Science education today – University of Rouen Normandie
To tackle crucial challenges such as the degradation of living conditions on the planet, the climate emergency or pandemics, science education is proving to be a lively question. Because the transposition of disciplinary content into a learning path accessible to all students remains problematic. If the school programs evolve, are accompanied by rapid changes which begin our society, the training of future citizens in questions as complex as those related to the environment or health comes up against the organization of the school system in disciplines sufficiently impervious to each other and to the social contexts on which they are based.
Faced with citizen issues, new content and skills have been introduced into the programs, broadening the specialty of teachers and redrawing the contours of a scientific education which takes up questions debated in the public space and requires more than ever to be done. acquire the capacities and dispositions essential for individual and collective action.
School programs evolve to support the changes
rapids that manifest our society. Shutterstock
The question posed is then that of the responsible development of a scientific education which is as demanding in terms of content as it is promising in terms of relevance and authenticity. For, it is not knowledge that is intrinsically relevant or meaningful; it is the practical learning situations and situations in which it is embedded that hold the keys to interpreting the world. The question of authenticity, for its part, is the concern of education professionals to transmit true knowledge, as close as possible to its source.
The question of school content
We can be pleasantly surprised at the speed with which the knowledge established in the scholarly and decision-making sphere has entered school curricula over the past twenty years. Thus the question of science content (in particular of life and living things) no longer arises today in terms of obsolescence and updating. Currently, more and more socio-scientific questions, publicly debated are also discussed in class, within learning activities.
Decision-making on these issues requires considering two main dimensions: a political, or ethical, dimension, and a scientific dimension. Let us take the example of irradiated foods: the political question arises as to whether the irradiation of different foods should be authorized or not, this refers to a political and ethical choice. In addition, there is a scientific dispute over whether irradiated foods have lower nutritional value and impact on health, so it is also a scientific question. The political and ethical dimensions are absent from the (science) training of teachers, although they meet in the classroom on complex issues widely debated in the public sphere.
The pupil’s point of view on this type of socio-scientific question could be crucial insofar as “it is in a rationally informed way that everyone must be able to participate in decision-making, individual and collective, local or global ”(Annex current programs, General second, Eduscol website, 2019). Discussing these aspects with students is part of their scientific training in the subject of understanding science, and the scientific process.
A matching logic versus an updating logic
It will be understood that the scientific education of the citizen today resides in the correspondence of contemporary scientific practices with activities and contents of science education in school and outside school. More than ever, it is becoming necessary to have a good knowledge of the sciences, their practices and their institutions.
On the one hand, by communicating on their practices, researchers and scientists can better understand the way in which they develop questions and research the concepts that make it possible to formulate these questions, to assess the human and financial resources deployed. This communication is part of the mission of scientists to promote scientific, technical and industrial culture, and even promotion of research results who are at the service of society. It is now included in the national SNR research strategy (law 22 July 2013).
On the other hand, the requirement of scientific education of the citizen lies in the need to ensure the adequacy, the relevance and the applicability of a specific scientific corpus. to a particular social issue. Usually, the relevance is eclipsed in the formalism of the disciplines when they bring to the foreground the formal structure of knowledge without the possibility of recontextualization with the pupils.
Setting up authentic learning situations amounts to reintroducing into scientific school activities the options, projects and issues that are the source of knowledge and its legitimacy. This epistemological knowledge – in terms of critical discourse on the principles, methods, and results – of scientific practices leads to rehabilitate the concept of profession who has a practical sense of the problems to be dealt with, of the appropriate ways of dealing with them, etc.
This understanding of the profession of scientist and researcher is an important component in the interest that students may show in scientific studies. It makes it possible to rule out stereotypical images: male science, science that always tells the truth, science with immutable theories, scientists always in agreement …
Responsible and critical positioning
Moreover, we have a duty to explicitly question this positioning on the school side and on the laboratory side if ever we avoid being politically irresponsible. Laboratory side, scientists must make it possible to make the rules of the game between knowledge and science accessible. By, to make the reasons which incite to understand the theories, this example can destroy them or confirm them, which they represent for the human mind.
On the school side, we must make clear the reciprocal and problematic relationship between school knowledge and culture. In fact, on a daily basis, young people live and interact in a world transformed by science and technology, a world of technoscience. This school relationship to the world of technoscience is set by the school, one of whose missions is to develop an in-depth reading in order to understand its diversity and its guiding principles. Here also lies the political meaning of education.
This is to avoid the all didactic through work on the relevance of school content (political positioning to rule out any technocratic inclination, political meaning of teaching, in particular that of certain issues such as development, warming, etc.) and a broadening of the field of intervention of teachers and the role of scientific activities (transversal concepts of the nature of science: modeling, causality, structure, function, etc.).