Constructivism and Non-Western Science Education Research

In this paper, I argue that science education research and curriculum development efforts in Nonwestern countries can benefit by adopting a constructivist view of science and science learning. The past efforts at transferring curricula from the West, and local development projects that result in curricula only marginally different from Western curricula, stem from an acultural view of science. These efforts also ground science learning in concepts of logical thinking rather than understanding. The resulting level of science learning, however, has not met expectations. Constructivism offers a very different view of science and science learning. It assumes that logical thinking is an inherently human quality regardless of culture, and instead focuses attention on the processes of interpretation that lead to understanding. Constructivism leads one to expect that students in different cultures will have somewhat different perspectives on science. Science education research should inform curriculum projects that incorporate this point, thus making science curricula authentically sensitive to culture and authentically scientific. Japanese elementary science education based on the Japanese traditional love of nature is a good example. Introduction Educators have long viewed science as either a culture in its own right or as transcending culture. More recently many educators have come to see science as one of several aspects of culture. In this view it is appropriate to speak of Western science since the West is the historic home of modern science, modern in the sense of a hypothetical-deductive, experimental approach to science. It follows that science education is an aspect of culture and thus it is appropriate to speak of Western science education (Ogawa, 1986; Cobern, 1991). "There is," wrote Wilson in 1981, "a growing awareness that, for science education to be effective, it must take much more explicit account of the cultural context of the society which provides its setting, and whose needs it exists to serve" (p. 29). With respect to Non-western cultures, this suggests that a simple transfer of Western educational practices to other cultures including ethnic minority cultures within the West will not due. Indeed, Lewin (1990, p. 1) noted that today "far more children study science in developing countries than earlier but the evidence suggests that the great majority do not master more than a small proportion of the goals set for them." Educators tend to focus solely on the careful explication of scientific concepts, the "domestic affairs" (Hills, 1989, p. 183) of science education leading to the view that science curricula are readily transferable. Instead, educators must grapple with how to help students make sense of science concepts that are often quite foreign. This "foreign affairs" focus is based on two premises. All science exists in cultural context, and second, the teaching and learning science is often a cross-cultural activity. By "culture" I have in mind Geertz' definition, "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, 1 If "science" is taken to mean the casual study of nature by simple observation, then of course all cultures in all times have had their own science. There is, however, adequate reason to distinguish this view of science from modern science. 2 and the analysis of it is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning..." (1973, p. 5). Science makes more than scientific sense to a scientist. It makes sense within the scientist's entire view of reality and significance. A classroom lesson seeks to make scientific sense of a scientific concept, but this becomes a cross-cultural activity when the scientific sense does not automatically fit with the student's more global view of reality. One would think then that the further students are culturally removed from the West the more seriously one ought to address the relevance of culture in science education. In 1980, Lutterodt noted that to significantly improve science learning in developing nations researchers and educators needed to know more about the influence of local culture on science learning. Ten years later Lewin observed that the profession still had "a long way to go in developing ways of representing science that are not foreign, expert, and culturally unsympathetic" (1990, p. 18). Whether among ethnic minority cultures in the West or in Nonwestern developing countries, the role of culture in science learning requires greater attention. To date approaches to science teaching amongst the ethnically diverse using transferred, marginally adapted curricula have not been sufficiently effective, and it is time to consider a change of focus. Indeed, Kyle (1993) argued that the embrace and affirmation of cultural diversity in the science classroom is an important theme for science education reform and research. In this article, I argue that researchers can use a constructivist model of learning to both support the need for, and facilitate, investigations of how science education can be formulated from different cultural perspectives. I begin by addressing two widespread though typically implicit assumptions about Non-western and traditional cultures, that is, the assumptions of cultural deficit and illogical thinking. Rationality is Not the Issue In the West, science is assumed to be an integral part of Western culture. In theory, science is not alien to people of Western culture. What interests Western educators and policy makers is achievement in science, particularly the comparative achievement in science among students of different Western nations plus Japan. Americans are constantly asking whether or not their students know as much science as Japanese and German students, for example. While educators in Non-western, developing nations share an interest in achievement, there are other questions that rarely arise in the West. These are the fundamental questions about one's understanding of the natural world, one's relationship with the natural world, and understanding of causality. These are cultural questions about worldview and the compatibility of various Non-western worldviews with modern science (e.g., Abimbola, 1977; Ogunniyi, 1984 & 1988). The science historian George Basalla wrote that the establishment of independent, indigenous science in a society new to modern science requires that "resistance to science on the basis of philosophical and religious beliefs... be overcome and replaced by positive encouragement of scientific research" (1967, p. 617). "It is difficult," according to Poole (1968, p. 57), "to see how the less advanced societies can achieve the high living standards at which they aim without assimilating large portions of the Western conceptual system, not least those concepts of scientific significance." Musgrove (1982) not only concurred, he further argued that a successful education lifts children out of their culture. Such opinions reflect an unnecessary "deficit" or "culture-clash" view of culture where traditional cultures are not simply viewed as different, but tacitly assumed to be less rational than modern Western culture.