Towards a Cultural View on Quality Science Teaching

Socio-scientific Issues in the Classroom

“…Unfortunately, educational soundness often conflicts with political realities such as expediency, institutional expectations, customs, ceremonies, beliefs, routines, loyalties, and the power of certain societal stakeholders (Aikenhead, 2006(Aikenhead, , 2010. SSI research and development projects will be far more influential if their agendas not only embrace the educational soundness of SSI school science, but as well, produce a politically savvy plan for transforming the school science culture in the school system where the project takes place.…”

“…In the first place, school science must prioritize, throughout its science curriculum, scientific content primarily found outside of academic school settings -relevant science in the everyday world (Aikenhead, 2010). Conventional science content in schools and undergraduate university programs differs in cultural ways from the science content observed in everyday sciencerelated occupations, events, and issues.…”

“…These everyday contexts represent culturally different communities of practice compared with conventional school science (Sadler, 2009). Examples of relevant school science content appear in this volume and are emphasized in Aikenhead (2006Aikenhead ( , 2010 who offers a taxonomy of school science content based on the political question: Who decides what is relevant? Relevant school science includes, for instance, concepts and procedural knowledge for understanding and acting upon scientific evidence -"concepts of evidence" (Duggan & Gott, 2002) -in the world of work and in other everyday situations.…”

Developing a Measure of Scientific Literacy for Middle School Students

“…Scientific literacy is the ability to understand scientific processes and to engage meaningfully with scientific information available in daily life. Meaningful learning is understood as the connection of new information with prior knowledge in personally relevant ways (e.g., Aikenhead, ; Ausubel, ; Berry, Loughran, & Mulhall, ). Thus, we see scientific literacy as “a broad and functional understanding of science for general education purposes and not preparation for specific scientific and technical careers”; this functionality refers to the ability to use science to “live more effectively with respect to the natural world” (DeBoer, , p. 594).…”

El Campo De La Salud Ambiental: Una Oportunidad Para Alcanzar Las Metas De La Educación Científica

“…From this brief sketch about air pollution problems in cities and their implications for the health of inhabitants, it is crucial to highlight the importance of focusing efforts on citizen scientific literacy and topics or situations that accomplish criteria suggested by Aikenhead (2012), educational soundness and relevancy rather than political expediency. Considering these criteria, environmental topics should hold a privileged spot in science curricula and should promote an educated citizenry able to critically examine issues of local importance and global significance in ways they currently do not (Dillon, 2012a).…”