Abstract
The recent years have seen an increased interest in science education aimed towards the nature of science and inquiry. Within this context, promotion of reasoning and argumentation in school science has come forth as an important field of research. The present contribution describes the project “Kitchen stories” which seeks to develop a framework for teaching argumentation and inquiry in a cross-curricular setting comprising science and home economics. The explicit teaching of Toulmin’s argumentation pattern is utilised for students to analyse claims, expand them to build complete arguments and plan open-ended inquiry with regards to specifications (i.e. claims) about food and cooking collected from authentic sources in everyday life, herein termed “culinary precisions”. This way a holistic teaching framework has been constructed incorporating project work, argumentation, inquiry, second-hand investigations, sourcing skills and declarative knowledge. Preliminary results from the study involving pre-service teacher students in science and home economics are described. Possibilities, challenges and prospects are discussed when using kitchen stories for teaching argumentation, inquiry and other pertinent topics in science education.
Highlights
The concrete approach to culinary precisions used in teaching pre-service teacher students in this project is as follows: First phase (2–3 weeks duration) Step 1 – Collect and document culinary precisions The students can find culinary precisions by interviewing family, professionals or others, they can search in literature and cookbooks, food pages on the internet and so forth
Through the project it is evident that it is possible to use Toulmin’s argumentation pattern (TAP) in the exploration of culinary precisions, supporting the hypothesis that it is possible to construct formal arguments based on culinary precisions
The undergraduate students report it to be intellectually demanding, they are able to use this tool for structuring arguments and all groups were successful in producing coherent arguments. This despite the fact that TAP is said to be difficult to apply in analysis of real life verbal data (Erduran, Simon, & Osborne, 2004)
Summary
Within the international science education community and among policy makers it has been defined as a major challenge the development of quality teaching methods to promote scientific literacy, focussing on what we know and on how we know and why we do so (e.g. Driver, Newton, & Osborne, 2000; Osborne & Millar, 1998; Rocard et al, 2007). Gilbert, Bulte, & Pilot, 2011) This context is given through relevant content from home economics, namely claims and specifications about cooking. As shall be demonstrated below, home economics may offer fruitful contexts for teaching science in a cross-curricular setting, concerning declarative knowledge and scientific methods and ways of thinking. In some cases TAP has been used in the explicit teaching of argumentation, as a tool for teachers to gain an increased understanding of discourse in their own classroom (Osborne et al, 2004) and the epistemic nature of their own discipline (Simon et al, 2006). TAP constitutes a bridge between, on the one hand, practical work and science content knowledge, and on the other hand the specific subject matter as a socio-scientific issue
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