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Date: December 9, 2009

Title: Teaching Science in Schools

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Podcaster: Manoharan Karthigasu

Organization: www.creativethinklabs.com

Description: Interest in science related subjects in schools as well in Universities has been slowly declined over the years. Why is this so? Maybe it has something to do with the way we teach Science in schools. If so how can we as teachers rekindle this passion?

This podcast is dedicated to my lovely kids Ynez and Kieron , may your learning be filled with wondering and imagination.

Bio: Married with two lovely kids and currently teaching Mathematics in an International School in Jakarta (SinarMas World Academy), Indonesia. Avid fan of astronomy and trying to do my bit in getting children interested in it.

Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, celebrating Five Decades of Training Young Scientists through summer programs. Explore the hidden universe in radio at www.nrao.edu.

Transcript:

Way back in 1987, while I still was in high school I came across a very interesting edition of the Time Magazine with a picture of a frail looking man in a wheelchair touted as the next brilliant Einstein. Deeply intrigued, I bought the magazine and started reading the pages on Hawking Radiation and Time Horizons. Not understanding a word I was reading, I brought the magazine to my Physics teacher to have him read it and maybe explain it to me. He came back the next day saying he didn’t have a clue what it was about (well that’s another story). The subjects of discussion were too interesting for me to just let them go. Big Bang, violent death of stars, duality of light; heck these ideas and phenomena were more interesting than my Physic lessons! Hence began my love for astronomy and cosmology. The first related book I read was Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’. It changed the way I looked at the world forever. Though I personally never pursued a career in these fields directly, my passion for science has never dwindled. Once I caught myself explaining with great enthusiasm about violent death of stars and the Chandrasekhar Limits to Grade 3 kids. I think I scared them!

Working as an educator, one thing is for certain; both from personal experiences and educational science journals, students’ interest in science and mathematics has been slowly declining leading to lower enrollments in sciences even in Universities. It pains me to see Middle School and High School kids cringing as they go to their Science lessons. Why is this so when we live in an exiting time of discovery with many questions left unanswered? I believe it has a lot to do with the way Science is being taught in schools. A recent report by Lyons, published in 2006 described school science as such:
♣ Transmission of knowledge from teacher or the textbook to the students (our opinions are not involved)
♣ About content that is irrelevant and boring to our lives; and
♣ Difficult to learn in comparison to other subjects

Sometimes science is merely taught to help students prepare for test. Textbooks and past year papers dominates students’ science. In such cases, science is usually presented as a body of knowledge – facts to be memorized, equations to be solved, concepts to be understood, and discoveries to be admired. But this approach can give students two misleading impressions. One is that science is about what we already know. The way it is being taught in schools inclines students to think that that almost everything had already been discovered. But in fact, science – as the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote – creates an “expanding frontier of ignorance,” where most discoveries lead to more questions. Try telling that to students when they have 4 term tests a year and countless quizzes.

The second misconception that comes from the “facts, facts, facts” mode of teaching science is the impression that scientific discovery progresses as an orderly, logical manner; that each new discovery points more or less unambiguously to the next. But in reality, while some scientific work does involve the slow, brick-by-brick accumulation of evidence, much of it requires leaps of imagination and daring speculation. Some of our greatest of scientist dared to venture beyond safety areas of inquiry and even risked being labeled as insane; Einstein, Copernicus and Bohr to name a few. Yet it is this same mentality that is needed for great science, which we inadvertantly squash at schools.

In general, our ability to make scientific discoveries can be limited in a number of fundamental ways. One is time: it’s hard to do good experiments that last for more than a few weeks. Experiments that run for years are rare; as a result, we know relatively little about long, slow processes. Another constraint is money; a third is ethics (some experiments that would be interesting to do are ethically challenging to implement). Some questions remain uninvestigated because no one stands to profit from the answers. Still others are neglected because they are perceived to have no obvious bearing on human health or welfare, the areas of research are unfashionable or not in trend, or the appropriate tools haven’t been invented yet. Some problems are overwhelmingly complex like string theories.

But there’s one way in which we should not be limited: imagination. As Einstein put it, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” The question is do we as teachers give students the license to wonder, to imagine and ask difficult questions.

If we think about it, science pretty much originated with the ancients looking up the heavens in awe. Of course, initially much of the observed phenomena were thought to be from magic. When the weather turns bad, the gods must be at war. It took pre and post Platonic philosophers to gradually challenge these ideas. Many ideas were brought forth; some were proved to be wrong later on. Others, like the hypothesis of the existence of “atom” were revived later in the 17th century. The rest of the atomic story, as we know, is history. If astronomy had the power to make men wonder and seek answers, why shouldn’t it do the same today, in our classrooms?

Project Relevance of Science Education Project in London (ROSE) asked students if they were scientist what research will they undertake. Most chose the field of medicine in finding cures to diseases. But the close-second most popular choice was research of space, stars, planets, black holes and space travel. Astronomy has an intriguing appeal to students’ interest. Even my 5-year-old son has been learning a bit about the solar system and he his completely hooked. He wants to know more. I am bringing all kinds of books on astronomy home just to satisfy his appetite as we discuss and wonder together. Through it we do numbers, reading, history and whatever else that he needs to do to fulfill his school curriculum. Guess what is his favourite show? “The Clone Wars”. A while ago I asked my students whether any these names bears any significance to them: Opportunity, Spirit, Cassini, Huygens, New Horizon, Messenger? Sadly after some prompting and context building, most of them had not the faintest idea what these were, nor at that time were they curious and risk-taking enough to venture some guesses.. When we are busy doing curricula, often current science gets squeezed out.

Astronomy has a tremendous potential to ignite students’ interest in Science. Astronomy is perhaps the best science for teaching children. Astronomy-themed learning projects can help teach children not only astronomy but also many other subjects; reading, writing, math, history, geometry, chemistry, art, and photography to name a few. Almost any area of knowledge can be integrated into a children’s astronomy class or workshop. Children are not only learning the fascinating subject of astronomy that has engaged children of all ages for centuries – the solar system, the planets, the stars, the nebula, the comets, the galaxies, the spaceships and space marvels, the telescopes. In the search for subjects that will inspire young people, astronomy and space come through again and again at the top. They are interested in questions such as ”What happened before the big bang?” “Does life exists on other planets?”, or “what happens when a supernova explodes?” or “Is what depicted in the movie 2012 really going to happen?!” So here we have a subject that can drive forward an interest in science, whether as a career or for a lifetime interest.

As we celebrate the anniversary of the day Galileo pointed his telescope to the heavens and opened up an amazing journey for all of us, let us once again look up to the heavens and use astronomy as a catalyst to show young people how to wonder and wander beyond their wildest imagination.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the New Media Working Group of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow…goodbye.