Science Youth Action Research: Promoting Critical Science Literacy Through Relevance and Agency

In this article, I introduce Science Youth Action Research (Sci-YAR) as a curricular framework and instructional approach and argue for its potential to enhance youth’s participation as citizens in a democratic society. I highlight and explain SciYAR’s key features, ground Sci-YAR in the essential tenets of two learning theories, and explain how Sci-YAR is designed to help youth construct views of themselves as agents who can use science to bring about personal and social transformation. Being able to function as part of a democratic society requires that youth develop and become aware of their individual capacities to act in the world. Sci-YAR is designed to facilitate this process for youth because it: (a) integrates the learning of science content and the development of science process skills in ways that reflect essential tenets of learning theory, (b) ensures that this learning is relevant to youth’s lives by creating opportunities for identity work in the science classroom that facilitate explicit connections between youth’s lives and the content and practices of science, and (c) promotes youth’s identity work in service of critical science agency, so that youth might see science as a tool and a context to take action in their own lives and communities. 10 Science education in the United States (U.S.) has a long history of problems for which it has been critiqued, as well as a multitude of reforms intended to address these ailments. A prominent issue, even at the beginning of the 20 th century, was articulated by John Dewey (1910), as he questioned science instruction, arguing that “science teaching has suffered because science has been so frequently presented just as so much readymade knowledge, so much subject-matter of fact and law, rather than as the effective method of inquiry into any subject matter” (p. 124). Dewey saw science as a subject that had direct connections to people’s everyday lives, however, was not being presented as such, but rather was reduced to merely the transmission of content knowledge, with the expectation that youth accumulate this knowledge. He concluded that denying youth the opportunity to generate knowledge through the sciences denies them the freedom that comes with being citizens in a democratic society. Despite his warnings, science education continues to be viewed by many as the transmission of and accumulation of facts and scientific knowledge. This approach to science education has had its pitfalls; given the sheer multitude of scientific information that could be included in a curriculum, educators are forced to arbitrarily select material to be taught and to cover topics at a very superficial level, often decreasing youth’s interest and engagement in science. Policies intended to reform science education generally have not addressed the problem of science education as a meaningless accumulation of facts. Instead, reforms have been introduced—usually following national political crises—with the intent of increasing America’s performance in science, for the purpose of ensuring our viability as a nation (Kliebard, 2004; U.S. Department of Education, 2000). Some of the major 11 policy reforms, as well as their outcomes for science teaching and learning, are outlined in Table 1. Because of the reactive nature of these reforms, they have had little impact on how science teaching and learning is practiced (DeBoer, 1991), and they have not deterred educators from using didactic, lecture-based teaching methods (Martin, Mullis, & Foy, 2008; Martin, Mullis, Gonzalez, & Chrostowski, 2004; Martin et al., 2000; Provasnik et al., 2012; U.S. Department of Education, 2000). Furthermore, when examining the cycles of reform over the past half-century, one sees separate emphasizes on either knowledge of scientific content—most often characterized by textbook-oriented curricula and rote learning—or the processes of scientific practice, characterized by active learning approaches through inquiry. Creating a separation between science content and science processes is not only an inaccurate picture of how scientists go about their work, but it tends to prioritize the importance of knowing science content, resulting in curriculum with a strict emphasis on students acquiring a plethora of science facts, concepts, and theories (Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2008). Examining the major trends in reform, it is clear that a significant challenge in science education has been overcoming the idea that rigor in science education means developing an ever-expanding curriculum in which teachers transmit and students accumulate a large amount of science content knowledge. A major problem with this approach is that a sole focus on acquiring content knowledge often leads educators to neglect the ways in which they can help youth understand how the processes of scientific thinking and practice have lead to the development of this knowledge and how these scientific skills and ways of thinking might help them develop knowledge and take action 1 2 Table 1 Major Science Education Reforms in Response to Political Context and Events Political Context or Major Event Policy Reform Actions Associated with the Reform Outcomes of the Reform Launching of Sputnik, the world’s first earth-orbiting satellite (1957) National Defense Education Act (1958)  Emphasis on the cognitive goals of education, rather than affective or life skill goals.  Curriculum revision in science, math, and foreign language, with the primary power to develop curriculum given to national government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF). (Kliebard, 2004)  Curricula focused on memorizing facts, laws, theorems, and presenting in-depth knowledge about very specialized fields of science.  Simple experimentation used sparingly to briefly expose students to basic inquiry process used by scientists. (McNeil, 2009) Great Society and social reform (late 1960s, early 1970s) Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965)  Federal funding for public education to initiate reform.  Science-Technology-Society movement promoting more practical applications of science through societal issue-oriented curricula. (Aikenhead, 2006; DeBoer, 1991)  Prevalence of humanistic approaches to science education focused on teaching of content through the development of active process skills, with the purpose of  Short-lived due to a lack of support structures in place, including high costs incurred by publishers to put out curricular materials and the large amount of teacher training involved with these types of curricula.  Schools and teachers returned to more rote science learning through textbooks. (Duschl et al., 2007; McNeil, 2009)