Teaching for scientific literacy: Bangladeshi teachers’ perspectives, practices and challenges

In this paper, we have reported on three Bangladeshi science teachers’ perspectives of scientific literacy, translation of their perspectives into classroom teaching, the values they consider in their teaching for scientific literacy, and the issues they perceive as challenging in their teaching. It is found that whilst participating teachers hold a range of perspectives of scientific literacy, in practice they demonstrated limited capacity to translate their perspectives into their classroom teaching practice. For example, Sabina’s Vision I-II perspectives turned into Vision I in her teaching practice when she failed to consider a particular life situation as a context for learning science; rather she used contexts as add-ons to the academic science content. In this manner, she placed emphasis on transmitting the academic science knowledge rather than the functional science knowledge. This Vision I approach may restrict students from seeing that the science they learn in school has relevance if they are to function effectively in their everyday lives (Aikenhead, 2008). Moreover, this Vision I approach has reduced capacity to make science important to all students and results in limited development of scientific literacy for the students (Aikenhead, 2008). This approach is often linked with the decline in student interest and enrolment in specialised science courses (Aikenhead, Barton, & Chinn, 2006). It may, therefore, be reasonable to argue that this Vision I practice would enhance the decline in student enrolment in science as observed during the last decade in Bangladesh (Iqbal, 2010).

This research reveals that whilst participating teachers mostly perceived the importance of the curriculum-identified values for scientific literacy, they found it difficult to develop and implement suitable teaching approaches to promote these values. Moreover, they expressed their naive perspectives on the contemporary nature of science, for example, subjectivity in science. Teachers should not be blamed for their naive perspectives since they rarely have the opportunity to learn about the nature of science in their own studies in the context of Bangladesh (Sarkar & Gomes, 2010). As the ideas regarding the nature of science have importance to understand the ideas of scientific literacy and its underpinning values, they should be taught explicitly in science studies at different educational levels and in different teacher education programmes designed for science teachers in Bangladesh.

This research indicates that the gap between teachers’ perspectives and teaching practices are perhaps due to the many challenges they felt have been placed upon them. Teachers in this research often expressed their discomfort in teaching the content-dominated General Science course in a large class. In addition, they often lamented the fact that they are obliged to prepare their students for exams that mainly assess students’ memorisation of factual content knowledge. This obligation may result in an emphasis placed on memorising the factual content of science from the recommended textbooks. Teachers, therefore, may resort to using the textbooks as the authority of knowledge while students passively absorb information. Such contextual issues could be seen as contributing factors for the gap between teachers’ perspectives and practices.

As noted previously, in this paper we have reported three qualitative case studies, which are part of a larger-scale study. Whilst we considered maximal variation in selecting the cases, we understand that they might not be a representative sample in Bangladesh. However, being involved in qualitative case studies we were not keen in maintaining the representativeness, nor did we intend to claim for any generalised findings, but we were more interested in gaining an in-depth picture of teachers’ perspectives, practices and challenges in relation to their teaching for promoting scientific literacy.

Acknowledgement: Grant for this paper was received from the Monash University Postgraduate Publications Award.