What should be the role of religion in science education and bioethics?

In much of Europe the importance of religion has been waning for at least a hundred and fifty years, probably much longer. However, somewhat to the surprise of many people, religion continues to be important in much of European social life and politics. In certain areas, including aspects of education and bioethics, it may, if anything, be increasing in influence in some countries. This chapter will concentrate on the relevance of this to science education and bioethics. What role, if any, should religion play in these matters and how should we decide this question? I shall argue that science education and bioethics need to respond quite differently to the issue of religion, and that the reason for this difference stems from the different aims of science education and bioethics and the different ways in which the two disciplines arrive at their claims about valid knowledge

Teaching and Learning in Diverse and Inclusive Classrooms

Writings on diversity and inclusion have been slow to consider religion along with such facts as gender, ethnicity, class and disability. Yet there are many students and families for whom personal religious belief and practice are important. The right to hold a particular belief, religious or secular, should be accepted as part of a wider spectrum of rights to equal participation in education. Done poorly, education about religion can bore students and achieve little. Done well – and not just through formal religious education lessons but in other subjects and in the life and ethos of the whole school – it can engage students, build knowledge, sharpen ethical thinking, contribute to community cohesion and make religious extremism less likely. Teachers may find themselves holding very different views about religion to those held by their students. There are various ways of dealing with this – schools typically have policies about such matters as religious dress and time for prayers. More generally, religion can be thought of as a controversial issue, namely as one where a range of positions may rationally be held. In most instances the cardinal rule is for teachers to respect students – and vice versa – even if they don't agree with them

Religious diversity and inclusive practice

Writings on diversity and inclusion have been slow to consider religion along with such facts as gender, ethnicity, class and disability. Yet there are many students and families for whom personal religious belief and practice are important. The right to hold a particular belief, religious or secular, should be accepted as part of a wider spectrum of rights to equal participation in education. Teaching assistants and others (e.g. parents, mentors) who work in school classrooms alongside teachers can play an invaluable role in facilitating inclusion. Both by what they say and by their actions they can play a major role in helping students to be tolerant and respectful of difference, including religious difference. Teaching assistants and others can also be an important link between the school and the wider community. By drawing in, and going out to, the local community and working with local organisations (including faith groups) schools can develop their inclusive cultures in terms of sharing, accepting, celebrating and understanding. Developing these kinds of relationships with parents of school students and with the wider community can take time and effort but prove to be mutually rewarding

Health science education in primary schools: evaluation of procedures and results

Health education is an important component of school education, one that can be defended by an analysis of what the aims of education should be. Yet it is often undervalued by schools and suffers in competition with other subjects. Teaching health education well makes many demands on a teacher, and these differ for primary and secondary teachers. This paper examines the place of health education in the primary curriculum and discusses what is meant by good health and how a school might structure its curriculum and pedagogy to enhance the health of it students. It is important to evaluate health education interventions. I discuss the place of evaluation of procedures and of results and of formative and summative evaluation. The benefits of evaluation are stressed, along with action research and long-term studies

Science Education in the Light of COVID-19: The Contribution of History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science

In this position paper, I examine how the history, philosophy and sociology of science (HPS) can contribute to science education in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. I discuss shortcomings in the ways that history is often used in school science, and examine how knowledge of previous pandemics might help in teaching about COVID-19. I look at the potential of issues to do with measurement in the context of COVID-19 (e.g. measurement of mortality figures) to introduce school students to issues about philosophy of science, and I show how COVID-19 has the affordance to broaden and deepen the moral philosophy that students typically meet in biology lessons. COVID-19 also provides opportunities to introduce students to sociological ways of thinking, examining data and questioning human practices. It can also enable students to see how science, economics and politics inter-relate. In the final part of the paper, I suggest that there are strong arguments in favour of an interdisciplinary approach in tackling zoonoses like COVID-19 and that there is much to be said for such interdisciplinarity in school science lessons when teaching about socio-scientific issues and issues intended to raise scientific literacy

A Framework Within Which to Determine How We Should Use Animals in Science Education

The scope of science is fundamentally to understand the natural (i.e., material, as opposed to aesthetic, moral, imaginary or other) domain. Since one of the more remarkable features of the Earth is the presence of millions of species of organisms, nearly 90% of them animals, one might imagine that animals would play a central role in school science education. But this is not the case. Biology curricula are heavily weighted towards humans, and inside and outside of school many students are now exposed to only a few non-human animal species. Here, I seek to provide a coherent framework within which we can consider how animals should be used in science education. To do this, I examine two main issues: (i) the purposes of science education, and (ii) an ethical analysis of how humans should use animals based principally on utilitarianism informed by critiques of speciesism. My focus is K-12 though the principles also apply to pre- and post-school education

The use of natural history dioramas for science education

Natural history dioramas have long been identified as potentially valuable sites of learning. In this chapter, I first examine what the purposes of science education might be and then argue that the other chapters in this book show that natural history dioramas do indeed have considerable potential to advance the learning of science. Such dioramas are engaging to many visitors, whatever their age and prior knowledge and experience and enable visitors to construct narratives about what is happening in the diorama. Nevertheless, the evidence about the extent and types of learning that natural history dioramas can enable is still modest. Furthermore, there exists quite a wide range of tools for gathering and interpreting data at dioramas and it is not always evident that the reasons for this diversity are valid. Much research still needs to be undertaken to help realise the educational affordances of natural history dioramas