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FEATURES |
* University of California at San Francisco
(UCSF), Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP), San Francisco, CA
94143-0905; St. Paul Public Schools, 360
Colborne Street, St. Paul, MN 55102-3299;
Department of Biological Sciences, University of
Delaware, Newark, DE 19716
Submitted October 1, 2003; Accepted October 14, 2003
Partnerships between members of the scientific community at institutes of higher education and the K–12 education community are an increasingly popular approach to science education reform (Atkin, 1989; Chatman, 2002; Sussman, 1993; NSF, 2003a, 2003b). Although the word partnership can mean many things to many people, we use the term scientist–teacher partnership here to mean a collaboration among a group of college or university scientists and K–12 teachers, with the goal of improving science education along the kindergarten through postgraduate educational continuum, although many other varieties of partnerships can and do exist through museum and industry collaborations. Since the inception of Cell Biology Education, we have used the space of this column to highlight pedagogical approaches or topics that could be useful to readers in reflecting on and improving their own teaching practice in biology education. We have explored a variety of science teaching issues, including the anatomy of the questions we ask our students (Allen, 2002), how we group students in the learning process (Tanner, 2003), the role of problem-based learning in developing higher-order thinking skills (Allen, 2003), and even the critical importance of simply how long we wait in the classroom to hear answers to questions (Tanner, 2002). We've attempted to provide resources and rationales that would be useful to the broad audience of readers, including those new and veteran to teaching, those who view teaching as their primary profession and those who combine teaching with scientific research or administration. In selecting topics and writing this column, it has been no small influence that the primary co-authors of this column function in two different professional realms of science teaching and learning, one predominantly focused on the undergraduate level and the other on K–12 classrooms. We have been engaged in our own partnership, of sorts, and thought it appropriate to highlight the potential role of partnerships between members of the K–12 community and the college and university communities as a promising avenue for improving the teaching practice of all of us in K–16 + classrooms. Indeed, we propose that partnerships across the divide between K–12 schools and institutions of higher education are essential in increasing the coherency of science education in the American educational system from the first days of kindergarten through the undergraduate years.
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ISSUES IN EMBARKING ON SCIENTIST–TEACHER PARTNERSHIPS |
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As stated above, we are using the term scientist–teacher partnership here to mean any collaboration among a group of college or university scientists and K–12 science educators with the goal of improving science education at all educational levels, K–16+. In defining scientist–teacher partnerships, we are additionally using the term scientist to include all participants in the enterprise of science in higher education–not just faculty but also research associates, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and other trainees in the science and health professions. In many instances, scientist–teacher partnerships involve scientific trainees who are closer in age to K–12 students and who often have greater flexibility in their professional lives. By teacher, we refer to members of the K–12 teaching profession, including middle and high school science teachers, as well as kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers who teach elementary science along with many other core subjects. The inclusion of elementary school teachers in scientist–teacher partnerships is important because all national education reform documents assume the teaching of science during the elementary years, yet institutions of higher education may traditionally view only secondary school teachers as science teachers (NRC, 1996).
Unfortunately, although partnerships are easily proposed and even easily started, detailed knowledge of mechanisms to facilitate, support, and sustain these cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary partnerships is lacking and partnerships can be short-lived, achieving few of the widely proposed benefits. In our work facilitating scientist–teacher partnerships, we have encountered many potential barriers to collaboration and conversation among college and university scientists and K–12 educators (Chatman, 2002). Even the most well-intentioned and enthusiastic pioneers in a partnership may face challenges that arise independent of the particulars of their project, personal styles, and goals–challenges that are rooted in differences among the institutions (K–12 schools, colleges, and universities) and among the disciplines and professional practices of scientific research and K–12 education. In particular, scientists who are primarily engaged in research without significant responsibilities or experiences in science teaching may find the world of K–12 education foreign. Similarly, K–12 educators, elementary and middle school teachers in particular, may have little to no experience with the culture and content of the discipline of science. Although there are a growing number of scientists and teachers that have experiences in both the K–12 and the college and university worlds, we use the terms scientist and teacher herein to refer to those individuals with the least experience collaborating across these institutions, scientists whose primary focus is scientific research with little teaching experience, and teachers whose primary focus is teaching with little scientific research experience. In the spirit of generating productive partnerships and conversations between all teachers and scientists, we briefly highlight three issues that, when acknowledged and discussed among partners, may promote greater understanding among scientists and teachers, and when allowed to go unacknowledged can impede collaboration: (1) the importance of mutual learning in partnerships, (2) the professional cultures of scientists and K–12 educators, and (3) barriers of language in partnerships. Although the discussion of these issues is based predominantly on experiences at the Science and Health Education Partnership at the University of California, San Francisco, we anticipate that, in some form, they are relevant to partnerships at a variety of institutions across many disciplines.
The Importance of Mutual Learning in Partnerships
Not all collaborations among teachers and scientists involve mutual
learning, a situation in which both parties contribute specialized expertise
to a project and in turn learn from the expertise of their partner. In fact,
many relationships between universities and K–12 schools and between
scientists and K–12 teachers historically have been quite
unidirectional, emphasizing the high status of institutions of higher
education and the specialized content expertise of scientists, with little
acknowledgement or regard for the expertise held by K–12 teachers, which
ranges from pedagogical strategies and student cognitive development to a more
broad scientific content background than many scientists possess. Perhaps as a
result, some college and university scientists may view partnerships as
primarily about fulfilling mandates from funders and useful in demonstrating
community involvement to tenure and promotion committees. Contributing to this
imbalance, K–12 teachers may view collaborations as primarily garnering
resources for their students such as role models for certain scientific
careers and speakers on particularly difficult content topics, rather than
seeing scientists as colleagues who could contribute to their own professional
development. Common profiles from the media and public opinion further these
assumptions by emphasizing the failings of K–12 schools and teachers and
the wisdom of universities, often neglecting to report the successes of the
K–12 system and the failings of institutions of higher education.
That said, scientists and teachers have much to learn from one another about innovative pedagogical strategies, scientific inquiry, scientific concept development, student cognitive development, and recent developments in scientific understanding about how the natural world works. As such, a key issue in scientist–teacher partnerships is the extent to which these collaborations are characterized by mutual learning. Mutual learning requires that all participants in a partnership bring to their conversations and collaborations a learning stance, a willingness to be open to new ideas, a capacity to listen, and, most important, the professionalism to examine their own teaching beliefs and practices critically. The relative expertise each scientist or teacher brings to the partnership is dependent on his or her own depth and breadth of experience in teaching and scientific research. Therefore, in forging a partnership, it is key that both teachers and scientists ask themselves questions such as, "What is it that I want to learn?," "What aspect of my own teaching do I need to improve?," and "What scientific ideas or pedagogical skills could I explore with or learn from my partner?"
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The professional cultures of scientific research and K–12 education have commonalities that can be a source of familiarity for collaborating teachers and scientists, referred to herein as common ground (see Figure 1). Both teachers and scientists function in professions that are learning environments: for scientists, primarily learning about how the natural world works and for teachers, primarily learning about how students learn and how best to teach them. In addition, both teachers and scientists generally have tremendous passion for their field. Both professions require extremely long hours, although at different times of day with different constraints. Teachers and scientists often find commonality in that they must be prepared for the unexpected. Teachers speak of how s/he may be in the middle of a wonderful mathematics lesson when a butterfly emerges from a chrysalis in the terrarium, and s/he must reorient the class to take advantage of a teaching opportunity in science. Similarly, a scientist may be doing an experiment for one purpose, and if s/he doesn't look at the data point that is the outlier, s/he could miss an entire new stream of knowledge. Both professions are based on bodies of knowledge and research, and in each case, the connections between research and practical application–educational research and classroom pedagogy or basic biology research and clinical or other applications–are not always clear. In addition, the research knowledge base for science is generally both more publicly acknowledged and financially supported than it is for education. Last, both professional cultures experience mistrust by the general public on one hand, with issues related to genetically modified organisms, human cloning, and evolution, but then are expected to solve very complex problems, with a constant tension between the expectations of and the regulations imposed on both of the professions.
The Professional Cultures of Scientists and K–12 Educators: Uncommon Ground
While this common ground exists, the professional practices of scientific
research and K–12 education also have differences that can be
significant barriers to scientist-teacher partnerships (see
Figure 2). We highlight a few
of these issues of uncommon ground here (Chatman,
1998,
1999). Scientists, in general,
have greater access to scientific resources than their K–12
counterparts, sometimes leading to unrealistic assumptions about what is
available–running water in the classroom, electrical outlets–and
thus what is possible while teaching in the K–12 setting. Similarly,
teachers may overestimate the scientific knowledge held by their partner
scientists, unaware of the extreme specialization required for success as a
scientific researcher. As an example, a teacher may be surprised to learn that
while his/her partner is the world's expert on the role of a specific protein
in cell division, this scientist partner may be unable to spontaneously
explain the structures and pathways of the human circulatory system to
students, scientific content that is common knowledge for and used often by a
secondary science teacher. In the context of co-planning and co-teaching
lessons, scientists and teachers may also bring different levels of
flexibility to their teaching styles. In the laboratory, scientists excel in
the control of variables and the detailed planning of experiments, and even
for scientists who are engaged in college or university teaching, their
classroom setting can be a relatively staid and controlled environment
compared with a lively middle school classroom. This is in contrast to the
professional culture of education in which teachers are often in the position
of responding to changing variables in the classroom and are more likely to be
comfortable with a high level of improvisation in their teaching. Another
point of uncommon ground is that scientists are often accustomed to
functioning in an environment imbued with an intrinsic interest in science,
whereas teachers are more often in the position of trying to cultivate
interest on the part of students not only in science but also in other
subjects that they may teach, especially at the elementary and middle school
levels. Perhaps, the most salient of all the uncommon ground issues is that
scientists are professionally trained to be critical in their pursuit of
scientific research and teachers are professionally taught to be nurturing in
the development of their students and supportive in interacting with one
another. These cultural aspects of each profession result in scientists often
communicating through skepticism and critical feedback and teachers often
communicating through encouragement and positive feedback, using more tempered
language. As one scientist volunteer at UCSF stated, "In science, if
it's 98% effective, we're trained to pick apart the 2%," to which a
teacher laughingly responded, "And in education, if it's 45% effective,
that's sure better than the 40% it was last year!" Not to be
underestimated, this aspect of differences in professional culture, more than
any other, can be a significant source of stress in scientist–teacher
partnerships. Even for scientists who are equally involved in research and
university teaching, the skeptical and critical communication style of the
laboratory can permeate all of their professional communications. These
differing approaches to communication can contribute to misinterpretations,
such as scientists viewing teachers as complacent and uncritical about their
work and teachers viewing scientists as unreasonable and never satisfied.
Recognition of these communication differences and subsequent compromise,
though, has the potential to bring new skills in communication to both
teachers and scientists.
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The common ground and uncommon ground ideas presented here are by no means exhaustive, nor will all of them apply to all teachers and scientists in all partnerships. However, the more that partners are aware of differences in each other's professional culture–its communication style, customs, values, and traditions–the more they can build a productive partnership, teach and learn from one another, and develop new knowledge and skills. An awareness of these issues of common and uncommon ground can remind partners that many of their differences are not personal but a reflection of their professional preparation, practice, and culture. In fact, insights gained through partnership into the similarities and differences in the professional cultures of science and education can lead to shifts in one's own professional identity and goals (Phillips, 2002; Tanner, 2000).
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Scientific terms such as basal ganglia and haploid mitosis are usually identifiable as specialized, and nonscientists recognize them as such and realize that they are unaware of their meaning. In contrast, terms in education are often composed of common words, for example cooperative learning or local systemic change or standards. These terms appear to be deceptively simple and cause the noneducator to attempt to derive the meaning simply as the sum of the conjoined terms. As an example, cooperative learning means much more than students helping one another during a lesson and is in fact a well-researched and complex pedagogical approach (Johnson et al., 1991, 1993). In addition, seemingly simple words like activity, model or matrix can have multiple meanings even within one field, but when definitions are compared among teachers and scientists, very different multiple meanings and uses of these words becomes apparent. Figure 3 shows a sample of definitions generated by participants in scientist–teacher partnerships for these terms, highlighting differences for three words commonly used in both scientific research and K–12 teaching. It is noteworthy that the definitions form a continuum of meaning, with some overlap between the two categories of teachers and some overlap between middle and high school teachers and biomedical scientists. In addition, the word model has been reported by some elementary school teachers to mean exemplary or best, as in "this has been designated a model school for how science should be taught," adding a quality of superlative judgment to the word that would be unintended by a scientist proposing a "model lesson" for an upcoming classroom collaboration.
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BUILDING THE DISCIPLINE OF SCIENCE EDUCATION PARTNERSHIP |
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Here, we have shared informally a few of the issues that have emerged in our work facilitating scientist–teacher partnerships. Because the potential benefits of these partnerships are enormous, detailed and extensive knowledge of how partnerships work and what scientists, teachers, and, ultimately, their students reap from them is essential. Unfortunately, few resources exist on how to facilitate and sustain scientist–teacher partnerships (Chatman, 2002; NRC, 2003; Sussman, 1993). The increased attention to partnerships as a mechanism for science education reform that could promote greater articulation between science teaching and learning at the K–12 and the college and university levels invites formal studies of scientist–teacher partnerships in these venues. Studies such as these would begin to build the discipline of science education partnership and inform future partnership projects and collaborations across a variety of institutions, content areas, and professional cultures. In closing, we encourage you, the reader–likely a scientist educator hybrid yourself–to help build the discipline of science education partnership by embarking on systematic studies of your own partnerships and sharing this scholarly work in journals such as Cell Biology Education.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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Corresponding author. E-mail address:
kim{at}phy.ucsf.edu.
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REFERENCES |
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Allen, D.E., and Tanner, K.D. (2002). Questions
about Questions. Cell Biol. Educ.
1, 63–67. DOI:10.1187/cbe.02-07-0021
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Atkin, J.M., and Atkin, A. (1989). Improving Science Education Through Local Alliances: a Report to Carnegie Corporation of New York; Santa Cruz, CA: Network Publications.
Chatman, E.L. (1998). The Professional Cultures of Science and Education: Common & Uncommon Ground, UCSF Science & Health Education Partnership Newsletter Winter (No. 31), p. 4–5. Available at:. Available at http://www.ucsf.edu/sep/newslett/news31.pdf.
Chatman, E.L. (1999). Understanding Common & Uncommon Ground in Forming Scientist–Teacher Partnerships, The Accelerating Science Curriculum. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Office of Grants & Special Programs [book chapter].
Chatman, E.L., Tanner, K.D., Strauss, E.J., Smith, R.L., Caldera, P.S., Nielsen, K.N., Peñnate, J., Ribisi, S. (2002). Building Strong Scientist Teacher Partnerships: The Role of Collaboration in Science Education Reform (Short Course), National Science Teachers Association, San Diego, CA. Available at: http://www.ucsf.edu/sep.
Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., Smith, K.A. (1991).Active Learning: Cooperation in the College Classroom , Edina MN: Interaction Book Company.
National Research Council. (1996). National Science Education Standards, Washington, DC, National Academy Press. Available at: http://www.nap.edu/books/0309053269/html/.
National Research Council. (2000). Attracting Ph.Ds to K–12 Education: A Demonstration Program for Science, Mathematics, and Technology, Committee on Attracting Science & Mathematics Ph.Ds to K–12 Education. Center for Education, National Research Council. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
National Research Council. (2003). Resources for Involving Scientists in Education. Available at: http://www.nas.edu/rise/rise.htm.
National Science Foundation. (2003a). NSF Graduate Teaching Fellows in K–12 Education (GK–12) Program. Available at: http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/dge/programs/gk12/.
National Science Foundation. (2003b). Math and Science Partnership (MSP) Program. Available at: https://www.ehr.nsf.gov/msp/.
National Science Foundation. (2003c). Postdoctoral Fellowships in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education (PFSMETE) Program. Available at: http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/dge/programs/pfsmete/.
Phillips, M. (2002). Their Learning Lab: Novice Scientists Reconciling The Self and the Subject through a Scientist-Teacher Partnership Program. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University School of Education Dissertation.
Spradley, J. (1980). Participant Observation. Orlando, FL: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Sussman, A., ed. (1993). Science Education Partnerships: Manual for Scientists and K–12 Teachers. University of California, San Francisco.
Tanner, K.D. (2000). Evaluation of Scientist-Teacher Partnerships: Benefits to Scientist Participants. New Orleans, LA: National Association for Research in Science Teaching Conference Paper. Available at: http://www.ucsf.edu/sep.
Tanner, K.D, Chatman, E.S., Allen, D.E. (2003).
Cooperative Learning in the Science Classroom: Beyond Students Working in
Groups. Cell Biol. Educ. 2,1
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Tanner, K.D., and Allen, D.E. (2002). Answers Worth
Waiting for: "One Second is Hardly Enough." Cell Biol.
Educ. 1,3
–5. DOI:10.1187/cbe.02-04-0430
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