What is wrong with the current curriculum?

Solutions to improve a pluralist view of science and educational outcomes

Science, Nature, and Outcomes

• Teaching science tends to take one view of ‘reality’ and one process for ‘certainty’ and then teaches critical thinking separately.

• What is wrong with this approach?• Does it produce better outcomes or not?• Why or why not?

Outcomes and Experiential Learning

• What are the learning outcomes that we are trying to reach?

• Is mastery of content knowledge about taxonomy in a deciduous forest also leading to learning outcomes such as respect, reverence, and learning about the interrelationships between human societies and the forest?

Proof in the Outcomes

• If you treat nature as a purely mechanical ‘machine’ how will that change the learning outcomes in the ways nature is treated and viewed by students?

• Is Western science the only reality? Is it taught like it has a purchase on reality? Then what will be the result of those learning outcomes?

• Why does critical thinking suffer in this model?

Some Unintended Learning Outcomes

• If nature is a machine, I can learn how it works and do whatever I want to it.

• If human beings are of nature, and also ‘machines’ (defined by function), I can do whatever I want without regard for consequences.

• Science is reality, so whatever it says is absolutely, irrefutably true and right (no matter how wrong or harmful it might be)

How does Illarion Merculieff address learning issues?

• Earth-based pace• Attending to relationship• Place-based knowledge, learning from the

earth• Learning/thinking/working as a group• Learning from Elders• Close observation and emulation.

More of Illarion Merculieff’s ideas

• Indirect teaching • Silence, pausing, reflection• All senses experiential learning• Visual/Non-verbal learning• Storytelling• Dance and games• Good instructions• Humor

What are the likely outcomes of Merculieff’s pedagogy?

• Careful, inductive and empiricist reasoning required for any real practice of science.

• Attention to consequences of all inquiry and action, not grasping for accomplishment and ‘discovery’ at any price.

• Care for cultivating relationships.• Critical thinking and critical reasoning skills by

learning ‘other ways of thinking’ and diversity.

Since these are ‘learning outcomes’ why aren’t they taught?

• The term ‘learning outcome’ is incompletely, and insufficiently understood.

• Learning outcomes are based on a mechanistic input-output model that can be measured and expressed in data without any regard for the holistic nature of any ‘outcome’ in science or pedagogy.

My own experience in 20 years of teaching

• I am extremely standards and outcome oriented. I have to be. I teach tough students to IEP’s or in college bridge programs with exit exams, and I am scored on each student’s success or failure on ‘objective’ tests.

• Yet there is nothing about teaching experientially or valuing the learner that inhibits outcomes. It promotes good outcomes.

What is the difference between Merculieff’s model and the standards

and learning outcomes in public schools?

• Merculieff’s model is holistic – it cares about place-based learning.

• It emphasizes experiential learning – in other words what you have lived through and experienced shapes your intellectual readiness.

Standards and Learning Outcomes in Public Schools

• They extract discreet intellectual tasks, make them very abstract, and try to feed students with this rote learning to get results.

• Each intellectual task, in isolation, is tested (a knowledge of subject-verb agreement, capitalization, comprehension of text, PEMDAS in math) and demands a single answer. This is not applied knowledge.

The Problem

• This form of assessment and instruction leaves students without the ‘Gestalt’ the big picture or ability to put it all together.

• It also can be demeaning and demoralizing.• It presents ‘knowledge’ like some foreign thing

that students have to purchase or have no enfranchisement in, and this erases the student rather than builds on each student’s abilities and experiences.

The Solution

• Merculieff’s ‘all-senses experiential learning’ gives applied, living, individual experiences a way into the learning process.

• Then after using this pedagogy, I say students will score better. The Rural Systemic Initiative studied indigenous schools and rural schools and saw improvement in outcomes after indigenous and local traditions were respected.

The Rural Systemic Initiative

• This was an NSF grant funded opportunity to look at improving math and science education outcomes at rural schools.

• One of the rationale’s for the work was to find out how to make students in isolated areas more competitive in the global economy.

Competitive in a global economy?

• There were a few problems with this opportunity thinking – what does a global economy have to do with an isolated area?

• Why would any student care?• If there are no ‘global jobs,’ what does this

mean to people in isolated areas? • Does this mean that if they do learn to be

globally competitive they have to leave to take a real job?

Yes, it does!

• Then what is appropriate for a science literacy curriculum if it isn’t to be ‘globally competitive’?

• Learning relevant, local, regionally, tribally important material became tantamount to the effort to improve educational outcomes.

What does it mean to bring Native knowledge into the curriculum?

• Research has shown that superficial initiatives that do not connect to a deep sense of cultural values are not effective.

• In Alaska, efforts have been made to show how indigenous ways of knowing connect to a standards based curriculum to ensure that native wisdom is not taught in a superficial way but as a significant knowledge tradition.

The Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative

• “But at its heart, the effort was built around the single idea that math and science education must reflect – and strengthen – the knowledge, values, and wisdom of traditional Alaska Native cultures. Academic excellence and cultural survival are not mutually exclusive goals, but essential partners. This led the effort for a more culturally grounded curriculum.

The Alaska Native Knowledge Network and Standards Based Learning

• In 1998, a standards-based curriculum with over 100 standards was published online:

• http://ankn.uaf.edu/Publications/CulturalStandards.pdf

Pluralism in Science

• This is actually something that I have spent time trying to understand. The pluralist view in science is important in a feminist philosophy of science – basically pluralism is the idea that there is more than one science, more than one truth or answer.

• De-colonizing science (as pluralism) is described by Glenn Aikenhead:

• http://www.usask.ca/education/profiles/aikenhead/webpage/An-Emerging-Decolonizing-Sci-Ed.pdf

As Aikenhead writes about science education:

• Indigenous ways of living in nature have not generally been welcomed in science classrooms, and Indigenous students must suppress such knowledge to meet the conventional goal of thinking, behaving, and believing like a scientist. Thus, school science overtly and covertly marginalizes Indigenous students by its ideology of neo-colonialism – a process that systemically undermines the cultural values of a formerly colonized group (Ryan, 2008). As a result, an alarming under representation of Indigenous students in senior sciences persists.

What can/should non-indigenous people do to improve the situation?

• Recognize that a problem exists, particularly in science that does not acknowledge or accept pluralist views of science.

• Working to push to the forefront the pluralist view, and understanding that pluralism is an ally with indigenous learning and science.

• Locating issues/problems in the Western and Eurocentric view to correct.

Objectivity and Eliminative Materialism

• The concept of objectivity is the belief (the methodological faith) that the observer can be extracted from the thing being observed to arrive at an absolute truth. This is non-pluralist in nature.

• Eliminative materialism is the radical view that anything non-material, any metaphysical idea should be eliminated and replaced with objective scientific terms.

‘Objectivity’ and Eliminative Materialism are not Allies

• Non-indigenous people can help indigenous people by championing pluralist views that do not try to ‘clear cut’ uncertainty or extract the knower from the known.

• Non-indigenous people can bring indigenous voices, writings, paintings, and music into the classroom to enhance pluralism.

Problems with Helping

• While non-indigenous people may want to learn Native wisdom traditions and teach them, I think this path has dangers.

• Appropriating other peoples’ truths can be a result, and I think non-indigenous people have their work cut out for them already trying to cut down the tangles and thorns of ‘objectivist’ and imperialist views.

Freeing the Western paradigm to make it inclusive

• So, the best thing that can happen in this collaboration between indigenous wisdom and Western/Eurocentric critique is finding together the common ground of what needs to be critiqued, and if “He who defines reality holds the power,” then it is clear that defining reality must be pluralist.

Allies in Pluralism

• William Poteat, “Recovering the Ground” is one book he has written. He talks about knowing ‘mind-bodily’ and the problems with objectivity.

• Allison Wylie and Helen Longino are two theorists working to gain a pluralist understanding.

Museums and Informal Learning

• OMSI’s “Roots of Wisdom” exhibit offers a showcase of perspectives on Native science. Including:

• Restoring fish ponds in Hawaii• Rediscovering traditional foods of the Tulalip

tribes• http://programs.omsi.edu

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