School Science: An Approach to Rethinking What Students Learn and How They Might be Better Engaged

Abstract

For decades, two critical challenges have plagued school science in the years it is compulsory for students in many educational contexts across the globe: how best to identify what science is meaningful for all students to learn during their formal school science education, and how to keep these students engaged in the learning of this science. Diverse science curriculum movements over these decades and throughout the English-speaking world have provided different conceptualizations about the science content and process students should learn, and suggested many pedagogical practices to engage students in that learning. However, the two intertwined challenges of specific concern for this article clearly remain: what science to include and how to foster student engagement with that science. In this paper, we first seek to provide insights relevant to these two challenges via reviews of extant research in three quite broad and important areas of scholarship: (a) the concepts of imagination and creativity, considered particularly through current cultural-historical approaches to early years science learning; (b) the long-standing support around the globe for a range of inquiry-based approaches; and (c) the German constructs of Didaktik and Bildung as existing paths from a non-Anglo context that assist the determination of choices of science for curriculum inclusion or rejection. We then consider how these three discussions can lead to considerations of school science curriculum that better address the two challenges. Though simple solutions for these complex and multifaceted challenges are unlikely and beyond the aim of this paper, interrelated aspects of our three discussions point to curriculum-focussed initiatives focussing on “big ideas” as a way to determine content. We conclude by briefly illustrating these considerations via the example of school science curriculum structured via the big ideas of science: that is, those that are argued to be fundamental to the learner over the course of their compulsory science education.