Introduction

In 1980 in a gloomy mood after our first piece of research that revealed the extent of the inability of successful university science students to relate scientific knowledge to everyday related phenomena, I flew a kite in the ASERA conference at State College of Victoria labelled, A Research Base for New Objectives of Science Education. Three of the six new objectives that were tentatively proposed were :

(i) to introduce students to examples of how scientists have defined concepts in ways useful to them, but which conflict with commonsense experience and usage,

(iii) to enable students to recognise that scientists invent general concepts which idealise and oversimplify real substance and phenomena.

Encouraged by the discussion at ASERA, I then submitted a paper with the same title to Science Education where it was in due course published (Fensham,1983). International response to this paper was not great, but it was picked up at the time by some of the researchers I most respected in the alternative conceptions field. Over the years I have, in a number of science education contexts been so reminded of this gloomy paper, that last year when I was interviewed about the evolution of research in science education, I included this highly speculative paper as one of the "two or three of my most significant publications".

The flood of research findings in the decade that followed confirmed rather than negated the great difficulties we face in school Science in enabling the great majority of students, whether or not they are taking the more serious senior secondary sciences, to understand what those aspects that we generally describe as the Nature of Science. This includes how scientists go about exploring, describing and explaining the physical and biological world, how they associate phenomena with theory, how general principle relate to particular cases and can be used to sole practical problems, etc, etc..

Furthermore, we are all now much more aware that almost all the assessment regimes in schooling encourage student learning in school Science that is quite antithetical to the nature of Science itself. They encourage a type of student we are all familiar with but to whom Larson (1995) in a recent paper gave the name of Fatima. He described this un-scientific behaviour in school Science as Fatima's Rules. It could have been Amy's Rules (or countless other names), because Shapiro (1988) described just the same behaviours in Amy, the top student in the class she observed so insightfully in the mid-1980s.

On this same distortion of Science in schooling,Herschbach, the 1986 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, sighed as he reflected on the insistence in school Science on right answers, when the fascination in Science, for both its researchers and those who apply its knowledge, has always been on not knowing the answer and the search to find one (Fensham,1992).

In the face of the educational difficulties I was beginning to realise in 1980 are associated with the educational task of inducting students at school into Science in its richest senses, what I was trying to suggest in the "new objectives" were more modest tasks. If it was so hard to get students to change their thinking so that they became like a scientist, perhaps it would be easier to affirm the commonsense ways people think about natural phenomena, and simply let them become aware of, rather than embrace, the alternative way that scientists look at the same phenomena.

Whether these are more modest educational tasks or not, I now believe that my objectives of 1980 are related to what is probably the most exciting politico-educational challenges science educators in general now face. In New Zealand and Canada and to a lesser extent Australia, a politico-cultural aspect of these challenges is also now being recognised, and this Seminar directly relates to this aspect.

Furthermore, I believe that an open consideration of how this cultural aspect of indigenous knowledge about Nature should be handled in schooling could have relevance to that earlier challenge to school Science presented increasingly through the 1980s by the Girls and Science and Technology (GASAT) movement, but which seems now to have somewhat stalled in the 1990s. Finally, I will argue that a resolution of the issues of indigenous knowledge and schooling may be a way forward to achieving my "new objectives" in schooling.

Some years ago there was an exhibition at Monash University of seascapes by Fred Williams, the painter. Most of them were very wide and very short - say 1.5 to 2 m wide and only 30 cm high. It appears he had painted on the beach looking at the sea meeting the land, whereas almost all other painters set out to capture the land (and particularly cliffs and headlands or harbours) meeting the sea. The results of these two views across the same border are dramatically different.

In 1991 the World Council of Churches held its Seventh Assembly in Canberra. The theme had been chosen eight years before in Vancouver at the previous Assembly. It was Come Holy spirit - Renew the Whole Creation. This was the first time the WCC had had an Assembly theme that addressed the Environmentale Problematique - the abiding dilemma for the world ever since it was first officially recognised at the 1972 Stockholm Conference of the United Nations on The Human Environment. It is interesting to note in passing that the now fashionable but confusing phrase "ecologically sustainable society" first emerged in 1974 at a WCC Working Party on Science and Technology for Human Development.

The responsibility for the preparation for the Canberra theme was given to the existing Commission of the WCC on Peace and Justice. This Commission was asked to add the Environment to their concerns. There were also, however, a series of less official meetings of groups who saw the Environment as the primary issue. The official group was essentially anthropo-centric in its perspective while the unofficial ones were nature-centred. The former saw the environmental issues of our time as subsidiary and consequential to the very great human issues of peace and social justice. For example, the rain forests in Brazil might be traded for Third World debts. Whereas the latter groups identified themselves more easily with the 1990's Conference of Indigenous People in Norway when it stated :

"If we begin with the perception of ourselves as apart of the wholeness of creation, and if we understand justice as the practice of human beings in maintaining the inter-relatedness of all of creation, then peace will flow naturally".

The disjunction and struggle, as these two views across the border of the Environment sought to convince tha Assembly of what actions it should follow, were very evident. The contrast between the perspectives was heightened by the fact that the Organising Committee was making a serious attempt to include aboriginal Australia in the Assembly.

In the later 1980s, I slowly became aware of the differences of perspective when the same things in science education are viewed across different cultural borders. Boeha (1989), a physicist from Papua-New Guinea was writing his doctorate thesis at Monash on the conceptions of force, gravity and friction that were held among school and university science students in P-NG. I was curious that he had only found the same alternative conceptions of these ideas that had already been reported in studies in a number of Western countries. At that time we generally assumed these alternative ideas were most likely derived from out-of-school experiences or from commonsense descriptions (Fensham,1993). If this was so, why should Beno's respondents, with the very different social and cultural environments in which they had grown up report the same conceptions?

To pursue my curiosity, I pressed him to try to think of experiences in his own childhood that involved phenomena that would be described by Science in terms of the concepts he had been studying. His long and successful socialisation in school and university physics meant that this task of remembering was not easy, but eventually he came up with two examples that were so interesting that I insisted they be included in the introductory chapter of his thesis. One of them was about a canoe that was stuck in the sand on the beach and that his father asked him to push into the water. The description of the incident as he remembered it included a alternative conception, namely, that the boat had changed in weight, that has still not, I believe, been reported in the many ,many studies that have been conducted into conceptions in mechanics (see Pfundt and Duit, 1994). Here was a cultural border about which our present research tools in science education was leaving us unaware, a point to which I shall return later.

However, my comprehension of the magnitude of the issue came home to me more clearly in science education when the Australian Science Teachers Association held its annual conference in Alice Springs. Christie (1991), a New Zealander linguist, who is described in white society as the authority on one of the aboriginal languages in Arnhem Land gave the opening address on Aboriginal and Western Science. He began by acknowledging that 14 years with the Yirkalla community had given him a fluency in its language, but that he was quite lost at times when the elders were talking by the metaphors they used in their discourse. He gave us a number of illustrations of how the metaphors that are used in descriptions of a natural phenomenon can change not only our sense of it, but also the actions we, as humans, are likely to engage in relation to these aspects of the natural world.

One that I remember was the relation between mountains and rivers - incidentally, a well used topic in the recent Third International Science Study in both our countries. Western Science describes mountains or high ground as the source of rivers whereas the aboriginal elders describe the mountain as the mother of the river. Western scientists, he went on to say, smile at this human subjectivising of objective Nature. But when they go on to say they understand that the river becomes polluted when extensive logging erodes mountain sides when extensive logging occurs of its forests, but somehow their society does not have the will to stop it, it is the turn for the aborigines to smile. For the latter this dilemma is a natural consequence of not including the will in the analysis of the phenomenon and such inclusion is much more likely if the mountain is the mother of the river. To so damage the mother is quite obviously to damage the offspring river.

Christie also helped us to see the important obsession that Western Science has with separate building blocks, and with counting them. Aboriginal views start rather with relationships, and including all the sorts of relationships in the description is more integral to its completeness than how many of each there are. This difference reflects a dominant interest in Science in analysing Nature, whereas the aboriginal interest is in being part of a more total synthesis of Nature.

The distinction between the analytic view and the synthetic view has also been drawn by Layton (1988) in his attempts to characterise the differences between the sub-cultures of Science and Technology that should be drawn out in schooling. It certainly also relates to the different view environmental educators try to communicate when they use the terms "holistic" as well as "multi-disciplinary" to describe their perspective compared with Science's essentially disciplinary view.

"Science for All", "Science for All Americans", "Science for Every Student", and "Science is for Everybody" were but four slogan variations of the same common objectives for school Science that official reports and commissions in a number of countries called for in a spate of concern in the years between 1983 and 1990.

The Canadian Report, Science for Every Citizen, is indicative of these new found priorities for school science when it listed the following objectives ;

(Science Council of Canada, 1984)

Three of these four are concerned with the whole group of students at school, and only the second is exclusively concerned with the minority group of future scientists and technologists.

Yet I think it is not too harsh an evaluation of the current international school Science scene to say that only a few countries have made any progress towards these goals, and some others may be now further from them than they were five years ago. Elsewhere, I have argued that Canada is in the "some progress" category and Australia and New Zealand are in the "slipping backwards" category (Fensham, 1995).

When all these ambitiously inclusive reports were written there was no hint of the fact that the Science that would be needed to achieve these objectives might need to be different for these two groups. Recognition of this began to emerge later in the 1980s and some countries like Israel, Thailand and The Netherlands have embarked on curriculum projects to develop mandatory Science for so-called "non-Science" students in senior secondary schooling! Very interesting challenges to the established conceptual descriptions of school Science are emerging in these projects.

There was also in the reports no indication that out-of -school cultural experiences and descriptions of Science's phenomena may be powerful and resistant constraints on how well school Science could achieve any of these objectives. The decade that has followed has amply demonstrated these constraints. This lack of awareness in the reports of the role of sub-cultural factors in science education was due to assumptions their authors made about a homogeneity of emptiness in the thinking students brought to school Science, and to a complete assumption that Science itself was a trans-cultural aspect of social thought and action. Both of these assumptions have been strongly contested in the years since these reports. The varieties of commonsense knowledge about aspects of everyday life to which school Science relates have repeatedly been shown (not least by the very great contributions made by the Learning in Science Project at the University of Waikato) to conflict with the abstract generalisations of formal Science. For many out of school purpose the former are also more useful to the students.

A characteristic of commonsense knowledge is, however, that it lacks coherence. It has no underlying assumptions that can be used to define its boundary of application.

Likewise, a strong case has been mounted in feminist circles that Science has been formed in Western societies in a manner that is a reflection of men being the dominant determinants of the way society is organised. The conceptions this generates about human beings' ways of thinking about Nature (one form of which is Science), and the topics to which attention is given reflect this gender-biased situation (for example, Harding,1986). These criticisms of Science as we know them internationally through the biennial GASAT Conferences (since 1981) have been less successfull in offering answers to what a less gender-biased descriptions and explanations of the natural phenomena of Science would be like. This is understandably a very difficult task, since most of the leading critics in this field have themselves grown up and been educated within the dominant world view in which Science as it is today is so well established. There also seems to be a gap between the attention that has been drawn by science educators like Harding and Donaldson (1986)and Smail (1987)to the "nurturing" interests of students and similar possibilities in Science and the more comprehensive cosmological sense of nurture found in other feminist writers like McFague (1987).

Finally, the reports of the early 1980s completely ignored the place and worth of alternative world views of Nature that are well established among various cultural and sub-cultural groups in a number of parts of the world. The need to recognise these or at least some of them is increasingly being raised. One obvious arena for this is has been the medical one where considerable official ground has had to be given (under public pressure) to the place of traditional Chinese and other formulations of health and disease. Another related arena is that of food and nutrition, and there are others that intermingle spiritual dimensions with physical ones in ways that were common in established Science 100 or 200 years ago, but which have no place in the establishment of Science as it is known today. The questions this Conference is raising about the relationship and status of indigenous knowledge vis a vis Science were certainly not in the mind of those who set Scientific Literacy for All as a priority goal for school Science.

I will now turn to science education and try to make clear the links between the ideas of "border crossing" and Science for All that I see as emerging as exciting new possibilities. I will begin with an analogy that no doubt has limitations like all analogies, but it has been useful to me as I continue to think about the issues that make Science for All so hard to achieve.

A Possible Way Forward

One of the very established findings in the field of conceptual learning is that not-examples of the concept as well as examples of it are important facilitators of its learning. Bruner, in a number of studies in the 1960s, contributed to this finding in general, and Gardner (1972) and others showed its particular relevance to the learning of science concepts in school. The use of Venn diagrams in school Science education with their natural inner and outer regions that facilitate this finding in pedagogy has been publicised by White and Gunstone (1992) in their well known text, and by numerous practising teachers in the pages of their Science Teacher Associations' journals. One has, however, only to look at a few text books to see that this finding continues to be ignored in these influential sources of authority for school Science. Text book authors continue to assume the boundaries of a concept are self evident from its definition, or that not-examples are seen by their publishers as wasting space.

Another related finding comes from the more recent studies of the use of analogy as a common heuristic in school Science. This pedagogy has been shown to be a powerful aid to learning, but only when the analogy is used in a clearly comparative manner (Treagust et al, 1996). That is, the boundaries between the analogy and the phenomena that it is being related to must be sharply drawn. If this is not done, the learning becomes garbled and very often the student emerges with irrelevant features of the familiar analogy established in their minds as features of the phenomenon itself. The same can be said of the use of models in science teaching. A heuristic model, as Henry Bent, a great American teacher of chemistry, once argued must be good enough to alert students to an important feature of the phenomenon, but bad enough that they will never mistake it for the real thing.

Lemke (1990), a science educator who worked for a number of summers with Halliday's socio-linguistic group in Sydney, has done science education a helpful service by opening up the pedagogical implications of the different registers of language that science teachers commonly make use of in their classrooms. He has convincingly demonstrated that the blurring from one register to another that is so commonly the case among science teachers is a hindrance to learning rather than the help the teacher intends.

In summary, each of these disparate research findings indicates that some of the learning we are seeking in school Science can be encouraged and assisted by the use of a clearly defined comparison between what we are trying to teach in school Science and something else. These learnings are, however, about fragments of Science knowledge and not about the nature of Science itself.

Phelan et al's (1991) concept of students' multiple worlds and Giroux's (1992) notion of "border crossing" between cultures or sub-cultures when applied to schooling provide a very useful framework for thinking about how to help student learning in school Science. There is now a keen interest among science educators in the perspective that sees learning Science as cultural assimilation. Driver et al (1994) argued that learning Science as it is defined for schooling is "entering a new community of discourse, a new culture', because this Science is itself a sub-culture.

If we pursue these ideas, my analogies about learning aspects of this Science can be taken a step further. If we take the trouble to make students aware of the fact of which sub-culture we are in at this point in our lessons, and when we are crossing the border from it to another subculture there should be learning advantage. Furthermore, the comparison of the ways that things are seen and described differently in these two cultures will enrich the learning in and about both.

The alternative well developed world views that some ethnic sub-cultures have of natural phenomena could, I believe, provide the coherent comparison that would make clear to students the underlying characteristics of the Science world view we have so unsuccessfully been trying to teach. As I have indicated, some comparative teaching has been found useful in association with fragments of our teaching of Science, but we have never had a coherent alternative view against which to contrast and hence highlight the unique features of Science's contemporary use of empiricism, intuitive leaps, idealisation and generalisation of apparently disparate events, etc..

So we point out, for example, that the physicist's definition of Work as Force times Distance is difficult to apply to the experience of weight lifters at the top of the clean and jerk, or that some languages do not have two words for heat and burn which need to be distinguished in chemistry, or that the idea of an "ideal gas" is powerful even though no real gases are ideal, or that energy is conserved is a more important principle than the reality that energy is never conserved in real life. But these fragmentary comparisons do not begin to tackle the nature of Science. As I said earlier commonsense or everyday knowledge about natural phenomena lacks the coherence or epistemological qualities that might make this grander learning about Science possible.

One source of possible comparison for learning about the nature of Science is the history of Science. There has been a revival of interest in this field among science educators in the last six years, and I have seen some interesting material that a clever teacher might be able to use to underline the ways of thinking in contemporary Science by contrasting it with the "quaint" thought forms that were mainstream in Science in earlier centuries.

Stephen J Gould's (1987) book, Time's Arrow and Time's Cycle is a lovely example of why the latter was the dominant theory in geology until the beginning of this century. Again, I did research on nickel I was very aware that only just over 200 years ago the chemists of the day could not accept Cronsted's claim that he had discovered a new metal till after his death, because it would have meant 13 metals, and there could only be 12 because there were 12 signs of the zodiac!

My hunch is that the historic approach will not prove acceptable to today's science teachers for a number of good and bad reasons. Furthermore, such vignettes from what is indeed the History of Science as it has developed in Europe and the Western sphere of influence would not be helpful to those whose cultural history is quite different.it does not contribute to the needs of those members of today's sub-cultures who need if the social disadvantages many of them experience are to be overcome.

Another comparison that could be used in many countries, and certainly in Australia and New Zealand, is between Science and Indigenous Knowledge of the type we are discussing in this Conference. Such a comparison of these two powerful and established world views about Nature could have advantage for the members of all the sub-cultures in a society. For the members of dominant sub-culture it could, on my thesis, make more intelligible and meaningful the nature of Science we now so badly fail to teach. For the members of the other sub-culture it could inform and affirm an important part of their cultural heritage, and at the same time assist them to acquire the knowledge and skills of the Science that is such a dominant part of the society in which they must also make their way. As Rangimarie Rose Pere (1988) said "I am learning to understand my own culture by comparing it with others"

It may be that such a comparative exploration would reveal some unexpected similarities and differences. For example, the current discussions as to whether Science as it is currently defined deserves an adjective like "Western", and whether Indigenous Knowledge in New Zealand should be described as "Maori Science", could interesting counterparts in schooling. School Science as most curricula define it is a sub-culture itself that may have some of the characteristics of Science but certainly does not have all of them. Some of its characteristics may, in fact, turn out to be more like characteristics of Indigenous Knowledge.

Two important papers have been published in this field in the last two years, the authors of which reach different conclusions about the matters we are discussing in this meeting. The first is by Thijs and Van Den Berg (1994) in The Netherlands and is based on a comparison of the alternative conceptions findings among culturally distinct groups of students, particularly in Africa, and among students in Western societies. They conclude that, although the former do live in sub-cultures that have very different world views from that of school Science, it does not interfere with their learning of this subject. The hindering misconceptions these students have are, they argue, more the result of earlier bad teaching of Science, and hence can be rectified within school itself, at least in theory.

The other paper is by Aikenhead (1996) in Canada and he quotes a number of studies that have reported problems experienced by students who have an indigenous traditional background and who attempt to learn a subject matter grounded in western culture as science is. He is concerned about the dilemma that learning science poses for these students. To be successful means losing an important part of their identity. The choice we so often offer is of conceptual change. We have not offered conceptual addition, so that two rather than one set of knowledge become available for use by our students in the different contexts in which they move in our mixed societies. Aikenhead argues the case for and the possibility of clear border crossings as the way forward in school Science for members of these minority sub-cultures.

As you will have detected, my reading of the research findings is in line with Aikenhead and not in line with Thijs and Van Den Berg. The identification of a number of the findings in alternative conceptions research with the school context may , as I have suggested above, be related to the methods we use to elicit them, but this does not eliminate the possibility that more significant and comprehensive cultural world views may be making the learning of Science both difficult and threatening to a number of students' sense of identity. The argument I have given here for agreeing with siding more with Aikenhead's suggested solution is based more on pedagogical research in science education than his more widespread review of anthropological and other research. While I was marshalling this mixture of thoughts on the issues of this meeting, it was interesting to find in the most recent copy of Science Education International a paper by Yerrick and Nugent (1996) in the USA who suggest for Science 'schools should be places where students can engage in multiple dialogues with diverse viewpoints'. In suggesting this, they remind us, if we need such a reminder, that 'part of the curriculum debate is about identity, representation and power and as such will remain an intensely political battle for some time to come".

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