The construction of school knowledge on history, philosophy, and social studies

The construction of school knowledge on history, philosophy, and social studies of biology
Special session co-organized with the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group (IHPST)Organizers: Charbel N. El-Hani (Federal University of Bahia, Brazil) and Carlos Sonnenschein (Tufts University, U.S.) (on behalf of the ISHPSSB Education Committee) and an organizer to be chosen from IHPST.

Please read the description of the session below and, if you plan a submission that fits it, please send it to us (both here and by sending a message to charbelelhani4@gmail.com

One paper is already part of the session. It can be found below.

Description of the session:
 This session is concerned about how and why theories about the nature of biological knowledge and other contributions from the history, philosophy and social studies of biology are reconstructed into school knowledge, from basic to higher education. School knowledge is not the same as academic knowledge in a given research field. Rather, it is knowledge transformed to become possible to teach and learn. This is not only about simplifying theories, models, concepts. As these knowledge constructs are transferred from one domain (that of academic knowledge) to another (that of school knowledge), their meanings are transformed because they are embedded in different networks of ideas. This is one reason why theories about the construction of school knowledge have been proposed, such as Yves Chevallard’s ‘didactic transposition theory,’ which concerns how knowledge from a given field is turned into to knowledge to be taught, then to knowledge effectively taught in the classroom, and how its meaning changes in this process. But how meaning changes as it is transposed across these contexts is not the only theoretical concern about the construction of school knowledge. Another relevant question is how certain theories, models and concepts are or are not chosen to be transposed to school knowledge. This question has to do with decision making about school curricula, which is recognized as a domain of tension and struggle, influenced by power, and ideological and other societal dynamics. Other theories about the construction of school knowledge deal with this issue, such as Basil Bernstein’s theory of pedagogical recontextualization. Another set of questions emerges when considering how to conceive of the Nature of Science, a construct introduced in many different countries’ curricula since the 1980s to include in science teaching considerations on how science works, how scientific knowledge is built and justified. The science education literature has seen substantial debate on what one could reasonably expect teachers to teach and students to learn about the Nature of Science in different educational levels and learning progressions. Some debate has also emerged on the Nature of Biology, in particular, a curricular construct concerning how biological knowledge is constructed and justified.By and large, these developments have not received much attention by scholars in the history, philosophy, and social studies of biology. This session will invite works on these issues, such as, say, how are the meanings of theories, models, and concepts from the history, philosophy, and social studies of biology transformed when curricula, teaching materials, teaching plans, and classes are developed to tackle them in different educational settings? What are the consequences of these transformations? How are certain theories, models, and concepts from the history, philosophy, and social studies of biology chosen for inclusion in curricula, teaching materials, teaching plans, and classes, while others are neglected? What could one reasonably expect teachers to teach and students to learn about the Nature of Science, generally speaking, or the Nature of Biology specifically, based on our current knowledge on history, philosophy, and social studies of biology?

 Paper 1: Nature of Science (NOS) and Nature of Biology (NOB) as curriculum goals as seen through the lens of the didactic transposition theory – Charbel N. El-Hani (Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia).Learning about the Nature of Science (NOS) has been defended by many researchers and educators as one of the main goals of science education since the 1990s (for reviews, see, e.g., McComas et al. 1998; Lederman 2007; Hodson 2014; Matthews 2015). NOS can be understood as a pedagogical construct that establishes a curricular goal in science education, namely, to foster understanding of the main characteristics of scientific practices and knowledge. Among many reasons justifying NOS as a central goal in science teaching, we find the claim that a deeper NOS understanding can help students and teachers grasp the place and role of scientific knowledge in our society (Driver et al. 1996). The need to promote a better understanding about NOS is also reinforced by empirical findings showing that science teachers and learners in different schooling levels present conceptions about the scientific work that are not consistent with how the construction and acceptance of scientific knowledge are conceived from a scholarly perspective (for reviews, see, e.g., Abd-El-Khalick and Lederman 2000; Lederman 2007; Matthews 2015). We consider that referring to NOS as a pedagogical construct of science education is a precise way to refer to this learning goal. NOS is a complex curriculum component, which is related to a diversity of academic fields, including history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Moreover, its complexity is reinforced by the fact that we find distinct approaches to science in these fields, which at times challenge integration. For instance, history of science, philosophy of science, sociology of science, and science and technology studies often show significant disagreement in the way they conceive scientific practices and knowledge. We do not find in these areas some consensus view that we could take as a point of departure to establish NOS as a pedagogical construct. But, just as it happens with any pedagogical construct, NOS needs didactic transposition (Chevallard 1991), i.e., knowledge from these fields should be transformed to originate a set of teachable and learnable ideas. This entails changing what is philosophically, historically, sociologically discussed about science, such that NOS becomes teachable and learnable at different schooling levels. In recent years, there has been intense debate on NOS in the science education literature, which we will interpret based on the didactic transposition theory (see, e.g., Allchin 2011, 2012; Irzik and Nola 2011, 2014; Matthews 2012; Schwartz et al. 2012; Duschl and Grandy 2013; Erduran and Dagher 2014; Niaz 2016; Dagher and Erduran 2016; McComas 2020). Much of this debate hinges upon the criticism of, and alternatives to the “tenets-based” or “general aspects” conceptualization of NOS (Kampourakis 2016), which propose a list of basic tenets about general aspects of scientific work as teaching goals in basic education. We see this debate as an ongoing exercise on what Chevallard calls “epistemological vigilance” (El-Hani et al., 2020), which examines whether the transposition process that leads to the “general aspects” conceptualization may be distorting too much what we know from historical, philosophical and sociological standpoints about scientific practices and knowledge. If too much distortion is taking place, in the end it will not be worth teaching and learning NOS once transposed in this manner. An important aspect of this debate concerns to what extent NOS teaching and learning should take into account not only domain-general learning about scientific practices and knowledge, but also domain-specific understanding of the pluralism of approaches in different scientific disciplines, such as biology, chemistry, physics, Earth sciences. This leads us to question, then, how we should think of the Nature of Biology (NOB) besides the Nature of Science. Again, this leads us into a diversity of scholarly views on biology, in fields such as history, philosophy, and sociology of biology, and, again, we need to think of a didactic transposition process that can lead to a teachable and learnable NOB in school curricula. In this talk, we will elaborate on this debate on NOS and NOB from the perspective of the didactic transposition theory, one of the more influential accounts of the construction of school knowledge.ReferencesAbd-El-Khalick, F., & Lederman, N. G. (2000). Improving science teachers’ conceptions of nature of science: A critical review of the literature. International Journal of Science Education, 22(7), 665–701.Allchin, D. (2011). Evaluating knowledge of the nature of (whole) science. Science Education, 95(3), 518–542.Allchin, D. (2012). The Minnesota case study collection: New historical inquiry case studies for nature of science education. Science & Education, 21, 1263–1281.Chevallard, Y. (1991). La transposición didáctica. Del saber sabio al saber enseñado. Buenos Aires: Aique.Dagher, Z. R., & Erduran, S. (2016). Reconceptualizing the nature of science for science education: Why does it matter? Science & Education, 25(1–2), 147–164.Driver, R., Leach, J., Millar, R., & Scott, P. (1996). Young people’s images of science. Philadelphia: Open University Press.Duschl, R. A., & Grandy, R. (2013). Two views about explicitly teaching nature of science. Science & Education, 22(9), 2109–2139.El-Hani, C. N., Nunes-Neto, N. F. & Rocha, P. L. B. (2020). Using a participatory problem-based methodology to teach about NOS. In: McComas, W. F. (Ed.). The Nature of Science in Science Instruction: Rationales and Strategies (pp. 451-483). Cham: Springer.Erduran, S., & Dagher, Z. R. (2014). Reconceptualizing the nature of science for science education: Scientific knowledge, practices and others family categories. Dordrecht: Springer.Hodson, D. (2014). Nature of science in the science curriculum: Origin, development and shifting emphases. In M. R. Matthews (Ed.), International handbook of research in history, philosophy and science teaching (pp. 911–970). Dordrecht: Springer.Irzik, G., & Nola, R. (2011). A family resemblance approach to the nature of science for science education. Science & Education, 20, 591–607.Irzik, G., & Nola, R. (2014). New directions for nature of science research. In M. R. Matthews (Ed.), International handbook of research in history, philosophy and science teaching (pp. 999–1021). Dordrecht: Springer.Kampourakis, K. (2016). The “general aspects” conceptualization as a pragmatic and effective means to introducing students to nature of science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 53(5), 667–682.Lederman, N. G. (2007). Nature of science: Past, present and future. In S. K. Abell & N. G. Lederman (Eds.), Handbook of research in science education (pp. 831–879). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.Matthews, M. R. (2012). Changing the focus: From the nature of science (NOS) to feature of science (FOS). In M. S. Khine (Ed.), Advances in nature of science research: Concepts and methodologies (pp. 3-26). Dordrecht: Springer.Matthews, M. R. (2015). Science teaching: The contribution of history and philosophy of science (20th anniversary revised and expanded edition). New York: Routledge.McComas, W. F (Ed.). (2020). Nature of science in science instruction: Rationales and strategies. Cham: Springer.McComas, W. F., Clough, M. P., & Almazroa, H. (1998). The role and character of the nature of science in science education. In W. F. McComas (Ed.), The nature of science in science education: Rationales and strategies (pp. 3–39). New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Niaz, M. (2016). History and philosophy of science as a guide to understanding nature of science. Revista Científica, 24, 7–16.Schwartz, R. S., & Lederman, N. G., & Abd-El-Khalick, F. (2012). A series of misrepresentations: A response to Allchin’s whole approach to assessing nature of science understandings. Science, 96(4), 685–692.