Steve Alsop

Science education and affect

This mini special issue is about affect: it is about interest, motivation, attitudes, beliefs, self-confidence and self-efficacy within science education. In Kincheloe and Steinberg’s (1999: 238) words, it is about the desire to avoid ‘boring places marked by drudgery and repetition where isolated students work in joyless and meaningless lessons painfully tied to their development level’. There is, of course, far more to science education than cognition. The role of emotions in teaching is well documented. When science teachers talk about their work, they recount episodes of wonder, delight and excitement (Bell and Gilbert 1996), not only because of their association and identity with science, but also because of the emotional bonds, the relationships established, developed and maintained with children in their everyday practice. It has been widely documented how these practices are inextricably tied to emotions. Identity, self-esteem and confidence permeate pedagogical practices and have a key role in formulating personal and professional classroom identity (Day and Leitch 2001). In a broader sense, Hargreaves (1996) writes of the ‘emotional geographies of schooling’, the ‘spatial and experiential patterns of closeness and/or distance in human interactions or relationships within the school’ (Zembylas 2002: 80). Central to this landscape is the student, managing and circumnavigating the oftenheightened emotions associated with learning science. After all, learning involves moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, traversing the emotional quagmire of success, self-doubt, challenge and classroom identity. At an extreme level, emotions can overwhelm thinking and concentration so that intellectual efforts are swamped and rendered wholly ineffective. ‘Cognition doesn’t matter if you’re scared, depressed or bored’, as Claxton (1989: 155) notes. At the other extreme, feelings of enthusiasm, confidence and zeal are equally powerful motivators, so that learners are swept up in a flow of eagerness to learn. In the middle ground, learning is a place of mixed emotions, Claxton writes:

Facts and feelings: exploring the affective domain in the learning of physics

This article presents the results of a comparative study of two groups of learners. The study explores whether their feelings about a potentially emotive topic - radioactivity in this case - influence their approach to learning.

Understanding understanding: a model for the public learning of radioactivity:

While much of the work in the public understanding of science has focused on the publics appreciation of science and their familiarity with key scientific concepts, understanding the processes involved in learning science has largely been ignored. This article documents a study of how particular members of the public learn about radiation and radioactivity, and proposes a model to describe their learning—the Informal Conceptual Change Model [ICCM]. ICCM is a multidimensional framework that incorporates three theoretical dimensions—the cognitive, conative, and affective. The paper documents each of these dimensions, and then illustrates the model by drawing upon data collected in a case study. The emphasis of the analysis is on understanding how the members of the public living in an area with high levels of background radiation learn about the science of this potential health threat. The summarizing comments examine the need for a greater awareness of the complexities of informal learning.

BRIDGING THE CARTESIAN DIVIDE: SCIENCE EDUCATION AND AFFECT

There is surprisingly little known about the emotional aspects of science education. A senior scholar, over a decade ago, called for a fundamental shift in our field, suggesting that the “affective area will prove to be crucial, in research and curriculum planning in the future” (Head, 1989, p. 162). However, despite periodic forays into monitoring students’ attitudes-towards-science, the “effect of affect” in the teaching and learning of science continues to be largely ignored. Existing research, while sparse, mostly presents a rather gloomy picture. After decades of research and curriculum reform, sources indicate that while some elements of science education engender fascination and awe, too many middle and secondary school students in high-income countries find school science overly mundane and lacking relevance (Sjoberg, 2002). Indeed, recent work suggests that attitudes and post-compulsory involvement in science education (particularly by women and ethnic minorities) are still on the decline (Osborne et al., 2003). But while research has been successful in defining the problem, it has yet to say very much about the solution, and this clearly needs to change. In broad terms, this is the challenge taken up here: to collect together contemporary theorising about the relationship between affect and cognition in science education and explore the implications that this has for further research and pedagogy. It is the centrality of affect and its lack of consideration that has driven my desire to compile this edited collection. After all, there is overwhelming evidence from a diversity of fields including Psychology (Sutton & Wheatley, 2003), Philosophy (Goldie, 2002), Cultural Theory (Shweder & LeVine, 1986), Feminist studies (Boler, 1999) and Neuroscience (Demasio, 2000, 2004) and Science Education itself (see Alsop & Watts, 2003a; Falk & Dierking, 2000; Zembylas, 2002, 2004), that affect and cognition cannot be meaningfully understood as disparate entities. Emotions, after all, have considerable influence over what happens in the classroom. Some (such as, joy, love, happiness, and hope) act to enhance education, optimise student enjoyment and achievement. Here to use the language of Csikszentmihalyi (1988, p. 127) teachers and learners become swept up in a world of consciousness, a “flow experience,” describing themselves as being “carried away by a current”; existentially lost in thought. Now, education is more than the memorisation of a curriculum subject, the anesthetised acquisition of a remote object. It is the beauty and delight of becoming absorbed, seeing the world in different ways with different possibilities. It is

The affective dimensions of learning science

This call for papers begins from the premise that learning in science is not solely or simply a cognitive affair. Disappointment, disaffection, distaste, aversionÐ as well as challenge, enjoyment, pleasure, fulfilmentÐ must play a significant role in the immediate and long term appreciation and learning of science. To ignore the affective domain is to exclude consideration of a seminal part of the learning that takes place in science in both formal and informal settings. Contemporary research in science education is largely shaped by a ‘conceptual change’ view of learning, and the suggestion here is that ‘conceptual change learning’ is heavily influenced by feelings and emotions Ð whether this concerns the situation in which learning takes place or in the specific act of learning. While recent research has acknowledged other dimensions to learning, there has been almost exclusive attention paid to the cognitive with only a few attempts to describe and discuss the affective. This call for papers is an invitation to contribute to a Special Issue of International Journal of Science Education to explore the influences of affect on the learning of science. Of particular interest are accounts and reports of work in the field which illustrate a clear theoretical pedigree with good empirical support, and which might address one of the following concerns:

Unweaving time and food chains: Two classroom exercises in scientific and emotional literacy

AbstractThis article concerns affective dimensions in school science. Using data from two case studies (one set in a British’university and the other in a Canadian junior high school), the article explores ways in which science has the potential to stimulate and challenge emotions. The developing discussions highlight (1) the importance of affect in learning science, (2) how emotions might feature more centrally in science classrooms, and (3) how definitions of scientific literacy might more explicitly embrace affect.Sommaire exécutifBien que leur signification ne fasse guère l’unanimité, l’alphabétisation scientifique et l’alphabétisation émotive sont depuis quelque temps d’une grande actualité. La thèse du présent article est qu’il existe un lien étroit entre l’alphabétisation émotive et l’alphabétisation scientifique, et qu’elles peuvent confluer dans l’apprentissage des sciences. Les arguments à l’appui se fondent sur des données provenant de deux études de cas. La première, menée dans une université britannique, analyse les réactions de 200 étudiants non-spécialistes dans un cours d’astronomie, en particulier pour ce qui est de leur rapport (ou de leur absence de rapport) avec les sciences. La seconde touche deux classes d’une école de Toronto, où l’on s’est servi d’expériences visant à provoquer des réactions émotives pour stimuler l’apprentissage. Les sujets traités étaient les chaînes alimentaires et les réseaux. On a utilisé un vidéo chargé sur le plan émotionnel pour provoquer des émotions et susciter les débats.Le but de cet article est d’utiliser des données empiriques pour mettre en évidence un aspect de l’enseignement des sciences dont tous s’accordent à reconnaître qu’il n’a pas encore fait l’objet de recherches exhaustives. Dans la conclusion, nous esquissons certaines réflexions d’ordre général sur l’importance des variables affectives dans l’apprentissage des sciences. Notre réflexion est centrée sur les façons dont on pourrait accorder une plus grande place aux émotions dans les cours de sciences et sur une définition de l’alphabétisation scientifique qui prendrait explicitement en compte les affects. Plus précisément, les commentaires finaux se penchent sur trois questions: 1dans quelle mesure on peut rendre les sciences intelligibles et intéressantes aux yeux de grands groupes de non-scientifiques2jusqu’à quel point la formation scientifique peut et doit susciter les défis émotionnels chez les apprenants3jusqu’où il est possible d’intégrer l’alphabétisation scientifique et l’alphabétisation émotive par le biais de la formation scientifique.

Meeting the needs of lifelong learners: recognizing a conative dimension in physics education

Recent curriculum reforms emphasize the importance of the public understanding of science and lifelong learning. This article develops from the assumption that school science should act as a preparation for lifelong science learning. The article documents a study of the public learning of physics. More specifically, it explores factors that influence how the public learns about a potential health hazard - radon gas. The article concludes by suggesting that meeting the needs of citizens requires more than a minor adjustment of curriculum content - it also requires the recognition of an important conative dimension in physics education.

Activism! Toward a More Radical Science and Technology Education

What might activism offer science, technology and education? What might science, technology and education offer activism? This chapter provides an introduction to an edited collection exploring these themes. We start by situating assembled responses within contemporary socio-ecological contexts and selected scholarship and practices. We then take up the case for activism as an open question with potentially far-reaching implications for science and technology pedagogies and offer a reading of the following chapters as a more radical complement to existing scholarship in the field. As a basis for greater reflectivity, we then propose four maxims for critical reworking science and technology education praxis; (i) contemporary conditions, (ii) democratic political theory, (iii) subjectivities and agency; and (iv) morals and ethics. The chapter concludes with discussions of partialities and associated tensions, contradictions and limitations, as well as thanking all those involved in bringing this project to fruition.

Interviews-about-Scenarios: Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Physics Education

to an unhoped-for discovery, opening before us. In spite of the difficulties of our working conditions, we felt very happy. Our days were spent at the laboratory. In our humble shed there reigned a great tranquillity. Sometimes, as we watched over some operation, we would walk up and down, talking about work in the present and in the future; when we were cold a cup of hot tea taken near the stove comforted us. We lived in our single preoccupation as if in a dream. [Marie Curie, quoted from E. Curie, 1938]

Afterword: Towards Technoscience Education for Healthier Networks of Being

In this final chapter, we weave together salient ideas and examples gleaned from other authors’ writing in this edited collection with our perspectives on relevant literature. As we stated in the introductory chapter here, we believe that contributing authors have bravely engaged in critical scholarship regarding socioscientific issues and, related to that, offer very progressive perspectives and practices for science and technology education that we all hope will help contribute to increases in social justice and environmental wellbeing. We agree with many scholars here that the wellbeing of individuals, societies and environments are under considerable stress – very likely associated with the immense power held within a vast and complex network of actants (material and semiotic), largely controlled by relatively few individuals and groups whose main purpose appears to be personal enrichment, often at the expense of others and environments. Our world is a strange – and, we believe, highly problematic – mix of never-satiated, largely celebratory, consumerism and gut-wrenching, but largely submerged, poverty and environmental degradation. Enmeshed in the global capitalist network behind this scenario are many fields of science and technology and much of science education. Science education networks, particularly under the current ‘STEM’ movement, appear to focus on generation of the relatively few students who may supply capitalists with immaterial labour – professionals, such as engineers, scientists, accountants, etc., who may develop innovative designs for commodities and their marketing. Complementing this function, appears to be generation of large numbers of citizens mostly prepared to serve as consumers (e.g., of labour instructions and commodities). Their consumerism, while enriching a few capitalists, appears to be largely-responsible for many potential problems associated with socioscientific issues discussed here. While several authors in this book lament difficulties challenging capitalist hegemony, rays of hope also are provided in several chapters regarding socio-political actions in the public sphere, elementary and secondary science education and in higher education contexts.