Complementary Epistemologies of Science Teaching

Abstract

Within the science education community, alternative epistemologies of teaching and learning have jostled historically for supremacy. For over 20 years, science education has been a site of considerable struggle between adherents of the competing epistemologies of ‘objectivism’ and ‘constructivism’; recently, proponents of ‘personal constructivism’ and ‘social constructivism’ have locked horns. In this paper, we argue that, in the interest of creating greater equity of access amongst students to a much richer encounter with science, science teachers should consider adopting an ‘integral perspective’ on these divergent epistemologies. First, we illustrate the unhelpful antagonism that exists between proponents of these highly influential but divergent epistemologies of science teaching and learning. Next, in seeking a means of moving towards epistemological pluralism, we argue that a mode of reasoning is needed that differs from the established Cartesian binary and dualist thinking which tends to fuel a discourse of competition between theories. From the perspective of constructive postmodernism, we propose ‘dialectical complementarity’ as a potentially productive way of considering unity-in-diversity amongst opposing epistemological perspectives. Then, in an attempt to overcome the obstacle of literalism, which tends to reinforce notions of difference, metaphor is presented as a frame of reference. The centrality of metaphor to both cognition and science, and its power in supporting a multi-perspective dialogue, is established. The metaphorical bases of both constructivism and objectivism are illustrated, with special attention given to the way in which concepts of ‘understanding’ and ‘making sense’ are metaphorically structured. Finally, we illustrate the viability of adopting an integral perspective on science teaching with a brief account of a doctoral research study into the scientific literacy of a class of junior high school students. From the extensive literature on scientific literacy, a set of complementary but distinctive metaphors was developed: ‘student-as-recruit’, ‘student-as-judge’ and ‘students-as-scientists’. Each metaphor is aligned with one of the three epistemologies of teaching and learning discussed in the paper. The three-metaphor set was employed as an interpretive framework to examine the quality of students’ access to science. Over the period of a year, the student as recruit metaphor was found to prevail and to exclude students with specific learning styles. Students were also tracked through the school day into their other subjects where some of the excluded students were observed to be highly engaged learners. We conclude that the 1