Public attitudes to science: Rethinking outreach initiatives

​The public doesn’t understand science. You scientists need to put more effort into communicating your work. Today’s kids leave school not knowing enough science. You teachers should teach them better.University graduates don’t even know how to write a concise scientific paper. You tutors should give them more practice before they come to work for us.Journalists don’t understand even the basics. You editors should employ someone who knows what they are talking about to write about science.Note the familiar pattern here. A shortcoming is found and it’s someone else’s fault. We don’t like it when we are in the firing line but we unwittingly do the same to others. In this article I argue that the type of ‘deficit thinking’ that underlies the above sentiments is an inappropriate way to respond to the complex issue of engaging the wider public with science. It benefits neither the people being judged nor the community that does the judging. For example, when the science community is on the receiving end, as in the first of the sentiments above, no matter how seriously they take the challenge of trying to communicate more effectively, there is a very good chance nothing much will really change if, with the best will in the world, that effort was misdirected. The challenge here is that topping up a deficit is no guarantee of a cure for whatever caused it in the first place

Measuring New Zealand students' international capabilities: an exploratory study

Executive summary: This exploratory study considers the feasibility of measuring New Zealand senior secondary (Years 12/13) students’ \u27international capabilities\u27. Building on background work undertaken by the Ministry’s International Division, the methodology had three components. An analysis of New Zealand and international literature pertinent to assessment of international capabilities was undertaken. Small-group workshops were conducted with 13 secondary school staff, 21 senior secondary students, and 10 adults with relevant expertise and perspectives about expression of international capabilities in post-school life. The third component was a visit to the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) to discuss similar assessment challenges in their work. What are international capabilities and why measure them? Broadly speaking, international capabilities can be described as the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that enable people to live, work, and learn across international and intercultural contexts. These capabilities, or aspects of them, are described by a range of terms in the literature, including international knowledge and skills, global competence, global/international citizenship, global/international mindedness, and intercultural competence. The Ministry’s background work suggests international capabilities can be seen as “the international and intercultural facet of the key competencies”. Focusing on development of New Zealand students’ international capabilities could, among other things: help make more explicit what the key competencies look like when they’re applied in intercultural or international situations provide a way to open a conversation with schools about internationalisation of education support New Zealand schools to better understand, analyse, and talk about the intercultural/internationalising learning activities they already do  open conversations about cultural diversity in New Zealand schools and communities and the opportunities this can provide for intercultural learning  create an opportunity for schools to revisit parts of The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) vision, including the notion of students being “international citizens”  encourage schools to connect with businesses and the wider community to develop learning opportunities that help students to develop innovation and entrepreneurial capabilities and connect these capabilities with intercultural and international contexts. Measuring New Zealand students’ international capabilities could help us to better understand how the schooling system helps to “increase New Zealanders’ knowledge and skills to operate effectively across cultures.” It could feed into ongoing developments within educational policy and practice to better align curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy with the high-level goals of The New Zealand Curriculum. Looking further into the future, knowledge about how our schools support the development of students’ international capabilities could assist with longer-term redesign of educational policy, curriculum, assessment, and qualifications to keep pace as demands and pressures on learning and schooling continue to change through the 21st century

Ontological possibilities the rethinking teaching on the "nature of science"

An extensive literature documents teachers’ failure to include ideas about the \u27nature of science\u27 (NOS) in their classroom programmes, despite widespread advocacy for this as an essential component of more inclusive science teaching. This thesis frames much of the existing NOS literature as a deficit literature that focuses on epistemology, while largely ignoring the ontological realities of the classroom and overestimating individual teacher’s agency to change their enacted curriculum. Epistemologically-focused NOS reforms are positioned as curriculum \u27add-ons\u27, which teachers are likely to ignore. A NOS focus on ontology would entail curriculum restructuring, attending first to the contexts in which scientific knowledge is produced, and the ways it acts in the world. In any case, science itself has changed in recent years. Drawing from the sociology of science, in particular the work of Bruno Latour, the thesis compares traditional philosophical thinking about the ontology of science with more recent \u27networked\u27 views. Brent Davis explains the educational implications of key ideas from complexity science. Political philosopher Stephen White adds an ethical dimension. His ideas are used to argue for replacing \u27strong\u27 ontologies of realist science with more nuanced and actively tended \u27weak\u27 ontologies, as appropriate to the rapid sociological changes of the twenty-first century. The thesis argues that epistemological uncertainties that could lead to the suspicion of relativism are potentially threatening in the classroom because of hegemonic pressures towards consensus and a certain, safe status for the knowledge taught. Seeking an alternative pathway to change, Daniel Liston’s conceptualisation of teaching as a passionate act informs the analysis of the empirical component of the thesis. Eight recipients of New Zealand Royal Society Science Teacher Fellowships were interviewed on four occasions over two years. They discussed their personal learning during a year-long sabbatical to carry out an extended science investigation and their thoughts and actions on returning to the classroom. Narrative methodology is used to explore the teachers’ stories, revealing both passion for their personal learning and an ethical concern for their students’ learning to care for both the natural world and science as a means of its investigation. The thesis argues for the use of ontological approaches to the initial introduction of NOS ideas in school science, with epistemological concepts added only once a topic has been grounded in what Latour calls \u27matters of concern\u27.Two potential teaching strategies—the production of network diagrams and the use of Davis\u27s \u27bifurcations\u27as a critical inquiry tool—are the focus of hypothetical experimentation. First in the context of global warming, and then addressing the challenges posed to teaching evolution by the proponents of \u27intelligent design\u27, these strategies are shown to have the potential to address some of science education’ s thornier issues, not just the NOS question. However, when conflicting expectations create tensions for teachers in the classroom moment, it is difficult for them to introduce reflective, deeply philosophical changes to their representation of science. Their working realities need to be acknowledged, and the tensions ameliorated, if we expect substantive change in their current practice

Designing for empowering curriculum implementation: The potential of “enduring competencies”

International advocacy for future-focused curriculum design often centres on the idea of “competencies” or “capabilities” as potentially transformative constructs for high-level curriculum frameworks. This trend is exemplified by the addition of “key competencies” to the 2007 New Zealand Curriculum. Despite good intentions, this structural change appears to have made minimal difference to the learning that many students experience, or to the assessment practices used to evaluate that learning. With a Curriculum Refresh currently underway, now is an opportune moment to revisit the use of competencies as a lever for curriculum change and ask how the type of transformative change they are intended to stimulate might be conveyed and implemented in more empowering ways. This paper introduces the idea of “enduring competencies” as an umbrella construct for more effective curriculum design conversations. Learning from what has proved problematic in the past, we show how this construct might refocus thinking about purposes for learning, while at the same time being more specific about how and why traditional curriculum “content” might need to change. We illustrate this potential by drawing on our recent collective endeavour to build a small set of enduring competencies for school science education. The paper briefly outlines these four enduring competencies and demonstrates how they build bridges between past (more traditional) and future-focused (more transformative) curriculum and assessment design for the science learning area

Curriculum implementation exploratory studies: Final report

Throughout the history of schooling in New Zealand the national curriculum has been revised at fairly regular intervals. Consequently, schools are periodically faced with having to accommodate to new curriculum. In between major changes other specifically-focused changes may arise; for example, the increased recent emphasis upon numeracy and literacy

Should generic curriculum capabilities be assessed?

Both Australia and New Zealand have recently taken up the idea of ‘key competencies’ (‘capabilities’ in the Australian national curriculum) initially proposed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In both countries we have made them our own by adapting them to suit our own educational contexts. People often say that these capabilities won’t be taken seriously unless they are assessed. So whether, and how, to assess them continue to be vexed questions. In this paper I argue that capabilities are more appropriately seen as changing the curriculum rather than adding to it. If we are serious about preparing students for the future, outcomes for learning need to be re-imagined at the complex intersection of capabilities and traditional content prior to determining any assessment approaches

The NCEA in the Context of the Knowledge Society and National Policy Expectations

The introduction of the National Certificates of Educational Achievement (NCEA), as the key school-based components of New Zealand’s National Qualifications Framework (NQF) has been accompanied by controversy around a range of issues. It seems that much of the debate has centred on surface level symptoms, and has not probed the deep underlying causes of the tensions. In this article I locate the assessment changes of the NQF/NCEA within the “knowledge society” imperative for “life-long learning” and explore consequences of the expectation that assessment can serve this overarching goal at the same time as the results are used for accountability purposes – that, is for “raising standards”. The tensions created by these conflicting expectations must be confronted openly before they can be resolved

Teaching for present and future competency: A productive focus for professional learning

The key competencies are a potentially transformative feature of the New Zealand Curriculum. However, the way in which they have been understood and implemented in schools points to tensions and challenges that may prevent them from acting as agents of curriculum change. One recent researcher /practitioner partnership developed materials that show how a close interweaving of key competencies and traditional subject learning might transform the taught curriculum. Analysis of the practice of the teachers who contributed to this project suggests that refocusing teacher thinking about purposes for learning is likely to be a critical change lever. A clear focus on students’ present and future needs must be part of any re-imagining of purposes for teaching and learning, and hence of the taught curriculum