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5. TEACHING AND LEARNING IN CONTEXT-BASED SCIENCE CLASSES A Dialectical Sociocultural Approach

INTRODUCTION

Internationally, many secondary school students are disengaged in science, finding the content of the curriculum unrelated to their everyday lives. Despite a rapidly changing world, outdated pedagogical approaches still persist in science classrooms where the focus is on the rote learning of conceptual knowledge, the application of concepts to routine problems, the treatment of context as secondary to concepts, and the use of practical work to illustrate principles and practices (Tytler, 2007). Context-based approaches offer a new way to engage students in science through more meaningful experiences by situating the learning of canonical science in realworld scenarios. Context-based learning has been researched previously (see e.g., King, 2012 for a full review of literature) revealing that students see the science content as relevant when taught in context (Hofstein, Kesner, & Ben-Zvi, 2000); students are more interested and motivated through learning science in context (Barber, 2000; Gutwill-Wise, 2001; Parchmann et al., 2006; Ramsden, 1992, 1994, 1997) and students’ understanding of science concepts compares favourably with those taught through a traditional approach (Barber, 2000; Smith & Bitner, 1993). Other research on contexts that explores a sociocultural perspective is found in the work of Van Oers (1998) and Roth (1995). Van Oers (1998) explored two interpretations of context; “situation-as-context” and “activity as context.” In the first interpretation, context is seen as a meaningful situation or a situation that makes “human sense” (p. 476). He further explains that the cognitive structures used to make sense of the context are personally constructed and may be influenced by social factors. The second interpretation, “activity-as-context” occurs when the activity is the starting point for learning and the context emerges through the interactions between the learners. He concludes that both approaches depend on some sort of surrounding, either a situation or an activity where knowledge can be socially constructed. He advocates that context “is essentially conceived in terms of a sociocultural setting” (p. 481). The definition of “context” adopted in this study is drawn from Van Oers’ first interpretation where the context is the “situation” or a “real-world scenario” that makes “human sense” to the students. R. Taconis et al. (Eds.), Teachers Creating Context-Based Learning Environments in Science, 71–85. © 2016 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

D. King

Roth’s (1995) research on authentic school science reveals “contexts” as important for learning in science. He explained that students’ experience of authentic science occurs when there is commonality with the work of real scientists like going into the field to collect data. One of the criteria for “authentic science” in schools is that “participants learn in context constituted in part by ill-defined problems” (p. xiii). Roth’s research