A Cultural-Historical Study of Children Learning Science: Foregrounding Affective Imagination in Play-based Settings

223 Pages·2015·2.756 MB·English

by  Marilyn Fleer, Niklas Pramling (auth.)

Cultural Studies of Science Education 11
Marilyn Fleer
Niklas Pramling
A Cultural-
Historical Study
of Children
Learning Science
Foregrounding Aff ective Imagination in
Play-based Settings
A Cultural-Historical Study of Children
Learning Science
Cultural Studies of Science Education
Volume 11
Series Editors
KENNETH TOBIN, City University of New York The Graduate Centre, New York, USA
CATHERINE MILNE, Department of Teaching and Learning, New York University
The Steinhardt School of Culture, Educat, New York, USA
CHRISTINA SIRY, Faculty of Language and Literature, Huma, University of Luxembourg,
Walferdange, Luxembourg
MICHAEL P. MUELLER, Anchorage, Alaska, USA
The series is unique in focusing on the publication of scholarly works that employ social and
cultural perspectives as foundations for research and other scholarly activities in the three
fi elds implied in its title: science education, education, and social studies of science.
The aim of the series is to establish bridges to related fi elds, such as those concerned with the
social studies of science, public understanding of science, science/technology and human
values, or science and literacy. Cultural Studies of Science Education, the book series
explicitly aims at establishing such bridges and at building new communities at the interface
of currently distinct discourses. In this way, the current almost exclusive focus on science
education on school learning would be expanded becoming instead a focus on science
education as a cultural, cross-age, cross-class, and cross-disciplinary phenomenon.
The book series is conceived as a parallel to the journal Cultural Studies of Science Education,
opening up avenues for publishing works that do not fi t into the limited amount of space and
topics that can be covered within the same text.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8286
Marilyn Fleer • Niklas Pramling
A Cultural-Historical Study
of Children Learning Science
Foregrounding Affective Imagination
in Play-b ased Settings
Marilyn Fleer Niklas Pramling
Monash University University of Gothenburg
Frankston , VIC , Australia Gothenburg , Sweden
ISSN 1879-7229 ISSN 1879-7237 (electronic)
ISBN 978-94-017-9369-8 ISBN 978-94-017-9370-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-9370-4
Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014947233
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Foreword
Personally and as an educator, I have always found it helpful to think of Science as
a human invention in which I could share. So it was pleasing to fi nd the authors of
this book unequivocally describe Science as a human invention. Very often in school
science, recognising or recording a natural phenomenon is confused with its sci-
ence. Phrases like “discovery learning ” and “guided discovery” commonly confuse
this recognition of a natural phenomenon with its subsequent description and expla-
nation in Science. Making the distinction clear helps science educators to explore
and teachers to employ pedagogical processes that move a learner from recognition
to scientifi c understanding. This book is about a particular view of how early child-
hood education can facilitate these processes.
Describing Science as a great human invention locates it alongside those other
great human inventions like Art, Music, God and Technology, each of which has an
immanent (personal) sense and a transcendental (beyond the personal) sense. The
cultural-historical foundation for early childhood science education that Marilyn
Fleer and Niklas Pramling, the authors of this book, espouse matches these two
senses, and they skilfully interrelate them.
I n the late 1960s, soon after my career in science education began, I visited the
Elementary Science Study (ESS) project in Massachusetts, a more interesting one
of the many science curriculum projects then being developed on both sides of
the Atlantic. A riveting comment by its director, Robert Hein, still comes easily to
mind. “Science should be the easiest subject to teach in the early years of school-
ing, because it only requires the abilities to see and to describe in talk what you
are seeing, and the great majority of children entering school have these abilities
already.” The materials for this project (and its counterpart in England, Nuffi eld
Primary Science) suggested that teachers should encourage their young students
to engage with a natural phenomenon and then develop the lesson from the ques-
tions the students asked. There were many reasons why these projects failed, but
three come to mind in relation to this book.
I have already referred to one, namely these projects’ mantra of “discovery learn-
ing” insuffi ciently recognised the invented nature of the science that described and
explained these natural phenomena. The second is the assumption the projects made
v
vi Foreword
that curiosity about nature is an innate quality we all share. I do not want here to be
defi nitive about such a deep issue. We would not have Science at all if there had not
been persons, since the dawn of humanity, who wondered in awe, and then in curi-
osity about nature. It is enough to say that these responses were not equally shared
when the ESS and Nuffi eld projects’ materials were tried in schools. Only some of
the students were interested in the engagement phase and fewer still came up with
investigable questions. Furthermore, many of the teachers in these early school
years were not interested in or inspired by these phenomena.
T his widespread lack of interest in the natural world is something I have had to
become more and more aware of in the ensuing years. When I began to think about
the issue of Science for All in the 1980s, I had to come to terms with the fact that
most of my peers in school did not share the same fascination that I had with
Science’s account of natural phenomena. Otherwise, they too would have chosen to
study the sciences in senior secondary school and go on with them after school. So
I can accept Fleer and Pramling’s premise that wonder in the face of nature is not
innate but needs help to be acquired. This acquisition needs to be in both meanings
of the word – the sense of sheer wonder (awe) of a phenomenon and the sense of
wonder (starting to question) about the phenomenon. This book deals particularly
with this second sense of wonder about the natural world (which is called curiosity)
not being innately shared and importantly attends to how one common source, the
experiences of pre-school education, can and should contribute to its learning.
T he third reason relates to how rapidly formal teaching and learning about a
natural phenomenon should move towards Science’s account of it. Too often, the
school science curriculum has tried to rush this movement. I remember going into
a bakery in a small country town in Victoria and being told by the baker that a local
teacher had recently brought her prep year students (5-year-olds) on a visit. The
baker told me he had been surprised that the focus of the visit was not on how bread
and other products were made but on how any heavy objects he used were lifted
and moved. Equally curious, I went to the school and talked to the teacher. She
showed me a range of “heavy” objects that had been put in the playground for the
students to explore how they might move them. Furthermore, she explained that
her group of students had also visited the local garage and the small supermarket
to see how their heavy objects were moved. Through these teaching experiences,
the students had come up with a number of ways to move their set of objects. Each
of these ways embodied in the students a set of experiences that would stand them
in good stead in subsequent years at school to engage with the theoretical concepts
and principles that Physics, as a science, has used to account for the movement of
heavy material objects.
A bout the same time, I came across the phrase “preconceptual learning” for the
fi rst time. It was coined by the team in the New Zealand Children’s Science Project
at the University of Waikato, which did so much in the 1980s to inform us all about
the ideas and supporting rationales that pre-schoolers and young learners commonly
hold about scientifi c phenomena and about the words like “force”, “fl oating and
sinking”, “light and dark”, “life” and “hot and cold”. “Preconceptual learning” was,
this team argued, a necessary step that had been very largely overlooked in school
Foreword vii
science. In other words, students were being expected to learn Lever Laws,
Archimedes Principle, Laws of Refl ection and of Motion, the Characteristics of
Living Things and Chemical Reactions before they had had any signifi cant experi-
ence of the phenomena these scientifi c concepts and principles had been invented to
describe and explain. This book reinforces the positive role the pre-school years can
play in providing this rich base of experiential learning.
I commend the authors for presenting so clearly the potential that the context of
pre-school education has for the beginnings of science learning and commend it to
teacher educators and their students – preservice teachers – to take up the opportuni-
ties this book offers to them.
Monash University , Clayton , VIC , Australia Peter Fensham
Queensland University of Technology , Brisbane ,
QLD , Australia
16 August 2013

Pref ace
In this book, we move beyond the traditional constructivist and social-constructivist
view of learning and development in science. We argue that science as a body of
knowledge is something that humans have constructed (historically) and recon-
structed (contemporarily) to meet human needs. As such, this human invention acts
as an evolving cultural tool for supporting and helping to understand everyday life.
We draw upon cultural-historical theory in order to theorise early childhood science
education in relation to our current globalised education contexts. We do not seek to
make cultural comparisons, as are found in cross-cultural research. But, rather, we
seek to better understand the many ways that science concepts are learned by very
young children.
T he book is designed for researchers and educators interested in a theoretical
discussion of the cultural-historical foundation for early childhood science educa-
tion. In a book of this kind, it is important to examine the contemporary theories of
learning and development within the general fi eld of early childhood education. A
theoretical examination of this kind allows for the foundational pedagogical con-
text of the young learner to be interrogated. Through this kind of analysis, it is
possible to examine play-based contexts in relation to opportunities for scientifi c
conceptual development of young children. With this approach in mind, and with
the empirical literature relevant to early childhood education examined, it is pos-
sible to introduce a more relevant approach to the teaching of science and for the
development of young children’s scientifi c thinking. In this book, we specifi cally
present a pedagogical model for introducing scientifi c concepts to young children
in play-based settings.
ix