Toward a fully human science education: an exploratory study of prospective teachers’ attitudes toward humanistic science education

Abstract

This study explores the relationships among 16 humanistic value orientations and three metaphysical orientations toward science held by prospective student teachers after reading and discussing Global Mind Change by Willis Harmon. A content analysis of post‐discussion papers finds that generally the prospective teachers advocate transcendental monism more often than either Cartesian dualism or materialistic monism as their preferred metaphysics. A factor analysis of the data yielded seven clusterings of educational and metaphysical orientations. These were identified as the individualistic orientation, the group orientation, the transcendental innovators, the concrete materialists, the self‐determined learners, the personal growth evaluation orientation, and the affective (experiential) bias. /The results of the study provide a number of challenges for innovative science teachers and educators. These include a continuing need to balance learning group concerns with those of the individual learners, the ne...