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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 21, Issue 1, Article 4 (Dec., 2021) |
Teaching outside subject specialisation, science teachers encounter various difficulties and they express them, if opportunity is given. The present study shows that 43.07 percent of teachers perceive themselves ill equipped to teach the subjects outside their specialisation. Out of those teaching outside their specialisation,23.07 percent of teachers face difficulties in teaching Physics, 12.31 percent in Chemistry and 6.45 percent in Biology; whereas 3.04 percent of teachers have issues with Physics and Biology both. Furthermore, even the teachers teaching within their subject specialization, face some challenges in teaching-learning and express the need of capacity building programme. Many teachers with specialisation in Biology have studied Physics only up to twelfth standard. Similarly, the teacher with specialisation in Mathematics has studied Biology only up to twelfth standard. It is of utmost importance to recognise and address secondary science teachers’ difficulties as it can be one of the major hurdles to students’ conceptual understanding of science. In order to overcome this hurdle, science teachers need the repertoire of teaching-learning strategies that can support their students in making sense of disciplinary basic ideas, relating the concepts with their existing ideas and linking the concepts horizontally and vertically.
Teachers need to facilitate students to see relevance of the science concepts learnt in the classroom in their everyday life (Prabha,2015).Deep probing revealed that secondary science teachers face difficulties in various aspects of teaching-learning of science, such as , identifying students existing ideas and relating the concept with those ideas, bringing flexibilities in their strategies as per students learning needs and styles and cross- linking the various concepts, selecting appropriate subject specific teaching-learning strategy, carrying out experiments and activities and interweaving assessment with teaching-learning. All these are components of pedagogical content knowledge. Teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge influences their teaching and hence, students’ learning outcomes. Emphasizing on the pedagogical content knowledge Shulman (1986) explains that it also includes an understanding of what makes the learning of specific topics easy or difficult; the conceptions and preconceptions that students of different ages and backgrounds bring with them to the learning of those most frequently taught topics and lessons. If those preconceptions are misconceptions which they so often are, teachers need knowledge of the strategies most likely to be fruitful in recognising the understanding of learners, because those learners are unlikely to appear before them as blank slates. Megnusson et al. (1999) argues that having subject matter knowledge does not guarantee that it will become transformed into representations that will help students comprehend targeted concepts or that teachers will be adept at deciding when it is pedagogically best to use particular representations. The authors further explain topic-specific representations as one of the categories of pedagogical content knowledge. This category refers to teachers’ knowledge of ways to represent specific concepts or principles in order to facilitate student learning, as well as knowledge of the relative strengths and weaknesses of particular representations. They also include in this category a teacher’s ability to invent representations to aid students in developing understanding of specific concepts or relationships. Representations can be illustrations, examples, models, or analogies.
The finding that 92 percent of teachers of the sample hold the opinion that if there are separate teachers to teach Physics, Chemistry and Biology, students’ difficulties in conceptual understanding of science can be minimized, implies two obvious points- first, that teachers realise that science teachers have difficulties in teaching outside their subject specialisations and the second, that they are rational to recognise students’ difficulties in conceptual understanding of science.
Teachers’ role is vital to students learning. One to one mapping of the difficulties faced by the individual teacher with the difficulties experienced by their students makes it obvious that teachers’ area of subject specialisation has significant influence on students learning. Students find difficulties in the same subject in which teachers have got some issues. It proves that teachers’ difficulties percolate to students. It also comes into sight from the study that given the opportunity to identify the area of science education where science teachers feel the need of hand holding, 66 percent of them have specified points at the issue. Hence, it necessitates that capacity building programme for science teachers are tailored to address their specific needs.
The finding that 37 percent of teachers point the origin of their difficulties at the students, is a matter of grave concerns. It is obligatory for teachers to explore the multiple variables affecting their students’ learning and to focus on the solutions in the process of supporting and optimising their learning. Undoubtedly, capacity building programme on the issues such as, how students learn; how to motivate them to learn and how to engage them in joyful learning in the context of teaching-learning of science can facilitate teachers to ease students’ difficulties in conceptual understanding. Further, it is extremely positive thing that 77 percent of teachers realise that they need training in some or the other area of science education. It implies their willingness to change for the betterment of teaching-learning of science.
Campbell et al. (2019) discusses that teacher education institutions have a responsibility to recognize the teaching situation that their graduates are likely to move into and to prepare them adequately to teach. Currently, institutions prepare for the ‘ideal’ teaching scenario, without consideration for the current and increasing trend of out-of-field teaching.
Hobbs and Törner (2019) have done cross-national comparisons of ideas through case studies, descriptions of practice and research data interrogates the experiences, practices, and contexts relating to out-of-field teaching with the collaborations between members of an international group of researchers and practitioners from Australia, Germany, Ireland, England, South Africa, Indonesia and the United States and highlighted the need for a nuanced understanding of the phenomenon . This has been an issue in many countries for some time, yet until recently there has been little formal research and poor policy responses to related problems. Caldis (2017) finds that not only does teaching out-of-field disrupt the integrity of a subject, it inevitably results in heightened levels of student disengagement, lower than anticipated achievement of student learning outcomes, and an increasing lack of confidence amongst teachers about their ability to teach effectively.
Childs and Mc Nicholl (2007) report that when teaching out of main subject specialism, one of the major challenges to secondary science teachers’ pedagogical practices is being able to give appropriate and effective science explanations in the classroom. Our findings are also in consonance with an earlier work of Bandela and Mercy (1999) and advocacy of The Royal Society of Chemistry (2014).On analysing the differences and similarities in the teachers experiences who are teaching science courses in and out of the area of specialisation in a single-sex/co-educational schools, Ogunsola-Bandele,(1999) found that those teaching out of their area of specialisation found it difficult structuring their lessons, getting back on track when drawn away from their original lesson plan and were sometimes unable to construct explanation in response to students (especially male) questions. The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) advocates that subject specialists should teach primary school science and secondary school Chemistry because students need to be inspired and engaged by teachers who have a “deeper understanding of the subject matter, the resultant increased confidence and the ability to improve attainment levels and attitudes to science” (RSC, 2014, p. 3).
Further exploration can be taken to authenticate the difficulties students face in learning the specific concepts of the subject as identified by the teachers. An interesting study can be to explore how secondary science teachers cope with the difficulties in teaching outside subject specialisation. The present investigation was limited to the science teachers’ perspectives on teaching outside subject specialisation. Their perspectives on other areas of science education can also be solicited.
