Science Educators and Science Education

For the last four days, I've been in New York City at the Bronx Zoo for a 3-day workshop that I attended with the two education coordinators from the local zoo, the Seneca Park Zoo. Seven 3-person teams from all over the northeast attended this workshop. The sponsoring group was "SPARKS" -- "Supporting Parents in Advocacy, Research, and Knowledge in Science." Attendees were from "ISI's" -- Informal Science Institutions -- with a parent representative from the community.

I want to write about this experience but don't know quite how to organize it, mostly because it, itself was not organized well. None of us who were attending knew quite what we were attending for, what the ultimate point of this all was, other than promoting science education with parents. I went because, well, partly I really see this kind of thing as part of my job with KidsOutAndAbout.com -- one of my missions is to promote science and to spark parents' interest in their kids education, as a subset of my main mission, to promote reason in the culture. I also went as a homeschooling parent, because I had a vague expectation that perhaps they would inundate me with ideas and resources and creativity for stuff to do with kids that I hadn't thought of.

We couldn't really tell until the end of the second day that what they wanted was for us to do the exact same 2-day workshop with a bunch of parents that we were getting: Some vague stuff from the education schools about how children learn, circadian rhythms, the "multiple intelligences" idea which is just oh, so fashionable but when you look at Gardiner's premises and what he actually says (which we didn't) you can see that what he is saying is not only unprofound but untrue. Also on the morning of the second day, the instructors tried to take us from:

Structured inquiry....bad to

Guided inquiry....better to

Open-ended inquiry....the ideal, but usually not attainable

So in essence I pointed out that this is nonsense. "I have seen some of this kind of thing before," I pointed out to the group charmingly, sweeting, and pseudo-naively, "but I must say, I just can't see the point of what is being called "open inquiry." Sure, what we want is for kids to use their brain themselves and to want to do it, but that's not the same thing as is being promoted here. Kids NEED context, they NEED information, they NEED guidance. This kind of advocates throwing a kid into a situation with no preparation and then letting them get messy and dirty in whatever it is, without showing them how to focus their attention on some specific thing they could learn from. Let me tell you what the effect has been in mathematics with the way education has been promoting this exact same concept over the past 15-20 years, my husband has seen the effect close up...KIDS CAN'T DO MATH when they get to college..."

I will be proud of myself for getting the whole group so much on my side with this that the instructors are revising their presentation for that segment of the workshop. "What I'm hearing here is that people are coming to an agreement that guided inquiry is being seen as more the ideal than open-ended inquiry...is that right?" Heads nodded vigorously. "OK, we'll revisit this for the next group that we work with, in Chicago in May."

I have more to say here, but I will close with how much it struck me that

1) Science educators are so different from scientists.

2) How low their standards are both for parent involvement AND for how much scientific knowledge kids can absorb.

This fact-fact-FACT-oriented mom was appalled.