During the week, I met a lot of people and made connections/friends with teachers who have shared interests. One of those was Philippa Clymo, a 5/6 teacher from Tasmania who had received a Hardie Fellowship to study STEM learning abroad for two and a half months. (She is keeping a blog of her experiences; the link is here.)
With her permission, I have some quotes from her blog that I have wanted to think more deeply about.
Physics and earth science are pretty easy to integrate with engineering design tasks, by their very similarity. I wonder whether the process is so applicable to many of the biology, chemistry and space sciences. There are some SLED units for these, but I reckon they may not really help with quite a bit of the Australian Curriculum for those subjects.
Or the American ones, either. While what we did this past week was enjoyable and I learned much about engineering design, I, too, wondered about how the process could apply to other sciences. So, as an example, I looked at my unit on Oceans where so many things are wrapped into one - ecology, environments, ecosystems, water systems, tides/gravity, marine life, and so on. It is a very broad unit, so perhaps adding in the design aspect will not be so hard (I am thinking about the lesson plans they gave us on erosion which would dovetail nicely.)
But what about chemistry? Where the focus is on the experiment and manipulating materials looking for a desired outcome? There are no lesson plans from SLED for that, and I have not been able to think of any. So the SLED process may not work for all aspects of science learning.
My biggest concern as the week rolled on, though, was that it seemed that the design process was overshadowing the science inquiry part of the learning. Philippa had similar concerns.
I had an interesting talk with Brenda Capobianco, Co-Leader of the SLED program, about the balance between engineering and science in the SLED units, and she explained that engineering is a recent addition to the Indiana curriculum, so there’s been a conscious aim when developing the units to support teacher learning in engineering by focusing on this part of the SLED activities. Perhaps in Tasmania, where engineering is also only just being added to the Australian Curriculum, we will need to do the same for a while. However, I know that many teachers are still lacking confidence and skills in teaching science, despite its having been in the Australian Curriculum for nearly four years. So perhaps a case should be made for supporting both areas equally. I would argue that for science to be taught well teacher knowledge and understanding still need to be a prerequisite even though engineering is also being introduced.
Absolutely! Now, if I can speak out of the OTHER side of my mouth, in the SLED staff's defense, I do understand that they have time constraints in which to disseminate the process to the teachers. And, the design process is newer to most of us than scientific inquiry. It's possible that, had we met for longer than a week, more of the inquiry process would have been taught and modeled.
Similarly, it’s interesting to consider the place of design and inquiry in the SLED resources. The former is given the major profile, and the latter is barely covered. Science understanding (content) is covered, but there’s little in the SLED units that would support the Science Inquiry Skills substrand of the Australian Curriculum, or the Science as a Human Endeavour substrand. Again, I think this is partly because of the aim to support the newer engineering curriculum in Indiana. However, I wonder if it’s also partly motivated because the design process is more concrete and accessible as an idea than the more complex and abstract idea of hypothesis and fair test. Maybe it’s therefore easier for teachers to grasp intuitively and use? Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should not teach inquiry – on the contrary, I believe you can’t teach or understand science without it. But it may be harder than teaching and using design practices…
This is an excellent point. Teachers are squeezed for time, trying to get everything in that must be taught. At times it is quite a struggle. If something that must be taught is more easily presented a certain way, it is logical that a teacher use that option. With that in mind, I can see the scientific inquiry portion overlooked. And that, in my opinion, is not a good direction. BOTH the inquiry and the design process are critical components of the learning process, and neither should overshadow the other in importance.
Now my task is to apply what I have learned, keeping these insights in mind, and working to ensure that both aspects, the scientific inquiry as well as the engineering design, are incorporated and given equal weight.
