Social Images of Science and of Scientists, and the Imperative of Science Education for All
In this chapter we examine the classic and renewed reasons that can be argued in order to support the need to teach science in compulsory education in the twenty-first century. We also discuss the currently proclaimed educational aims that configure the i
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Social Images of Science and of Scientists, and the Imperative of Science Education for All Agustín Adúriz-Bravo and Alejandro P. Pujalte
11.1 Introduction Fifty years of research on the images of science and of scientists that circulate in Western societies have shown that naïve and distorted images prevail. Many authors have pointed out that these folk images are scarcely adequate from an educational point of view, since they can become genuine obstacles in achieving a good-quality science education for all. This is seen in many enquiries on students of different educational levels (Mead and Metraux 1957; Beardslee and O’Dowd 1961; Brush 1979; Chambers 1983; Leslie-Pelecky et al. 2005; Pujalte et al. 2012b) and on science teachers (Hodson 1998; Chen et al. 1997; Adúriz-Bravo 2001; Manassero and Vázquez 2001; Hugo and Adúriz-Bravo 2003; Vázquez et al. 2006; Demirbaş 2009). Naïve images of science and of scientists are at odds with the idea that knowledge of and about science is indispensable for people to exercise full citizenship. Results of empirical research reveal a broadly extended view of scientific activity and its products that is positivistic, empirical-inductivist, a-historical, individual, decontextualized, and value-free (Gil et al. 2001; Fernández et al. 2002). Science is very often believed to be a neutral, objective, almost infallible endeavor with no recognizable human aims –apart from just “knowing”– and aiming at the sheer discovery of truth. The vast majority of social actors that have been studied (students, teachers, citizens, even scientists) share a portrayal of science as an elitist and excluding activity, mainly conducted by white middle-aged males who follow “the” scientific method and are above the rest of humanity due to their intellectual skills (Aikenhead 1984; Gagliardi and Giordan 1986; Hodson 1992; Newton and Newton 1992; Fernández et al. 2002). A. Adúriz-Bravo (*) · A. P. Pujalte Instituto CeFIEC, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. A. Yacoubian, L. Hansson (eds.), Nature of Science for Social Justice, Science: Philosophy, History and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47260-3_11
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A. Adúriz-Bravo and A. P. Pujalte
There is also an accumulated corpus of literature on the transmission and strengthening of these images of science and of scientists through formal science education, especially in levels K-12. Studies suggest that these views on the so- called “nature of science” (NOS) that circulate at school may constitute a relevant “didactical obstacle” for scientific literacy, and that this might be particularly relevant in the case of students coming from a socio-economically vulnerable background. In this chapter we engage the question: why teach science in compulsory education in the twenty-first century? We adhere to the idea that the currently proclaimed aim of a qual
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