Put a Little Science in Your Life
2 min read
From an Op-Ed in the June 1 online edition of the NY Times by Brian Greene: Put a Little Science in Your Life
The entire piece is worth the read. If you are pressed for time and need to choose between reading this blog post and the article, choose the article.
Some excerpts that struck me as particularly relevant:
in teaching our students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science's underlying technical details.
In fact, many students I've spoken to have little sense of the big questions those technical details collectively try to answer: Where did the universe come from? How did life originate? How does the brain give rise to consciousness? Like a music curriculum that requires its students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the great masterpieces, this way of teaching science squanders the chance to make students sit up in their chairs and say, 'Wow, that's science?'
and
At the root of this pedagogical approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A before moving on to B.
In reading this, I was struck how applicable this is to most disciplines, and how the requirements of a system that uses high-stakes testing as a primary means for assessing mastery (and as the basis for funding/management decisions) squeezes out the time required for engaging students around a big-picture vision of a subject -- and how that subject really cannot be contained within curricular lines. While most subjects have a set of core competencies that allow for a greater exploration of the subject, the core competencies cannot be confused with the end goal.
Among the many benefits of open content, this feels like one of the most compelling: content that can be freely edited and redistributed allows a teacher to balance the core competencies against the big-picture understanding. If this learning is supported within a learning environment that supports student-directed inquiry, the information contained within an open curriculum could provide a supporting framework for student work. This type of blended learning environment (part online, part face to face; part teacher directed, part student directed) would allow shared focus on core competencies and larger questions.
