Abstract
AbstractDuring the Cold War, UNESCO played a major role in promoting science education across the world. UNESCO's Programme in Integrated Science Teaching, launched in 1969, placed science education at the heart of socio-economic development in all nations. The programme planners emphasized the role of science education in the development of human resources necessary to build a modern nation state, seeking to build a scientific and engineering mindset in children. UNESCO's interest in science education drew inspiration from early Cold War curriculum reforms in the United States, where scientists, psychologists and teachers promoted science education as a way to enhance the scientific and technical workforce and to counteract irrational tendencies. While US curriculum reformers were concerned about the quantity and quality of science teaching in secondary school, UNESCO wanted to introduce science as a topic in primary, secondary and vocational schools, promoting integrated science teaching as the best way to do this. From the outset, the term ‘integrated’ meant different things to different people. It not only entailed less focus on scientific disciplines and scientific method strictly defined, but also more on teaching children how to adopt a curious, experimental and engineering approach in life. By the end of the Cold War, UNESCO abandoned the idea of integrated science teaching, but it has a lasting legacy in terms of placing ways of teaching science to children at the heart of modern society.
Highlights
‘Scientific literacy is an essential element of modern life and must be introduced in the primary schools as part of the ABC of education
During the Cold War, UNESCO played a major role in promoting science education across the world
While US curriculum reformers were concerned about the quantity and quality of science teaching in secondary school, UNESCO wanted to introduce science as a topic in primary, secondary and vocational schools, promoting integrated science teaching as the best way to do this
Summary
After the Second World War, curriculum reformers in the United States began to develop the ‘revolutionary’ science education projects that so enthused Awokoya and others.[3]. Recognizing the difficulty of identifying great scientific ideas that would fully express the views of all scientists and all science educators, Shamos proposed that the conceptual-schemes approach would assist children in developing an understanding of ‘the nature of matter’ at different levels of sophistication Having such a definite objective, he claimed, would provide teachers and children with a clearly defined goal, and, more importantly, give ‘them a cohesive picture of science rather than a series of disjointed topics’.60. It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve more into these particular issues; it suffices to say that the diversity of approaches to teacher education and student evaluation was as high as the diversity of approaches to integrated science teaching itself, as witnessed by the examples drawn from Volume 1 above
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