This morning I woke up thinking about all of the literature I 've read and I know I needed to start listening to the recordings of the teaching sessions and apply the ideas I've compiled to the data I've collected. So I pulled up my lit review and my old journal of literature and ideas and started thinking about them again. I am playing the recordings and listening as I review the ideas. I'm listening to a lesson of a teacher presenting a lesson on immunology. I notice that it pretty much fits the description of what we discussed in our focus group lessons. Mostly just questions from the students to clarify what is being taught. I hear the teacher repeatedly asking if the students have any questions and the silence that follows. The teacher then asks how many in the class have done their reading. One person responds. I know from the focus groups that this particular teacher attributes the lack of discursive exchange to the fact that students are not prepared for a discussion. They do not read or do homework so they have nothing to discuss. This makes perfect sense and is true. So now the question becomes - how can we get them to prepare for these discussions? Which keeps bringing us back to the issue of culture. Who in the world is going to prepare for a discussion about immunology in the current culture? I read something that is informative to this scenario.
A sociocultural perspective on science and mathematics education is skeptical and critical. The proposed study adopts the sociocultural perspective. Its most basic belief is that we do not know why we act as we do; we only know a few local reasons on a certain time scale and within a limited range of contexts. In the sociocultural view, what matters to learning and doing science is primarily the socially learned cultural traditions of what kinds of discourses and representations are useful and how to use them, far more than whatever brain mechanisms may be active while we are doing so. Unlike the better known theories of formal linguistics, social and functional linguistics regards our use of language as a socially and culturally contextualized meaning-making, in which language plays the part of a system of resources for meaningful verbal action (Lemke, 2000). In this way, use of language can be viewed as an aspect of a science students’ developing identity.
Lemke used the phrase "socially learned cultural traditions". What a phrase. It really embodies all that I see taking place. The teacher has an understanding of what is socially acceptable and appropriate for a person that seeks to understand immunology. This can be applied to any topic, but I'll go with this because that is the lesson I happen to be listening to. If you want to understand how the immune system works, you read about it before class, you listen to a discussion led my the instructor. You ask questions about any points that were unclear and are still unclear after having listened to the instructor. You write down not only what is on the board, but what is discusses orally, and you complete some sort of questions assigned as a review of the content. From our focus group discussions and countless discussions I've had with students through the years, this way of learning is pretty much obsolete. It is expected that the teachers will assign this work. It is accepted that this is the routine for learning. However - in a bizarre manner - students have made it clear that this method of learning is not something that they will participate in. Reading a science text book is just not going to happen. As a matter of fact, the world outside of science class and the world inside don't seem to touch each other at all. This also showed up in my literature.
What is largely absent from the literature is the experiential perspective of a student who spends most of every day, before and after science class, in other subject-area classes, in social interactions in school but outside the curriculum, and in life outside school. Much of the current conversation about the identity that students develop in the science classroom seems to frame the few minutes of the science lesson as having the ability to somehow create an isolated and nearly autonomous learning universe, ignoring the sociocultural reality that students’ beliefs, attitudes, values, and personal identities-all of which are critical to their achievement in science learning-are formed along trajectories that pass only briefly through our classes (Lemke, 2000). The direction of the thinking about this situation then shifts to connecting the world outside of the science classroom to the world inside. That can only be accomplished by changing the homework to applying what happens inside of the classroom to what is going on outside. So you read the book in order to design a study to apply to the outside world. You redefine homework. I remember taking immunology in grad school and it was pretty tough. Physiology was pretty difficult as well. I think I took that class twice. Animal Physiology in undergrad and Human Physiology in grad school. I know what really got me to learn the stuff was application. But what is the hardest part of it - and what is really challenging is convincing students that the world inside of our classes and the world outside are really one and the same. I think where we fail is bridging those two worlds. It doesn't happen because of time constraints and resistance from students to participate. You can ask them to investigate any number of really interesting diseases and get into the morbidity and mortality weekly report and change the homework to introduce them to the world of disease investigation. But the bottom line is - we became science nerds because we had a certain personality and adopted the culture of science. Embraced it. Competed with each other to see who could be the best at it. We are a world apart from most of our students. I spent a significant amount of time with museum educators and sometimes I wish we had their mindset in the public school system. Make things interactive, give tons and tons of information, but make it participatory. But then again, museums aren't held accountable for state exams. So I suppose I end with this thought. Another key to unlocking discourse is making the outside world and the inside world come in contact with each other. And then striking up a conversation about it all the while encouraging the students to adopt our scientific language and culture.
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