I’ve been thinking about practice/real-world problems and their place in the science classroom. One of my favorite classes in high school was chem 2, in part because we had a lot of hard creative problems and labs. Our midterm was a single problem test and we spent the last month of the year synthesizing aspirin from teaberry leaves we picked in the forrest. I think both of these experiences are rather atypical and I was very thankful my teacher didn’t make us do busy work. I have the language now to describe these activities as routed in cognitive learning theory. We did these activities after our teacher had taught us all the required chemistry. The class worked from simple to complex, but if I wanted to teach something similar but under a sociocultural framework, I think I would go complex to simple. By using techniques like jigsaw teaching that A. Brown recommended, we scaffold the big picture but it’s the students job to learn and teach each other the details. But is it as “simple” as saying: we start with aspirin synthesis at the beginning of the year and then work through the details as needed, learning content chemistry?
One question I have is lingering from our discussion last week. I said I would die on the hill that science knowledge is equally as socially constructed as race. I thought a lot about this over the weekend and while I still agree with myself, I am curious and a little stuck dealing with the idea of “disproving” in each community. My very messy thought process is: how do learning communities go about disproving ideas? In the science community, you can’t prove anything but you certainly can disprove things. A specific example: plate tectonics is the best theory right now to explain continental drift, but before that people (aka anti-mobilists) thought cycles of heating and cooling caused expansion/contraction of land masses (I had to read a lot of wikipedia to kinda sort myself out here). I’m confused though about how disproval works around race? We know that race is a start to racism and doesn’t explain anything productive. So why wasn’t it forgotten along with the anti-mobilists? Because race perpetuates power? Because the science community has settled on a specific set of rules to say what is and isn’t science but those rules don’t translate outside the community? Both communities have the same rules for disproving knowledge but just because something (i.e. race) is ‘disproven’ doesn’t mean the social ramifications disappear as well? I’m likely not comparing fair points across science and race. What is the equivalence in the ‘race’ world to disproving a theory in the ‘plate tectonics’ world? What do I even mean by disproving something?? I don’t know. So yeah I think this is my question.
Hi Sarah,
Admittedly you Chem 2 experience sparked memories of my Chem 2 days which I have shared a bit in my post, and I would bet our former teachers share some commonalities. I think if we structured our classes as entirely complex ideas to simple ones as you described initially feels very “abstract”, but at first AST sounded “abstract” to me and here we are.
Your second point leaves me just about where you were left off, and my thoughts are not super cleaned up here. I understand the way you lay out your connection between science and race, but it does start to feel like apples and oranges when looking at the massive negative effects of race implications that in worst cases lead to people harmed or killed compared to whatever we want to describe as science implications.