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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HISTORICAL BACKGROUND : THE 1990s
- New status for primary science
As the decade of the 90s began, a very different perspective of Science in the primary years appeared. During the 1980s for a variety of reasons country after country had given official assent to the notion that school science should be for all students and not just for those with intentions to enter science-based careers. As the decade ended, Science for All, as the slogan had been replaced by Scientific Literacy, placing Science alongside the already established literacies for language and number, that are so often used as the hallmarks of educated societies, and that politicians are so extremely sensitive about. The 1990s heralded the first responses of education systems to these new external presses for a new role for Science in schooling. The new National Curriculum in England and Wales declared Science to be one of three core subjects alongside Language and Mathematics. Then detailed lists of topics and concepts were prescribed in three disciplinary strands together with a strand of scientific skills (NCC, 1991). Without distinction in kind between primary and secondary schooling, many of these science learnings were to be taught in the first two stages of the curriculum plan that coincided with the primary years. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 1993) published its Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy in which a great number of science learning targets, now set out in seven strands, were associated with the primary years.
A number of other countries and states followed these leads, and compiled their own long lists of intended science topics and conceptual learnings. The Scandinavian countries, had been concerned for some time that Science within their integrated subjects was being poorly represented. Norway and Sweden thus now listed Science as a separate subject, again spelling out lists of intended science content learnings. Denmark, however, produced a subject in which Science and Technology were kept together and, even more surprisingly, did not prescribe any topics or conceptual content. Rather, its curriculum emphasised Science as Ways of Working and Ways of Knowing in investigations of science and science/technology situations, that teachers and their students could find in the school's near and further, natural and human-interacted environments (Andersen and Sørensen, 1995). It was argued by this curriculum's designers that, if these investigations were properly carried out, good and worthwhile science content would be learnt. This notion of Science as extended open-ended investigations of mutually-chosen situations that can involve Science provides, as I shall argue later, a much easier curricular context for successful and integrated learning to occur.
In many of these 1990s reforms, Technology emerged as a new and separate subject, making the previous promising explorations of integration between these two fields almost impossible to maintain.