The dilemmas of junior school science at Caby High School: societal expectations, school structures, student experiences and teacher accounts

© 2012 Sangeeta VarmaPublic claims about the “failure” of science teaching have a 100 year history, which is almost as long as science has existed as a subject in schools. These claims which have evolved to proclamations of a social “crisis” in the post war period have been based in various iterative assertions about the failure of school science to meet its assumed social function to induct young people into a modern scientific structural-economic or functional world view and hence to reproduce a technical class in society. Public discussions of the broader cultural value of science education and scientific humanism, in the education of the person and citizen have been rare. This may be interpreted as a response to the essentially subversive nature of scientific knowledge or the significance of the technical training function that secondary science education is required to perform. Science teaching has been institutionalised as value free, and the skills of science teaching defined in terms of practical epistemologies in various scientific domains. Studies of teachers’ habits of action, of interpretation, of belief and validatory belief have been rare, particularly juxtaposed to the experiences of their students in their classes. Studies of life in science classrooms have attended to teachers or students, rarely both and more rarely even the school as the unit of analysis. Such studies have been small in scale and very poorly funded compared to the numerous formal enquiries into declining enrolments in senior pre-professional subjects in secondary schools. It is a history of social enquiry that seems to be reproduced in each period at the point where the imperfection of the writers’ memory of their experiences in science classrooms meets the past inadequacies of documentation of practice. The current small investigation takes its rise not from an interest in the so called facts about falling enrolments in senior science subjects or to establish a new theory of cause and effect, but from an urge to put together in a new way what everyone knows is there in science classes in the accounts of students and teachers, but not noticed. At Caby High School, an urban, multicultural secondary school, seeking to improve student participation and achievement in secondary education, my three collaborating science teachers and I were not looking for new facts but to better understand what is in plain view to them and their students in their everyday experience in junior science education. In that sense my considerations in this study were not scientific or hypothetical ones, to advance a kind of theory. I have not sought explanations of the supposed “failure” of science teaching in terms of what students fail to accomplish, expect or experience but rather to document what the students’ experiences and expectations are of science classes and how the teachers responded, not directly to the students’ expectations, but in terms of balancing both the social order to which the teachers are retrospectively accountable and the constitutive order in the classroom which requires mutual attention and cooperation. Through the teachers’ dramaturgical interpretation of their day to day practice my brief analyses are aimed at improved understanding of teacher agency in relation to the dilemmas of general science teaching