FACULTY DEVELOPMENT FOR SCIENCE LITERACY: WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

In thinking about what sorts of readings ought to be featured in our pilot science literacy seminar our initial focus was not the science that would find its way into Freshman Inquiry but the context within which science literacy considerations would be situated. Thus we were faced with the need to represent the central practices of inquiry characteristic of the natural sciences in team-taught courses that are structured in significant measure by the goals of University Studies and typically with emphasis on civic engagement.

We sought to accomplish this by a close look at texts that provided a glimpse of the day-to-day practices of science. We also thought it important to examine the ongoing debates about the nature of science and the various ways in which science literacy is construed, the critiques of national science literacy benchmarks, and ongoing science curriculum reform efforts such as Project Kaleidoscope. We were also convinced it was important to address the rapidly changing context of knowledge production (for example, closer university-marketplace ties and the globalization of knowledge production projects). Finally, we turned to a particularly intriguing theoretical framework from the field of sciences studies (actor-network theory or ANT) for the purpose of synthesizing the full range of our seminar inquiries and suggesting classroom approaches. It was these considerations that framed our pilot seminar.

What ANT suggests is an alternative to the conventional understanding of science that sees scientific inquiry clearly delineated from the external effects of politics, the market and such. In the alternative view the day-to-day practices of the sciences are closely articulated with the institutional practices of scientific institutions, involved in the fashioning of supportive alliances with a variety of agents, and attentive to the public representation of scientific work and its outcomes. Indeed, one might argue, as Bruno Latour has done in We Have Never Been Modern, that public, journalistic accounts of what might be termed politicoscientific controversies exhibit this heterogeneous articulation.

This substantially dynamic model suggests that the settled outcomes of scientific inquiry are preceded by considerably unsettled (and unsettling) attempts to make sense of the objects of scientific inquiry. And in this process the “outside” is being unsettled and resettled as well. This view in turn allows us to map student science inquiries onto the process of reaching settlement and to appreciate the fuller range of possibilities at hand—from conventional labs (of the settled sort) to open-ended inquiries that explore the simultaneous unsettledness occurring “inside” science as well as “outside” it.