Education for Citizenship: Issues of Science and Society

Abstract

Faith M. Hickman is currently completing a Ph.D. in science education at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She was formerly Director of the BSCS Center for Education in Human and Medical Genetics and Staff Associate for the BSCS. She holds a B.S. in biology from West Virginia University and an M.A. in science education from the University of Colorado. Ms. Hickman has served as Co-Chairperson of the Education Work Group, Commission for the Control of Huntington's Disease and Its Consequences, NIH; and Special Consultant on Education, American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on Genetics and Committee on Health Education. She has been an Instructor of Methods of Teaching Modern at the University of Colorado, Boulder and audiovisual review coordinator for American Biology Teacher. She was NABT Director-at-Large in 1979 and Vice-President in 1980. Ms. Hickman was co-editor (with Jane Butler Kahle) of NABT's 1982 publication, New Directions in Biology Teaching. In introducing a special issue of the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies, the editor wrote that one factor gave promise of unifying the social studies. That factor was citizenship education (Views and Previews, 1981). Now, the NABT Board of Directors and the program committee for the 1982 convention have gone one step further. Through the convention theme of The Biological and Social Sciences: Education for Citizenship, they have suggested that citizenship education can not only link professionals within a discipline but can actually unite teachers and academics across discipline bounds. Citizenship education is, in their view, so powerful and so pervasive as to provide confluence of direction and purpose for teachers of both the life sciences and the social sciences. To be sure, social studies teachers have traditionally been more comfortable with the form and the substance of citizenship education than have their counterparts in biology. Doubtless the reasons for this dissimilarity are many and must include fundamental differences in the structure of disciplines, the organisms investigated, and the cognitive and emotional styles of the practitioners. Nevertheless, it seems that social studies teachers are less startled by words like values, conflict, issue, or controversy than is the typical science teacher. In fact, some have gone so far as to suggest that these are the essential tools of the trade in teaching the social sciences: