Science and Society in the Classroom: Using Sociocultural Perspec ...

relationships (Button, 1993). Various studies conducted in the 1930s and 1940s further established the fact that the democratic style of leadership is more effective in influencing children's behavior compared to autocratic leadership (Button, 1993). Milligan (1993) made similar observations about the current state of schooling: “schools function much like the nineteenth-century factories they were originally designed to resemble. Batches of boys and girls still move like cattle from room to room where each teacher dumps a little more on each student” (p. 326).

In urban settings, apart from these historical landmarks that influenced the evolution of present schooling in the United States, the complex curriculum game model (Adler & Tellez, 1993) provided a strong argument for contextualizing the learning experiences in school. Two levels of the model address the research questions in this study. The first level discussed the dichotomy between reproduction and transformation as the underlying principle of curriculum. The players interested in urban schools are more interested in transformation, as they represent special interests of racial or minority groups (Adler & Tellez, 1993). The second level touches upon the nature of knowledge. The central question that arises out of this discourse is “should the curriculum focus on an exclusive body of core knowledge that is to be passed to each new generation, or should the curriculum stress emerging perspectives that give access to divergent point of views” (Adler & Tellez, 1993, p. 92). Two different curriculum perspectives emerged from this discourse, namely, that knowledge is received as given and non-negotiable, and that reflexive knowledge is negotiable and can be criticized and revised (Eggleston, 1977). The underlying assumption is that “curriculum is a contextualized process in contrast to a technocratic conception of curriculum as a product” (Adler & Tellez, 1993, pp. 92–93). In other words, it is important for science educators to understand the fundamental, culturally based beliefs about the world that students bring to class, and how these beliefs are supported by students’ cultures, because science education can be successful only to the extent that science can find a niche in the cognitive and sociocultural milieu of students (Cobern, 1993).