The Art of Teaching Science Blog

The Legacy of Katrina

Jack Hassard — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 00:53:00 +0000

This weekend is the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, and much of the Gulf Coast region. Perhaps the best way to start this post is to watch this video which I embeded from the nola.com Hurricane Katrina page. The video is a sunrise service (February 9, 2007) amongst residents of New Orleans, and was uploaded to the nola site by Michael DeMocker, The Times-Picayune.

Sunrise Service at Katrina Memorial

Hurricane Katrina was the worst natural disaster to hit the United States, and now after five years, the city of New Orleans has organized the fifth anniversary to reflect on the disaster, and to assess the progress on newly constructed infrastructure, on the repair and construction on the thousands of homes that were damaged or destroyed, and on ways to prevent the kind of flooding that devastated the city.

One resource to find information, media, and documented articles on hurricanes, and Katrina is the Times-Picayune newspaper, and in particular the work of two Pulitzer-Prize Winning reporters, John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein. They co-authored the award winning 2002 5-part article, Washing Away, and published Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms in 2006. In their 2002 article they wrote:

It’s only a matter of time before south Louisiana takes a direct hit from a major hurricane. Billions have been spent to protect us, but we grow more vulnerable.

Of course south Louisiana was hit with a superstorm, Hurricane Katrina, and a year later McQuaid and Schleifstein wrote their book, Path of Destruction which described the devastation of New Orleans. As they report, levees and transportation led to the calamity in New Orleans. Their book combines geology, climate science, meteorology, and first hand accounts to help us understand Hurricane Katrina, the actions that government agencies took to prepare and deal with the coming storm, and the way local, state and federal agencies approached this catastrophic disaster. I highly recommend this book to help you understand the complexity of this natural disaster.

Right after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, I wrote Hurricane Katrina: A Citizen Resource to Further Our Understanding of Hurricane Katrina. The resource is an online resource and activity guide that teachers can use with their students to help them not only understand Hurricane Katrina, but hurricanes in general.

A Web-Based Experience for Students and Teachers on Hurricane Katrina

The legacy of Katrina is in the lives of the people who were affected by this devastating storm, and how people have worked to re-build the city, and their lives. Here are some further thoughts about Katrina as reflected in these pieces:

La Residents Rid Grief

Hurricane Katrina in Images

Nola Coverage of Hurricane Katrina

On this Blog

Science Progress

Jack Hassard — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:41:17 +0000

The Art of Teaching Science Blog advocates a progressive and humanistic paradigm for science teaching. One of sources of research-based information that I regularly consult is Science Progress, “a project of the Center for American Progress, specifically designed to improve public understanding of science and technology and to showcase exciting, progressive ideas about the many ways in which government and citizens can leverage innovation for the common good.”

One of the recent reports on Science Progress was a book review of Merchants of Doubt which explores how a small number of scientists obscured the truth on issues such as tobacco smoke and global warming. Other topics that will be of value to science teachers include:

Why Some Georgia Districts Choose Not to Partner with the State’s Race to the Top Grant Proposal

Jack Hassard — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 23:27:01 +0000

Georgia was one of nine states and the District of Columbia to receive millions of dollars from the Race to the Top Fund from the U.S. Department of Education. Georgia will receive $400 million.

Not all districts in Georgia will participate in the Race to the Top grant. Three large districts in the Atlanta area, including Fulton and Cobb Counties decided not to participate. One reason is that schools who do participate in the Department of Education proposal will have to evaluate teachers on a yet to be developed system that will no doubt include performance evaluations based in part on student achievement growth as measured on high stakes tests. The districts participating also will have to embrace the Common Core Standards in mathematics and language arts. The proposals funded by the U.S. Department of Education also include provisions for improving data collection and tracking systems, as well as increasing the number of charter schools in the state.

There is controversy over the research that supports these “reform” efforts, especially using the student achievement as a way to pay teachers, and the effectiveness of charter schools.

I’ll explore these two efforts, and identify some studies that shed light on why we should question the veracity of the Race to the Top assumptions, and whether this Federal program is the kind of reform that American education needs.

Race to the Top Winners

Jack Hassard — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:04:35 +0000

Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced the Round Two winners in the competition for $4.5 billion in the Race to the Top Fund. If you recall, Delaware and Tennessee were the only states to receive funding in Phase I of the competition. Now, 9 states and the District of Columbia schools were selected as winners of millions of dollars in grant funds in the Phase II competition. There were 9 other states that were in the running for funds, but were not selected to receive funds. These states included: Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina.

Here is a map identifying the states that are receiving Race to the Top Funds. Interestingly the states that did receive funds are Eastern and Southern states.

The ten winners will receive grants ranging from $75 to $700 million as follows:

• District of Columbia: $75 million. Score: 450.0

• Florida: $700 million. Score: 452.4

• Georgia: $400 million. Score: 446.4

• Hawaii: $75 million. Score: 462.4

• Maryland: $250 million. Score: 450.0

• Massachusetts: $250 million. Score: 471.0

• New York: $700 million. Score: 464.8

• North Carolina: $400 million. Score: 441.6

• Ohio: $400 million. Score: 440.8

• Rhode Island: $75 million. Score: 451.2

The proposals from the States were required to advance reforms around four specific areas:

Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy;
Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction;
Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and
Turning around our lowest-achieving schools.

According to Washington, D.C., Superintendent Rhee, one of the winning applicants, its plan is to use the grant money for school turnaround, alignment of curricula to the new “common core” standards, and expansion of the new IMPACT teacher evaluation system. The funds would also go toward improving teacher professional development, especially in the area of using data to drive instruction.

For many teachers, the top down proclamations implicit in the Race to the Top proposals, make the program suspect. But more importantly is the movement toward standardization through the acceptance of these states to the common core standards in math and literacy, and amazingly brazen over reliance on high stakes tests to determine the academic levels of students, determine teacher pay raises, and assess the performance of each school.

Carolyn Grannan, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, reports how Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute assesses the weakness of the Race to the Top through its use of testing, its narrowing of the curriculum to a focus on math and reading to the exclusion of everything else, its forcing states to allow more charter schools while ignoring the research giving no credence to that approach.

The state of Georgia, where I reside, was also one of the winners in the Race to the Top Fund. I’ll be reporting now and then on this state’s efforts to improve education through its Race to the Top proposal. Don’t hold your breathe.

Art of Teaching Science Website Survey

Jack Hassard — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:46:07 +0000

Dear Readers,

The link that follows will take you a survey that I have designed to solicit your feedback on the Art of Teaching Science Blog. The Art of Teaching Science Blog was started in 2005, and has had over a million visitors. It would be valuable for us to know what you think about the website, and what might be done to improve the site.

Here is the link for the survey.

It should take only a few minutes. Your time will be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

Jack Hassard

Why does the framework for a “new generation” of science standards need to be revised?

Jack Hassard — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 18:28:19 +0000

Last month in a blog post, I raised questions about the new framework for a new generation of science standards, funded by the Carnegie Corporation, and developed by the National Research Council. In particular I looked at the scant criticism that exists in the literature of the current science standards (NSES). In that post I called attention to a 1998 issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, in which professor Alberto J. Rodriquez published a critical review essay in which he argues that the NRC’s 1996 Science Standards uses a discourse of invisibility to lay out its massive reform for science education. He claims that the standards do not directly address the ethnic, socioeconomic, gender, and theoretical issues that influence learning in contemporary American schools. Rodriques goes further to suggest that equity must be a guiding principle in science education, and the standards should reflect this same principle.

The new framework was published last month and educators had an opportunity to complete a form that was used to provide “feedback” to the framwork’s developers. The 190 page report entitled “A Framework for Science Education: Preliminary Public Draft” outlines a framework by the Committee on Conceptual Framework for New Science Education Standards.

In an article in Education Week, Professor William Wraga, identifies “dangerous blind spots in the common-core standards.” In particular Dr. Wraga is critical of the common-core standards lack of attention to interdisciplinary curriculum, and the role of schools in preparing students for citizenship. In the latter he suggests that “disciplinary myopia” has led to standards that are overly technical and steeped in discipline concepts, processes and practice. He suggests, and we would agree, that interdisciplinary curriculum can lead to greater understanding by seeking connections among the disciplines. S-T-S, science-related social issues, and a lived curriculum ought to be starting points for a science curriculum; unfortunately this is not the case in the new science framework.

Wraga also focuses in on the unfortunate single purpose of schooling as depicted in the common standards, and that is that education should be in the service of economic interests. We see this in news reports each Spring when test scores are released which typically lead to “a sky is falling” mentality amongst chief school officers, governors, and other politicians. Repeated attention to international test results leads to unfounded comparisons among countries. Wraga sees this as a narrow function of schooling, and wonders why vocational, social, civic, cultural, and individual goals give way to a single goal, which he identifies as the academic goal.

The same criticisms can leveled at the framework for science education in that NRC’s Framework is steeped in a disciplinary approach to content. In fact, the word “interdisciplinary” is found only twice in the framework, and one of these was part of one of the committee member’s biography. The science framework is neatly organized into four traditional content areas: life, earth, and physical science, as well as engineering and technology. The framework does identify cross-cutting ideas, but this is not at all what science educators would view as anything remotely close to interdisciplinary curriculum.

For over a century, science reform efforts have have been put forth in a variety of ways perhaps beginning with the Committee of Ten report in 1895, which set us on the path of disciplined approach to curriculum. Although progressive ideas were part of reform, for example Dewey’s laboratory school at the University of Chicago, Jackman’s Nature Study Movement (c. 1910), and the Progressive Education Movement (c. 1930s), the traditional school, and its focus on academics and basics dominated educational reform. The goals of science education were articulated through successive NSSE yearbook publications in 1932 (A Program for Science Teaching), 1947 (Science Education and American Schools), and 1960 (Rethinking Science Education); the “golden age” NSF alphabet curriculum projects of the 1960s and 1970s; at the behest of hundreds of national reports starting with the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” claiming that schooling should instill global competitiveness amongst our students; The AAAS Project 2061 benchmarks for science literacy; the 1994 National Science Education Standards; the implementation of state-wide standards and high stakes tests for student, teacher, and school performance accountabiliy; the acceptance by 48 states of common standards in literacy & mathematics; and now the coming of a new generation of science standards.

Does the new framework offer a new set of goals for science education, and do these goals reflect the nature of K-12 science teaching? Although the framework offers “a less is more lesson” by limiting the number of “core ideas” in each of the four content area, the framework is linear, and there is no upfront conviction that science in the real world is interdisciplinary, nor are there examples. True, the framework has a chapter on cross-cutting elements including cross-cutting concepts such as patterns, cause and effect, scale, stability (the science processes of earlier reform efforts). It also discusses the importance of topics in engineering, technology and science, but these ideas are not integrated into the actual framework. They appear as of secondary importance.

The framework was not developed by K-12 teachers, or science educators, each possessing not only the content knowledge to develop a framework, but bring to the table the professional experience of working with K-12 students, the actual nature of classroom life, and anecdotal evidence & research so important to an understanding of 21st Century school. I am not suggesting that professional scientists should not be involved in the development of the framework. I am suggesting that teachers and science educators need at the core or center of this development, not on the outside looking in.

Rodriguez, A. (1997). The dangerous discourse of invisibility: A critique of the National Research Council’s national science education standards Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 34 (1), 19-37 DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1098-2736(199701)34:13.0.CO;2-R

What are students to make of the number of extreme weather events?

Jack Hassard — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:31:55 +0000

In my last post on this blog, I discussed how Native science can inform about global climate change. Some might say this is a stretch. I do not. In the Native science view of the environment, human communities are an integral part of ecological systems. This is a fundamental concept of environmental science. In this post I acknowledged reports written about the extreme weather events that have occurred not only this year, but for decades. In particular I called our attention to the unbelievable floods in Pakistan, the searing heat and fires in Russia, and the heat wave over much of North America.

Here is a map to showing some of the extreme weather events of this past year. These are only a few.
View Extreme Weather Events in a larger map

Jay Gulledge, Senior Scientist and Director of the Science and Impacts Program at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, wrote on his Pew Center blog that there are important lessons to be learned from the “extreme weather” that has impacted many regions of the earth.

Here is a synopsis of his recent post on the Pew Center blog:

The weather of 2010 continues the chaos of recent years. In the past six months, the American Red Cross says it “has responded to nearly 30 larger disasters in 21 [U.S.] states and territories. Floods, tornadoes and severe weather have destroyed homes and uprooted lives …” Severe flooding struck New England in March,Nashville in May, and Arkansas and Oklahoma in June.
Nearly the entire northern hemisphere is experiencing a massive heat wave this summer. Back in February, heavy snowfall in D.C. prompted some politicians to decry global warming, but those voices are now silent in the searing heat that has gripped much of the world this summer.
The current flooding in Pakistan is the worst in that country’s history, with two million people homeless, 20 million affected, more than a million acres of croplands flooded, and signs of an incipient cholera epidemic.
Russia is locked in the worst heat wave and drought in its documented history, with unprecedented high temperatures in Moscow and hundreds of wildfires burning out of control. The combination of extreme heat and thick smoke and smog from the fires doubled the city’s death rate at the peak of the heat wave last week.

Gulledge raises the question: Is there a connection between these extreme weather events and global climate change? It’s a question that is debated every time an extreme weather event occurs. And the question is one that we should engage our students with. Gulledge, one of the leading climate scientists answers the question, in part, this way:

As usual, there is no definitive answer about these specific events, but direct observations show that extreme weather events have become more frequent in the past half-century, and in the extreme cases that have been studied, the mechanisms are those that one would expect from global warming. At the most basic level, more droughts and heat waves are expected because of hotter, longer-lasting high pressure systems that dry out the land, as witnessed in Russia. On the other hand, more floods are expected because hotter air evaporates more water from the surface and holds more moisture.

Gulledge’s blog a valuable resource for our students. Here you will be brought in touch with a website that provides reliable information on global climate change, and lead you to other sources of information.

Native Science and Global Climate Change

Jack Hassard — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:19:56 +0000

I wrote to a friend of mine who lives in Moscow, Russia to find out how he was doing with the extreme heat and fires that are creating the worst air pollution event in Moscow’s history. He told me that he has been able to escape the heat by going to his daughter’s flat and workplace, each of which have air conditioning. As he said, the combination of heat and smog is terrible. Temperatures have been above 90 in Moscow for many days, and in combination with fires that have been difficult to control, the atmosphere in Russia’ capitol city is dangerous for all people. And combine that with the fact that 1/5 of Russia’s wheat harvest has been lost to the raging fires.

In Pakistan more than two weeks of flooding has devastated more than 14 million people, destroying homes, and displacing people. The floods were triggered by an unusually heavy monsoon season. According to one report, 1/5 of the nation is under water.

In the eastern part of the United States, millions of people are enduring the hottest July and August in memory, and the forecast is that this severe hot spell will continue into the near future.

Last Winter, many cities in the U.S. experienced snowstorms that set records. This could possibly happen again.

There are two articles that are pertinent to the extreme heat, smog, floods, and snowstorms that we are experiencing. In a Science Progress article, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway suggest that the science of climate change has been distorted, and at the same time science is evoked as a defense. They describe how a handful of scientists obscured the truth, not only about climate change, but issues related to tobacco and to the government’s “star wars” strategic defense system. As they point out, the climate change deniers use the same “play book” that big tobacco firms used to try and convince the public that smoking tobacco did not cause cancer.

The second article is a piece in the Huffington Post by Ryan Grim and Lucia Graves entitled ‘Global Weirding’: Extreme Climate Events Dominate the Summer. They quote environmental scientist David Orr suggests that these hottest hots, driest dries, wettest wets, windiest wind conditions are all part of pattern that is expected given the rise in Earth’s temperature. Orr’s book Down to the Wire confronts climate collapse, offering an analysis of the destabilization of climate, and suggests a call to action.

As I have written in my last two posts, I have been exploring Gregory Cajete’s book Native Science. Native science provides an understanding of the global events that have been mentioned above. Cajete’s book is subtitled “natural laws and interdependence” and this in itself gives us a first look at one the key principles of Native science. In Chapter 6 of Cajete’s book, A Sense of Place, he outlines the science of living in relationship with nature:

Key questions for traditional Native Americans included how individuals and the tribal community could ecologically respect the place in which they lived, and how a direct dialogue among the individual, the community, and the natural world could be established and maintained. Wherever Indigenous people lived, they found ways to address these questions of survival and sutainability in profoundly elegant ways. They thought of their environments “richly,” and in each environment, they thought of themselves as truly alive and related.

One of the important things that Cajete does in this chapter is to describe the wide range of advanced technologies that Native peoples developed with an awareness of the Earth as a living organism. His examples include mining, hydraulics, and transportation systems, and in all of these cases he identifies how these systems were nature-centered, and further advanced than systems developed in the West. As Orr points out in his book, we have failed to heed ecological and climate trends, and tended to ignore the relationship that humans have with the earth.

e-Readers & iPads: A Digital Learning Revolution?

Jack Hassard — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:11:36 +0000

There was an interesting article in USA Today raising questions about the use of e-readers, in particular, the iPad in higher education. Many of us who use these tools (right now my wife and I are on trip in the US Southwest & have with us an I-Book, an I-Pad, an I-Pad nano, and 2 I-phones) are often too quick to think that these tools as integral to classroom learning. some student’s report that they still prefer to use a textbook for studying, and that many put away cellphones, computers and Kindles.

e-readers, such as the i-Pad are powerful, yet unproven tools in the context of science learning

The emergence of the e-reader has taken off for those of us that read novels, but the use of e-readers as basic texts is still in the experimental stage. Yes, you can flip pages and highlight and save passages of text, but does this help students learn. But in spite of this, universities are embracing digital readers.

In one example, UC Irvine’s School of Medicine’s incoming class received a white lab coat, Zander a fully loaded I-Pad for all first year coursework.

I know that I would like the next edition of our book The Art of Teaching Science to be available in e-reader format. But will this be an enhancement for students in their science teacher education courses? There has been the tendency in education to think that a “new technology” is a panacea, and will lead to “increased” learning. But the research doesn’t support this view. Here is a passage from the USA Today article:

A host of research over the past decade has shown that even the option to click hyperlinks to related material can create confusion and weaken understanding. One study found reading comprehension declined as the number of clickable links increased. A 2005 review by researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, of 38 studies found “very little support” for the idea that all those links to additional information enrich the reader’s experience. A 2007 study published in Media Psychology raised similar concerns about add-ons such as sound and animation.

What are the implications for K-12 science teaching? More and more school districts are opting for digital textbooks in place of hardbound copies of texts. Is this necessarily a good idea? Will science learning be enhanced in the context of e-readers, and i-Pads?

In yesterday’s post, I talked about Gregory Cajete’s Native science research and how the Native science paradigm of learning is centered on the relationship among humans, human culture and nature. Can digital technology be an integrative tool in a Native science or humanistic paradigm? Experiential learning is at the heart of Native science, as well as the Western view of inquiry-based science. Digital technology in the service of experiential learning can probably lead to increased learning. But the important notion is the context of learning, and how science education is bringing students in touch with their lived experience, and closer to an understanding of nature, and an understanding of nature.

Source: The White Earth Tribal and Community College Extension Service

Native Science: A Paradigm for Science Education

Jack Hassard — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:53:57 +0000

The Art of Teaching Science weblog and book has, as its underlying philosophy, a humanistic paradigm promoting an active and lived learning experience for classroom learning. I have been traveling in the West recently, and was fortunate to visit the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There in the museum bookstore I found a copy of Gregory Cajete’s Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence.

My own view is that Native science, as explored and presented by Dr. Cajete, is a paradigm that offers science educators a robust, and experiential way to engage their students in the learning and exploration of science. In this blog, I have described this as the humanistic science paradigm, which you read more about here. It’s the ideas in Native science that I wish to talk briefly about here, and suggest that Cajete’s ideas should be a part of the movement recently to develop a new generation of science standards.

According to Cajete, “Native science is a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting and ‘coming to know’ that have evolved through human experience with the natural world.” He emphasizes the notion that Native science is based on using the entire body of our senses in direct participation with the world. It is this notion of direct participation that fundamental to a humanistic paradigm, and as Cajete points out, forms the foundation of the Native science paradigm.

Native science is holistic. Although Cajete points out that Native science includes such areas as astronomy, farming, plant domestication, plant medicine, animal husbandry, hunting, fishing, metallurgy, and geology, Native science goes further and extends these fields by including spirituality, community, creativity, and technologies that sustain and support environments of human life.

Dr. Cajete also observes that both scientists and non-scientists question whether there is such a thing as Indigenous science. Many argue that science is really a Western idea, and that Indigenous science knowledge is really not science. But, there are many that argue that Native science is indeed science. Cajete informs us that Native science can not be isolated from cultured, and that when one is speaking about Indigenous or Native science, “one is really talking about the entire edifice of Indigenous knowledge.

According to Cajete, Native science is very much like the Western science that is called environmental science or ecology. He points out that Native people don’t have words for environmental science or ecology, they understand the relationship that profoundly connect them to the natural world—which is indeed the purview of environmental science and ecology.