?We're just spectators?: A case study of science teaching, epistemology, and classroom management

Abstract

Project 2061, Benchmarks, and National Standards for Science Education are forwarding a vision for science teacher educators in which a constructivist teaching perspective is implicit. Included in these documents is an epistemological treatment of scientific knowledge that contrasts starkly with what researchers have found prolific in most science classrooms. It is becoming a more mainstream perspective among science educators that classrooms are places in which students and teachers jointly construct meaning from discursive events. Beliefs about the nature of science and the purpose of school are not constructed in isolation from one another. Rather, the philosophical treatment of science in classrooms, especially physics, has revealed that the dominant epistemology is a strong predictor of the types of learning strategies deployed by students. Given that the dominant epistemological treatment of high school physics is of a positivist origin and the purpose of normal classroom discourse is to make classrooms operate smoothly, we ask if the concerns of management are free from the influences of students' beliefs of what science is and what school is for? Practical teacher knowledge often quantizes the complexities of instruction, management, concept development, and philosophical frameworks as separate and discrete components of normal classroom science. Our purpose is to raise the critical issue of understanding the nature of certain classroom management problems as we examine the interaction of two contrasting epistemological treatments of science in a high school physics class and the subsequent classroom management techniques influenced by these beliefs. A physics teacher and his students were surveyed, interviewed, and observed during normal instruction and a range of epistemological commitments were identified. We argue that differences in epistemological stances can invoke antagonistic interactions that may not be well understood from a purely management or pedagogical approach to teacher knowledge and, inasmuch, classroom management choices made independent of epistemological considerations miss the mark. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Sci Ed 82:619–648, 1998.