New curricular developments in biology across the educational spectrum are resulting in the re-evaluation of practical biology and the unexpected outcome of reducing practical work in biology. The Mission of this symposium will be to enhance the HPS of Biology by examining the relationship between Biology per se and its educational ‘version’: is it a homology or analogy? The vision of the symposium will be to explore traditional historical approaches in practical workshops with historic equipment and re-evaluate them in light of new pedagogies and curricular reform, can school biology be called experimental science any longer? To ask, and answer, what the purpose of school biology is?
The meeting was planned to take place at the DCU Institute of Education, Dublin City University, St. Patrick’s Campus, Dublin on 11th-12th December 2020, but changed to a hybrid online/face-to-face format due to the ongoing COVID19 health crisis. Info and updates were posted at: https://sites.google.com/dcu.ie/ishpssb2020/home