Foreword: Science as Story: Science Education by Story

Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 2, Issue 1, Foreword (Jun., 2001)
Peter FENSHAM
Science as Story: Science Education by Story

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Examples of Science Education by Story
Belatedly, it is great to see people now writing about the school science curriculum in terms of Story being a central feature. After taking a strong STS approach to lower secondary chemistry in England and Wales, the Salters group at York University chose a quite different approach for its successor the A Level Chemistry course. Central among the materials prepared for this course is the student text which has the title, Storylines. A list of the stories making up one of its units is given in Example 1.

Example 1

At the same time on the other side of the globe, Dr Cliff Malcolm at the Curriculum Corporation in Australia was pioneering Story as the curriculum heart of a new approach to teaching Science in the primary and junior secondary years. (see Example 2 for the storylines of some of its units for the early secondary years.)

Example 2

Good stories have characters, events and a plot that is woven by the way the characters interact with each other and with the events. It is the quality of this interweaving of the human flow of time and space that makes stories so attractive and so memorable. This is the very opposite of the abstract and conceptual way we have been presenting the central content of school science for most of the last thirty years. For most students this approach seems rootless, suspended beyond time and space, and not surprisingly, is hard for learners to comprehend and build into their long-term memories.