Integration: An approach to Science in primary schooling

Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 2, Issue 1, Article 10 (Jun., 2001)
Peter J FENSHAM
Integration: An approach to Science in primary schooling

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INTEGRATION WITH LANGUAGE
- Science as narrative story
Since the mid-1990s there has been an awakening to the fact Science is a narrative human story. Every piece of scientific knowledge, and the way it has been modified and developed over the years, has associated with it a human story in which there are actors, events and all sorts of interactions between them as the plot to elucidate this aspect of nature is pursued. We enjoyed and were reminded of the truth of this description of Science, when we read the exciting story about how Watson and Crick unraveled the structure of DNA - one of the truly great achievements of science in our time. Great scientific story tellers like Stephen J Gould and Primo Levi have been producing popular best sellers that are these human stories of science. Five Equations that Changed the World, a more recent book by Michael Guillan, tells the stories of how these equations became part of the store of science, and how that process changed the lives of the people involved, and in due course all our lives.
It is thus strange, indeed, to realise that story telling has not been among the many pedagogical approaches that have been canvassed, promoted and explored in the thirty years since the great curriculum reforms occurred, that underpin school science and first identified primary science. Primary teachers, among all teachers at the various levels of educational systems, are the ones to whom story telling comes most naturally to use with confidence in classrooms. Perhaps because scientists and secondary science teachers have been so much in control of all the curricular reforms-even those for primary science - that we missed such an obvious pedagogy for so long.
In Beyond 2000, the report of a futuristic projection in Britain to define Science Education for the Future recommends 'that scientific knowledge can best be presented in the curriculum as a number of key explanatory stories' (Millar and Osborne, 1998). Before this legitimation of science education as story telling, several new curricula had appeared that are based on Science as story. One of these is the Salters A level Chemistry course in England and Wales. Its student text is entitled Storylines and each of its advanced topics is presented in story form. Because of this form, the conceptual chemistry involved is directly and explicitly in a context that gives it depth of meaning and provides students with the coherence for longer retention, that they have found so difficult, when the the same concepts are presented in the abstracted independence that has been the hallmark of the 1960s reforms.
For the other end of schooling, the Curriculum Corporation in Australia in the mid 1990s produced two sets of materials for primary Science: They Don't Tell the Truth about the Wind (for grades 1-3), and There's an Emu in the Sky (for grades 4-7). In both these volumes of curriculum materials, the authors have specifically recognised both the motivating effect good stories have on primary age learners, and the basic literacy skills that are rehearsed by them when their learning of science comes in story form, or is to be put by them into story forms that may be journalistic, creative or dialogic in style.