is boring and alienating for too many students
That it has the character of a compulsory activity and not a self-determined
activity
That it seeks to impose a particular way of thinking as superior
That it is shallow and superficial across all topics
That it insists that all students learn the same content, in the same way,
at the same rate
That it puts no emphasis on creativity, moral concerns, historical
development, or social impact
That it neglects the affective and emotional dimensions of learning
That it projects an inhumane image of science as not concerned with the
common cares and interests of most people and existing apart from the lives
of people who do science as well as those who use it and are affected by it



Proposals for Action

Having presented ambitious goals and serious criticisms of our work, I feel
a responsibility to present some initial proposals for action. After stating
these proposals, I will provide a more extended analysis of some of the
assumptions that lie behind them, and their implications for future research
on science education.

Let young children experience science mainly through nature study, working
with live higher animals, and reading or hearing wonderful stories about the
natural world and technological achievements

Let all students freely choose projects that have a science component and be
supported to conduct free and independent inquiry, alone or in pairs or
small groups, over extended periods of time (longer than one year for older
students).

Let students experience the reality of science and technology by regular
visits to laboratories, factories, generating stations, nature sites, zoos,
aquariums, and other sites where science and technology are visibly in use,
from the basement of the school to regional centers. Let them experience not
just the didactic displays, but the behind the scenes work that really uses
science and in some cases helps develop science.

Support students to explore in online communities and with online resources
that give information about scientific, environmental and technological
topics, and make this part of their total science education, with
school-based learning one important component but not the sole or central
focus of concern for science educators and government support.

Let older students learn from internships in organizations where science and
technology are central to the activities of the organization.

Let students have direct online relationships with adults who do science and
use science and technology as a key part of their work and lives, across a
wide range of careers and activities.

Let younger and older students work and learn together, breaking down the
un-natural segregation of students by age, and promoting cross-age learning

Support students to apply their scientific and technological knowledge to
practical problems in their lives and local communities and to take interest
and action in relation to larger society concerns where science and
technology are central parts of understanding and responding to issues.

Eliminate, once and for all, from all but the most advanced scientific
education, the assumption that learning abstract principles and
decontextualized information will lead to practical applications of
knowledge or even enable such applications for most students.

Recognizing the importance of language as the primary medium for reasoning
and conceptualization in science, help students to reason more effectively
about scientific and technological issues also in more quantitative ways
using both algebraic and graphical tools as well as numerical examples. Do
this in the most concrete and contextualized ways possible, and not as
abstract procedures or the solving of artificial problems.

Support students in reasoning about natural and technical phenomena through
integrated combinations of linguistic, mathematical, and visual tools,
including computer models, simulations, and interactive-immersive
environments, but always directly linked to concrete real-world experience
and in-depth work on particular topics or issues.

At the same time, recognize the importance of narrative as a medium of
communication and learning and restore it to a place of honor and prominence
in science education.

Explore the potential of other forms of language, such as dialogue and
poetic diction, as effective media for learning about the natural and
technical world. Explore other forms of visual and audiovisual media, such
as three-dimensions interactive, immersive computer simulation and gaming
worlds for their value as well.

Eliminate once and for all the assumption that science education beyond the
early childhood years can ignore the emotional and affective dimensions of
learning; make the learning of science a subject about which students are
enthusiastic and which they enjoy emotionally as well as intellectually ? by
whatever means are necessary.

I have based these proposals on several considerations. Some concern our new
understanding of the nature of learning. Others concern the role of science
and science education in society, historically, at the present, and for the
future.


New Views of the Nature of Learning

Our best understanding of how people learn has changed a great deal in the
last few decades. Let me summarize what I see as some of the most important
new principles to guide education:

Learning takes place on multiple timescales, from moments to lifetimes. Some
learning that takes minutes becomes part of habits that last days, or years,
but most does not. Students need to learn how to cumulate and internalize
for the longer term more what they learn in the short term. They need to
work on extended projects that afford opportunities for what was learned
before to be used in what is being done now.

Learning takes place across multiple sites. If something learned in one time
and place is to become part of our habits of action more widely, then it
needs to be carried over from one place to another, one task to another, one
activity to another, and these cannot be restricted to schools and
classrooms. Students? learning needs to extend across classrooms and
laboratories, online environments and natural settings, places of work and
sites of community activity.

Learning takes place across multiple media. If language is one primary
medium for learning, whether from conversations or books, it is far from the
only one. We also learn from visual representations of many kinds (drawings,
diagrams, graphs, maps, photos, films and video, 3D simulations, etc.), both
static and dynamic. And we learn from observing and participating in
activities, which are themselves structured in many ways like language (i.e.
they form semiotic systems). Most of all, we learn by integrating meanings
across all of these modalities, combining text and image, activities and
summaries, narratives and observations. This integration is not automatic or
natural, it is culturally specific and must be taught and learned.

Learning is a natural and inevitable part of lifelong human development. You
cannot not learn from everything you do. All that is at stake is what you
learn from activity and how past learning affects future action. Students
who learn very little of the content of the curriculum in school still learn
a great deal about how to play the ?game of school?, about social life among
their peers, and much else that we generally ignore. Students are always
learning, but not always learning what we want them to learn.

Learning takes place most naturally in mixed-age communities, where younger
and older learn from one another, and more generally in diverse communities,
where we learn how to learn with and from one another across divisions of
age, gender, culture, social background, etc.

Learning is not fundamentally the acquisition of abstract and general
principles, but the development of concrete habits and strategies, some more
tacit, some more explicit and reflective, for using a range of tools, from
levers and microscopes to formulas and graphs, for relatively specific tasks
in particular contexts.


Science Education and the Needs of Society

Current science education is largely a product of the desire of governments
and corporations to produce a more technologically and scientifically
literate workforce for commercial and military enterprises. As such it has
not been designed for success in educating more than a small fraction of the
population.

Current science education has become far too isolated from the everyday life
concerns of students of all ages and also from the larger moral and social
concerns of older students.
At the same time, various historical trends defining social privilege and
status have led to the incorrect view that abstract learning is more noble
than practical and concrete learning and that it is also more effective as a
basis for practical activity. Current science education suffers greatly from
this ideology.

The opportunistic basis of government support for science education tends to
reproduce the artificial divide between science learning and learning in the
humanities and the arts, and learning about society itself, including its
history, laws, economics, and politics. National pride, and elite
self-interest, have also worked to render invisible the dark side of human
history and the dark side of the history of science, its long complicity
with inhumane commercial and military projects. Without a commitment to
honesty and reconciliation in the relations of our view of science to our
view of the rest of human life, science education cannot succeed in engaging
most students with science learning in a positive way. We must honest face
the fact that many students today, at least after the age of primary school,
have a negative attitude to science and many of its technologies.

Many of our students are idealistic and altruistic in their basic social
views. They see a world rife with injustice and the horrendous consequences
of prolonged injustice. There are also many global problems they will not
see unless we teach them how to see them. Science education, in order to
capture the imagination and loyalty of students, and in order to deserve
their commitment to learning what we have to teach, needs to orient itself
toward social issues and social problems, not toward teaching abstract
conceptual principles of dubious practical usefulness or skills needed for
technical occupations.

Three great issues I believe will dominate the century ahead for all of
humanity:

We are already on the cusp of a global environmental crisis of unimaginable
proportions, which governments and commercial interests blindly and
self-interestedly deny. Changes in fundamental understanding and attitudes
to the relation of our species to the rest of the planetary ecology are
needed and science education must re-orient its priorities in this
direction.

Global social injustice in the distribution of wealth and resources will
create intolerable conditions for all peoples in all nations as the
justifiable anger of exploited people turns to acts destabilizing the
comfortable societies which benefit from these injustices. Science education
must orient itself towards the role of science and technology in these
issues and their resolution by preparing citizens to understand them.

The last invisible form of oppression and injustice in global society is the
power relationships that give the middle-aged (or in some few societies,
those still older) unjust privileges relative to younger citizens and in
many cases also relative to our eldest citizens. New technological changes
in the means of production will shift economic power toward much younger
citizens and they will launch a political movement for their just rights.
Much of education today, including science education, labors under the
burden of an ideology of false beliefs about the incompetence of the young.
Science education must seek a new respect for and work to more effectively
empower young learners who are still denied the rights of full citizenship
and are treated by most schools as lacking in all fundamental citizen
rights.

In all these respects, science education must take political and moral
stands -- or else in the judgment of its students today and tomorrow, and in
the judgment of history and humanity in decades to come, we will be found to
have been as blind and socially irresponsible as the educators who came
before us who did not oppose imperialism, colonialism, slavery, or the
oppression of women, who did not prepare citizens to criticize levels of
sanitation, industrial pollution, or basic health care, deforestation,
over-fishing, or the creation and use of biological, chemical, and nuclear
weapons of mass destruction. These issues were never on the agenda of
science education in the past, and it is to our shame that they were not.

Who will history blame if citizens do not understand the risks of private
ownership of the genetic endowment of humanity and other species? Who will
history blame if global environmental catastrophes occur that could have
been avoided by the political action of a better educated citizenry?

What will be the attitude of the neglected peoples of the world toward a
science education that turned a blind eye to their needs and to the role of
science in their exploitation, when they who are the global majority
eventually force their will to prevail in history?

What will be the attitude of the young whom we treat as mentally deficient
and without rights or respect in our schools and science classrooms, when
they are earning more money than we are and making their voices and votes
heard regarding future policy for science education?

If this last dimension seems elusive or puzzling, imagine that you were
teaching science education to influential adults in the community. Would you
design a curriculum without consulting them at all about their interests?
Would you insist that they all learned what you specified, in the way you
specified, at the time and the pace you specified, without any consideration
for their individual preferences for learning? Would you deny them the
opportunity to undertake science learning projects of their own and fail to
support them in these endeavors over extended periods of time? Would you
teach them superficial bits and pieces of mostly useless knowledge rather
than giving them in-depth understanding of particular valuable topics and
problems? And if you did, what would they do? Would they not look for
another teacher or another school? Would they not take their money and
resources and come together to support alternative institutions that would
be of more value to them in their learning? And would not our students do
this too if they only had the resources and the freedom to do so?

If we do not design science education for our students as if their desires
and preferences matter, is it not because we have been taught to see
students, even those who are biologically adult (at age 12 for most today),
or with many legal rights in progressive societies such as Spain (at age
15), as mysteriously infantile, irresponsible, and incompetent? And is this
not the basis for a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby our expectations and
treatment of the young encourages just these kinds of behavior?
Developmental biologists will tell you that juveniles of all species are
well-adapted to learning how to deal with their environments. For homo
sapiens, they are better, faster learners than we are, at almost any task
for which they have basic preparation.

This issue becomes more severe as our students become the young adults whom
society refuses to recognize as adults. Our society deliberately
infantilizes young adults in order to retain adult privilege and power over
them, for they are seen as a dangerous and potentially destabilizing force
in many societies. For centuries society did the same with regard to women,
if for slightly different reasons (exploitation of their unpaid labor or
sexual vulnerability), and historically we have held the same ideological
false beliefs about serfs, slaves, workers, most non-European peoples, and
even many poorer or more agrarian European peoples). None of these false
beliefs were contradicted by the voice of science until after changes in the
balance of political power. Will we wait for that to happen once again?

It may be the case that children below the age of four or five years are
relatively unable to participate in the structuring of their educations, but
this is not empirically established. It is certainly true that students from
the ages of twelve to eighteen are able and interested in having more of a
say in what and how they learn. From the age of six to eleven, we can assume
there is a growing ability to form more equal partnerships with teachers, if
we would encourage students in this and help them learn how to do so. If we
would teach them more of the skills of independent judgment and independent
learning.

Our present educational system of age-grading, or segregation by age,
justified today by relatively questionable evidence about developmental
readiness for different kinds of learning, was originally instituted because
younger and older students worked altogether too well with another ? in
planning and executing rebellions against their schoolmasters. What was then
a strategy of divide and conquer to maintain the power of the masters has
become today an obstacle to cross-age learning and learning in naturally
age-diverse groups and communities.

Science education is not alone in laboring under these cultural biases. But
science educators claim to be guided by rational principles and systematic
empirical evidence that challenges conventional wisdom and seeks
theoretically-guided ways of finding alternatives. By and large we have not
done this with regard to either the belief that our students are incapable
of having a greater voice in their own educations in science, nor with
regard to the equally unfounded cultural bias that favors teaching through
abstract principles rather than teaching through concrete experience and
specific issues. We have watched the light of wonder fade from the eyes of
our youngest students, to be replaced in all too many cases by boredom,
alienation, resistance, or a cooperative docility.

Yes, we are proud of the exceptions. The classes and activities where
students become for a time genuinely engaged. The few students whose
interest in science grows year by year. But for the most part these
instances are not typical. Schooled adults today are not for the most part
scientifically literate or prepared for technical careers. They are not
prepared to make intelligent personal or political decisions about medical
or technological issues. Their early wonder at the miraculous phenomena of
nature has not been nurtured or supported to develop in some direction that
might continue with them for the rest of their lives.

I do not believe, after more than 30 years in science education and
educational research, that we are going to succeed where past generations
have failed, unless we make major and fundamental changes in our approach to
science education. We must change the goals to better fit with student
interests and social issues. We must change the methods to support student
learning across multiple sites and multiple media. We must change the
curricula to support more in-depth study of fewer, more concrete topics.
Above all, we must change our own attitudes and beliefs, allowing us to make
our students as much equal partners in the design of their educations as
they truly can be.

For all these changes, much research is needed. Many alternative paths must
be explored and reported on for the benefit of the teaching-and-learning
community. I do not believe in a ?science of learning? in the same sense as
a science of electromagnetism. People are not the same sorts of natural
phenomena as electrons. Electrons are all alike; if you know how one
behaves, you know how they all behave. They have no memory, no history, no
culture, no processes of interpreting the meaning of their environments.
They have no emotions, no likes and dislikes. We can generalize about them
because they have no individuality. In the case of many more complex natural
phenomena, we can also generalize about them to the extent that the ways in
which they are alike are more important for our purposes than the ways in
which they are different.

I do not believe that the best education for every student is the same
education. I believe that the most important thing about educating a student
is the way in which his or her education is different from, not the same as,
the education of other students. I do not believe that all students need to
know the same things, at least not beyond the most basic content of primary
education. If there are truly fundamental principles in science, then the
extended study of any few topics in science will eventually bring students
into contact with those principles. (And if not, then they were not really
so fundamental, were they?)

We live in a society which tries to do mass education on the cheap. We
inherit a system of schooling and curricula that is based on the mass
production model of the factory assembly line. We know that system does not
work well for most students. We know that it places intolerable burdens on
too many teachers. We know that it is not a humane way to approach to
upbringing of the young. It does not send to our children the message that
we really care about them as individual people. It does not feel right. Why
should successfully educated adults spend so little time mentoring the next
generation and so much of their lives making profits for the owners of
large-scale enterprises? Why should society invest more resources in the
production and marketing of goods than in the education of its people?

Science alone will not make the world a better place. Learning the results
and methods of scientific research will not in itself help students make
better lives for themselves. We must all learn to understand how science and
science education can help us help ourselves. Science education still has a
great potential for good, but only if we take the true path of science
ourselves, rejecting what has been and exploring together new ways of
thinking, teaching, and learning.

_________________________________________________________________
Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/