I guess I’ll get the ball rolling with this first blog post.
My own education in science is instructive. I’ve gone from whenever the British system is supposed to teach science which was probably about when I was 11 years old, through to an undergraduate programme and beyond. I think I know something about how science ‘works’ and a more general overview of epistemology so it came as a shock to me to realise that the vast majority of my education had nothing to do with ‘science’ but rather just rote learning of facts and figures that science had uncovered.
It took me so long to realise this because I never had to teach it until I got involved in designing a curriculum for our school. I thought ‘Ha, the science part I’ve got covered!’ but then I realised that I was just going to be cataloguing a list of facts and figures that are currently know about in science, rather than teaching about science.
A small diversion
I need to preface this discussion with an axiom that we teach at the school and that is that there are historically three different ways of trying to understand the world.
- Art – which is not visual or performance art, but rather a way of understanding the world (universe/cosmos) through an emotional language.
- Inner Life – essentially self reflection, that is where thinking ‘within’ oneself it becomes possible to understand the world a bit better. People who are much stronger at this include meditators, spiritual practitioners and poets.
- Science – which is really a way of trying to understand the world. The two main rules are
- Must be observable by many (‘how much is many? Great question)
- Must be repeatable.
Really it’s three different ways of looking at the same thing. For historical reasons they were considered incompatible, but today we actually need to see the overlap in these three areas. Take for instance the ‘art’ in show casing scientific data. Some of the photography in biology for instance starts to easily crest into ‘art’. Check out any National Geographic wildlife photography awards for any year.
How did I learn about science?
OK so the way that we’re coming at this at our school is that science is NOT about facts and figures but rather a way of trying to understand the world. This why the old school science curriculum seems so outdated and unnecessary. A valid question would be (if my science credentials are considered valid), how did I get to learn about science then.
I can say exactly when that happened …
… field trips!
All the lectures and tutorials and labs that I took at my undergraduate university, were just more sophisticated versions of what I had been doing in 6th form. It was only when we went on field trips for a week at a time, that suddenly it started to make sense.
The other location that I learned about doing science was when I was doing individual research projects in my final two years of study (four year programme).
Invitation to HUMI as a way to teach science (& more!)
When David (Phillips) asked if I thought our school would have any interest in becoming involved in HUMI research, I pretty much jumped at the opportunity, precisely because in my head I could see in principle how this could actually work to actually teach science. It does so much more than that too but just for this post let me just stick to the pedagogy of how to teach about ‘doing science’.
I know that there are other ways of projects that could achieve the same aim BUT with a huge caveat. HUMI was presented as ongoing research, not just a repeat of what was going on before. I believe that our students are pretty clued on, and they quickly realise that there’s a different energy from doing something that has been done in science labs around the world for 100 years (baking soda and vinegar gives you …?); vs. we are collecting data and it’s brand new, never been collected, is going to be a contributing piece in the ‘sum of all human knowledge’ puzzle.
I guess that was the initial spark for ‘HUMI Suva’ from my side, but it took David and Chris to talk it over to see if it could be a viable way to bring HUMI to a different audience.
Longitudinal Studies
One thing that my studies and then my own subsequent research revealed is that one of the most highly lauded genre of research initiatives is the longitudinal study. It’s not done that much because it’s expensive to do (well) and most researchers cannot get commitment for long term funding (to say nothing of committing to long term interest).
BUT
A school environment can do exactly that. It actually helps teachers to build on expertise from the previous year. At the same time, the data from each year adds onto the previous years to give more detailed picture.
In the ‘old’ days of browsing the internet (mid – 1990s – do you feel old?), pictures that were large and especially if you were on a slow internet modem, would resolve with big pixels first on the first sweep, and then it would increase in resolution on the next sweep, and then increase again on the third sweep and so on until the picture was finally loaded.
When you go through this demo of Netscape, you will see that the page banners resolve in this way – and this would have been a ‘fast’ internet connection to show the product off at its best.
I think longitudinal studies are kind of like that. The longer you go with them, the more detailed your pictures becomes.
Non zero sum game approach
This brings me to my final point for this post and that is that during that initial question that David asked me for interest in taking part in HUMI, I could see that not only would we as a school gain, but also the science would gain by having us commit to a longitudinal study – even if at first we got it hopelessly wrong. Hence I’ve been stating that we want to commit to a five year study but in reality we are eyeing a 35 year study.
This would take us to the year 2056. At that point we would have passed the potential time points that current scientists state we are heading towards ‘tipping points’, particularly in the climate change space and loss of biodiversity arena. In other words very labile time periods to be measuring these indices.
The ‘non zero sum game’ approach is a topic for a different blog entry but just want to flag that creating this project was as much based on the premise that the school would get something amazing out of it, as well as the body of science knowledge would get something out of it too.
HUMI Suva 