October 13, 2005 Draft

Self-Conscious and Independent:
An Exploration Into and Out of the
Limit Conditions of Science Education

Anne Dalke, Wil Franklin
and Philadelphia K-12 Public School Teachers

...it was very difficult for me to understand that so many of my sixth graders already saw themselves as outsiders, and therefore, not entitled to this country's plums. You can't be an achiever and an outsider at the same time. I think these children need to be courted, to be won over, to be reassured that they are entitled to those plums, and to driven toward success. Margaret Robertson, Philadelphia Public School Teacher

Science has the potential to be what we all collectively need as we evolve into a world wide community: a nexus point that encourages and supports the evolution of shared human stories of exploration and growth, an evolution in which all human beings are involved and take pride. For this to happen, we all need to work much harder to not only reduce the perception of science as a specialized and isolated activity of the few but to make it in fact the product and property of all human beings. Paul Grobstein, Director, Center for Science in Society, Bryn Mawr College, Revisiting Science in Culture

We are a biologist and a literary critic who took on this work together, with great good will and a lot of energy--and intend here to think-through and write out the complexities of its "working out." In the summer of 2005, we co-directed an institute for K-12 public school teachers supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We called our project, which was hosted by Bryn Mawr College, and is fully archived at http://serendipstudio.org/local/suminst/eei05/, "Making Sense of Change: Hands-on Science Across the Curriculum." Our group was quite varied in terms of preparation and engagement: some of the participants had very little science background; others had masters' in science education. The classes they themselves taught spanned kindergarten to high school. Some of them were long-time veterans of earlier institutes sponsored by the College, while others had no such experience. Some thought of change as "an old friend"; for others it was a "challenge," "terrifying," to be avoided in a search for what was stable and lasting.

What we uncovered, in working with these teachers, is an understanding of how contemporary science education--the progressive, innovative, hands-on, inquiry-based classroom science of the past decade, which has been so deliberative in its attempts to bring those traditionally "outside" science "into" its various fields--has fallen short. It will be our argument in this essay that attempts as well-intentioned and well-funded as our our own have failed to take account of a central facet of human psychic and economic development: the Catch-22 of the persistent human impulse to put oneself "out," to refuse incorporation into any system that presumes to "know" or "predict" the direction of self-growth.

The articulation of this great irony, that the act of recognition is always an act of "determinateness" and "fixing," and thus will always be resisted, goes back at least as far as Hegel's essay on "Lordship and Bondage" (1807). But Hegel's essay also provides, presciently, a cogent analysis of how a student might move beyond the inevitable stand-off between recognition and resistance: "precisely in labour where there seemed to be merely some outsider's mind and ideas involved, the bondsman becomes aware...of having and being a 'mind of his own.'"

These, then, are the two Hegelian insights we recovered in our work with the Philadelphia teachers, insights we wish to articulate and illustrate here. First: however "out" the inside, as it is incorporated, another outside is always generated alongside. (As Stanley Fish says so clearly in a larger pedagogical context, difference is "the remainder that escape the drawing of any line, no matter how generous...the lesson [is] its irreducibility"--Dalke 102). As importantly, we also found that, precisely by participating with our students in that "dance of the irreducible," we were all enabled to engage productively in what Hegel calls the "formative process of self-enfranchisement." We structure this essay, accordingly, around a sequence of scenes from our summer's classroom, scenes which illustrate, qualify, re-arrange and extend the stages Hegel articulates in The Phenomenology of Mind, those of mutual recognition, opposition, consciousness, labor, and from that, self-enfranchisement. The dialectic we have to trace is a complicated but eventually, a hopeful one.

I. Duplicated Self-Consciousness

All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change God Is Change. Octavia Butler. "Earthseed: The Books of the Living." Parable of the Sower (1993)

"The only lasting truth is Christ. Therefore, on Christ, The Solid Rock, I stand. God is not change. He is stability....God always was, is, and will be. God is stable. Change is constant." Miss T." (Public High school principal and participant in Summer Institute)

These elements constituted the reliable framework for our exploration of change: The two of us were present for every session during the two-week period. We framed each day with introductory lectures and activities, and concluded each one by requiring participants to record and reflect on their experiences in a web forum. We supplemented our own presentations, each day, by bringing in a different guest teacher to represent a different disciplinary perspective; visitors included a physicist, a geologist, a chemist, a biologist, a psychologist and a computer scientist. This arrangement provided us with a rich opportunity for expanding our education in science education; we were able, for six hours every day, to observe what worked and what didn't, how hands-on learning engaged the teachers, and what happened when they weren't engaged.

The best of the classes, we came to see, did three things: they addressed a topic which interested the participants (and which they thought would interest their students); they framed it in terms of big questions and profound issues; and they demonstrated it in concrete manipulatable experiences--not experiments in the conventional sense of scripts to be followed, but as open-ended explorations. Taken together, the ten days of the Institute proved a model of interactive science teaching, meeting the challenge described in Science as Story Telling in Action of moving toward science seen as

• Primarily process rather than content knowledge
  • Rigor without oppressiveness
  • Concreteness without lifelessness
  • Playfulness without meaninglessness
• Something that everyone can draw from and be empowered by
• Something to which everyone can contribute
• Engaged with rather than isolated from other spheres of human activity.

The account we offer here of how we made sense of what didn't work in the summer institute on "making sense of change" is framed, in other words, in the context of a great deal that did. But since it is in the places where we fall short that we all have the most to learn, we focus our attention, here, on those. To begin in the beginning....

We had planned deliberatively for our opening class on cosmology, with an awareness of and eagerness to know more about where Institute participants were "coming from." We asked all of them, before they arrived on campus, to post on-line an account of how they would go about describing the beginning of the universe to their class--or to to their own children at a certain age: How would they get started? How would they tell the story? What would they emphasize? In the opening session, we illustrated the dynamic interaction of "constancy built on change," which we had chosen as the theme for the Institute, with the image of the faulted shale-limestone block which sits outside the Bryn Mawr Science Building, in commemoration of the founding of the Department of Geology here: an ironically "solid" record of historical pressure and stress. We also spoke about our own--markedly different--relationships to constancy and change. (One of us was raised in a stable, and stultifying, environment, and found herself drawn to science education because of its unremitting skepticism and openness to new possibility. The other of us was raised in an unstable, and unsettling, place, and found himself drawn to science because of its ability to elucidate patterns that were constant and predictable.)

As we concluded our opening presentation, we asked participants to write on-line, and then to read aloud to the group, a short story about some change they made--or chose not to make--in their teaching or learning or life. One of the teachers, who wrote about Christ as "the only lasting truth," refused to read her contribution to the group: "We are not children. Adults don't like to be read to, and I try to respect what people want." Her irritation at being asked to perform her own relationship to change was our first indication that our attempts to gather all participants into a single story--however commodious, how complex and paradoxical--were going to be continually frustrated.

We knew, from past Institutes, that participants valued the respect they earned as colleagues who had a great deal to teach us; following Hegel (though at the time we didn't realize we were following Hegel) we expected that, this time 'round, we would all recognize ourselves "as mutually recognizing one another." What we had not realized was Hegel's further insight--that the initial move in this game involves an instinctive reaction to others as antithetical to our own self-fulfillment, opponents or competitors with us in the game of recognition; as he says, "self-consciousness is primarily...self-identity by exclusion of every other from itself." When we first tried to draw a circle that included all participants, one of them immediately excluded herself.

Those acts of exclusion continued throughout the morning's presentation on cosmology, which left many of the participants "getting lost in the stars"; one observed that she "would still need more information on how to apply this difficult topic....I would have some difficulty bringing the language down to a middle or even to an elementary level"; another observed "that these topics are quite interesting for those who already inclined to study the space sciences. But for those who only possess a passing interest, these topics may be a little too abstract. The techniques for measurements that support what we are learning in this area are perhaps equally too advanced."

It was not until the afternoon session that we found ways to make these concepts engaging to their students: cosmology that was experiential as well as observational, interactive as well as visual, things they might ask their students to do with the movement of their own bodies, or other manipulatable objects, which would help them get a grip on the accelerating movement of bodies through space. The three activities we used in the afternoon were

• observing the characteristics of one another (as we altered our appearance),
• observing eggs (which seem so similar, but are amazingly and recognizably distinctive), and
• observing galaxies (which can be categorized in a number of different ways).

And what were ways of engaging their teachers and principals, some of whom had already "checked out" of the Institute?

II.Self-Cancellation

EFFECT OF ACID RAIN ON MARBLE STATUES This is an example of an acid/base reaction, one of the two most common forms of chemical reactions. In an acid/base reaction an acid gets neutralized by a base to form water and a salt. The acids are usually easy to identify as they have a low pH in water, and their chemical formula always has at least one "H". Bases are harder to identify without knowing a lot more chemistry. The most common base is hydroxide ion -OH which is found in drain cleaning products like "Drano" or "Red Devil." In this reaction the base is the carbonate ion, CO3-2. It reacts with H+ of acetic acid to form carbonic acid, H2CO3, which mostly turns into carbon dioxide and water. In this experiment our purpose is to demonstrate the effect of acid rain on limestone, a major constituent of marble. (From Terry Newirth, Hand-On Science and Math: A collection of Lesson Plans for Middle Schools)

I enjoyed measuring and being methodical. Our children thrive off specific clear directions. By modeling appropriate techniques the students will increase their knowledge and the importance of being careful and specific. Connie Williams, Institute participant ...we return to the experiment format with expectated results. My poor brain is smoking!!!!!! How can the concept of getting it less wrong translate to experimantation and safety rules? Are we as teacher setting ur kids up to be afraid of science and afraid to get it wrong? What happens to creativity and facilitated, gradually scafoldded discovery?...I feel that today's lab return us to the correct answer, experiment format. HELP!!!!!!!!!! Is this what it feel like to our students to move from a more abstract style techer to a more linear, conservative style teacher?????????? Antoinette Solimon, Institute participant

Hegel explains rather quickly that the first move in the game of recognition--destroying others to affirm ourselves--is contradictory: a person whom we have destroyed (or, less violently, dismissed) is not capable of giving us the recognition we seek, so we instinctively move to another strategy. We try for a one-way recognition with ourselves (we hope!) on top and the other in a situation of dependency. In retrospect, it would not be inaccurate to say that this may well have been the dynamic which underlay both the second and third days of the Institute. One of our guest presenters was an experienced chemist, who had taught many institutes for K-12 teachers, and prepared a booklet filled with hands-on experiments suitable for use with middle schoolers. She carefully guided participants through each of the experiments (turning a copper penny into "silver," then "gold"; inflating balloons with carbon dioxide; measuring the effect of an acid solution on marble chips). The effect was of a traditional classroom, with scripted activities and predictable outcomes, clearly differentiated roles of leader and followers, teacher and students; there was no new data collected, no interrogation of the terms of the experiments performed. Conversation in the on-line forum focused on the usefulness of making mistakes: "it is important not to assess the students on their results, because as I experienced first hand today, experiments sometimes do fail. It would be more important to be certain that the students understand what happened to the penny, the color of the water, or the water in the test tube and why. It would also be useful if some students' experiments were not sucessful, so that as a class, we can examine what happened to make them not work. (Although a comfortable, safe, non-threatening environment must exist in order for this to occur...) I often tell students that more is learned from mistakes than if they got it right the first time, because they must go back and examine what they did in order to LEARN how to do it right!! "

But there was also some further discussion about the usefulness of such scripted experiments that raised some interesting general issues about education: "The exhibit has a clear 'story line', starting out with a set of unexamined presumptions .... Is it appropriate/desireable to start this way? Might it be better to present the material to be observed without any "story"? with as little "story" as possible? To try to "direct" users as little as possible, just giving them something to make observations on, develop stories about themselves, play with? What are the likely pros and cons, for different audiences, of the two different approaches? Are there ways to better strike a balance between them? " Another participant pointed out that such experiments were located very far away from what most interested most of his students: "What is made out of marble, that our students care about? What would it distress them to lose? Can we use that as an incentive to learn?"

It was precisely this last question--what incites us to learn--and, even more insistently, its counter-question--what makes us resist doing so--which seemed to underlie the resistence which became so pronounced among our participants during the third day of the Institute. That day, a psychologist who also had a lot of experience both teaching elementary school and working with K-12 teachers visited our classroom, to show us how behaviorists, following the principles of reinforcement, can "guarantee" a change in behavior. Explaining first that developmental psychologists don't know much about how change happens (they have no idea, for instance, how kids make the shift from thinking that others know what they know, to realizing that they may be thinking differently), she defined the concepts of "reinforcement" (anything that will increase the likelihood of a behavior; teachers are not very good at predicting what is reinforcing for a younger generation) and of "extinction" (taking away the reinforcer). She also explained that "rebound" is to be expected (the behavior will "spike" before it ceases), the problem with punishment (the opposite of reinforcement: actively decreasing the frequency of a behavior), and the usual failure to replace it with something else.

It was the psychologist's intention, in this presentation, to offer participants some useable tools for managing student behavior in classrooms where behavior is often a problem. But the teachers' own resistence was universal--and nearly deafening:

Throughout these responses, we heard a vociforous insistance on what one of our lecturers called once called "The Harvard Law of Animal Behavior": "under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, an animal will behave as it damned well pleases." It seemed to us that our participants were rejecting some of the useful techniques behaviorism might offer for classroom management in order to retain--both for themselves and their students--the sort of variability intrinsic to human beings, which Fyodor Dostoevsky described so strikingly in Notes from Underground in 1864:

This key-note--heard as a refusal to be defined by others' intentions for oneself, a refusal to perform within the framework of the scripts written by others, even if the option is given to vary and revise those scripts-- was sounded twice again during the second week of the Institute, first in a session called Metamorphosis in Literature, which led to a series of stories about shame, and secondly in a session on When Caterpillars Make Choices--which led participants into confusion about their own abilities to do so....

How to get out of this pattern of action and reaction, the sense of helpless inability to change our behavior--or that of our students?

III. The Self in Labour

"Science: to see what has not yet been seen, to conceive what has not yet been conceived" (From Science as Storytelling in Action)

The most important "turn" in Hegel's essay occurs when he explains that the strategy of one-way recognition is misguided: the master depends entirely on the slave for her recognition as master. As far as possibilities for development are concerned, the slave is actually in a better position, because of his ability to express himself in the world, through his labor. Slaves can learn self-recognition, and self-enfranchisement, not in response to those who tell them what to do, but in the work that they perform. It is they who are capable of acting in, and on, the world, of being productive, and who in that productivity find themselves mastering the world.

It seemed to us that it was precisely this phenomenon--of actively contributing to the data-gathering and observation-making that is the work of science, and to the pedagogical innovation that is teaching students to do the same--which eventually enabled most of our participants to move beyond the conventional "resistence" that students demonstrate in relationship to their teachers. The classes which succeeded best were those in which they were asked, not to attempt replicating an experiment in which the results were already known, but rather to gather data for new ways of organizing the world:

Paul's "evolution revolution"

Don's "global change"

J.D.'s "fit/unfit-ness"

Anne's "making change"

IV. Self-Enfranchisement

the mini-symposium: articulating the outside

the performative assessments:

Randal's "Assessing What We Know about Tyrannosaurs"

V. Concluding: Changing the Environment of Science Education

Return to "Making Sense of Change: Hands-on Science Across the Curriculum"