Peter Taylor

Ever since the philosophers of the Enlightenment era proclaimed the necessary separation of science, religion and art so that each may flourish independently, many have realized that science has lost crucial aspects of the ‘othered’ disciplines. Values, imagination, creativity and dreams were deemed to lie outside the sphere of the scientific endeavor and were thus avoided. However, at the beginning of the 21st Century, the world has come to realize that in order to solve new and invariably complex problems on a global scale old solutions no longer suffice. Humankind needs citizens who are not only reasonable and science-savvy, but are also creative thinkers, ethically astute and multi-disciplinary problem solvers. This shift in thinking about the present situation and the future has already had an effect on education. In recent years we have seen stirrings of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) education in the USA, with the aim of equipping the world’s leading economic power with an advanced scientific workforce capable of maintaining its global dominance. Other leading nations are following suit, chief amongst which are China and Korea. In most other parts of the world, however, science education systems are still struggling to accommodate the previously innovative curriculum perspective of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education, which clearly does not yet embrace the arts. In this chapter we address the question of how science education can be transformed to better prepare future citizens by embracing a STEAM perspective that educates future decision-makers who are not only knowledgeable in science but also morally astute and creative.

For nearly 50 years, constructivist theory has been making a significant contribution to education, shaping the way we think about the active role of the mind of the learner, whether student, teacher, or researcher. But to answer the question “what is constructivism?” is not an easy task; it depends on which version of constructivist theory we are asking about. There are many versions of constructivism in the literature, with labels such as cognitive, personal, social, radical, cultural, trivial, pedagogical, academic, contextual, C1 and C2, and ecological. And there are also allied terms that have a strong family resemblance, including social constructionism, enactivism and pragmatism. For this entry, I consider four versions – personal constructivism, radical constructivism, social constructivism, and critical constructivism. These have had a major impact on science education and greater impacts than other forms/versions. I start with a brief consideration of Piaget’s cognitive constructivism, which laid the foundations for the emergence of the “Big Four,” and I conclude with an integral perspective on using different versions of constructivism to shape science teaching and learning.

During the closing decades of the twentieth century, science education researchers embraced personal construct theory and explored the many interesting ways in which students develop “misconceptions” of the natural world which differ significantly from the canonical scientific view. Pedagogical strategies were developed to enable teachers to detect and remedy these intuitive ways of making sense of everyday experience or, for most students, of the canonical representations contained in the artificial world of the science textbook...

How can we prepare science teachers with professional knowledge and skills for ensuring that teaching and curricula meet the global challenges of the twenty-first century, among which learning to live sustainably on planet Earth is one of our most pressing concerns? Education for environmental, cultural, and economic sustainability has been a key focus of the United Nations for the past decade, underpinned by the Brundtland Report’s advocacy of an “intergenerational conscience” which recognizes that meeting the needs of the present should not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (UNWCED 1987). The recent “Rio + 20” United Nations conference on sustainable development ratified this view.

Social efficacy as canonical myths is present as curricula designed to translate global and local knowledge and manifests itself in the sub-urban experiences of daily teacher work. As teachers we need opportunities to connect the personal with a curriculum dominated identity; a human kind of experience, with research as a living guide to meaning. Education continues the research on teacher identity in systems. The relative habitat of self in the context of teaching however, is a topic still under review, especially as it applies to the storying of self in a collective professional life-world and the artefact s and icons of system logic. I use autobiography combined with narrative inquiry as literary media to explore the teacher as a vocational being with a human map connected to others. Storying serves as an empathetic bridge to development and invites reflexive practice, as we recollect our lives and reflect on experience. I use the ‘technique’ of poly-vocal writing as evocative exploration to discuss identity among the overt and covert nature of teaching and infuse autobiography with interpretation, calling on salient literature as referent voices. Conscious constructed tales enabled me to explore the archetypal, reflexive and metaphorical act s of human meaning in the context of practice. In my thesis I act as an imaginative interpreter, drawing on experiences as teacher, writer, artist and creative facilitator providing a unilateral voice in the practice of knowing the self as a referent to knowing the other. And, as stories often go, I became an insider-observer or locus inquirer, to facilitate teachers as ethnographers of the self, as the reading and writing agents for transformation.