| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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groups by drawing attention to the nature of the curriculum taught and the pedagogy used in the process. This study focuses on science education in an urban setting where poverty and inequities associated with poverty are key issues.
Contextualized Science Curriculum
Science education should be directed toward facilitating students to examine, test, and modify ideas about phenomena in the world around them and making use of their understanding in shaping practical action. Understanding is defined in terms of knowledge of things and how to do things. Understanding, by its nature, is related to action just as information, by its very nature, is isolated from action (Dewey, 1946, p. 49).
Many researchers pointed out that a “confirmatory approach” prevails in school science curricula (Elliott & Nagel, 1987; Stake & Easley, 1978). Research on school science textbooks in the United States, for example, revealed a confirmatory methodology, described as the tendency to confirm the predictions being tested (Koul, 1997). Lederman and Zeidler (1987) also supported this premise, claiming that “most widely available textbooks in science classrooms have presented an idealized image of science that is dull but noncontroversial” (p. 61).
Research findings about the traditional methods of lecture and demonstration and the “inform, verify, practice” format in science teaching support beliefs that students do not have enough opportunities to construct knowledge, and thus most learning turns to rote memorization (Caprio, Powers, Kent, & Harriman, 1998; Simonis & Cumo, 1993). Other researchers also find similar traditional deductive-nomological and inductive models of logical positivists' statements in textbooks. For example, statements like “water, wind, sunlight and biomass … are freely available” and “do not pollute the environment,” and “all alternative sources are renewable” (Sanchorwala et al., 1987; Zutshi & Bhandari, 1994) clearly demonstrate that a positivist approach to