Learning objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
Discuss and debate existing literature and theoretical works on primary school students’ everyday worlds and contexts;
Identify and discuss the concept of everyday science in the context of students’ lives;
Understand the concept of sustainability as a socio-scientific reality in students’ learning of primary science;
Discuss and critique literature on student-framed participatory learning in the context of learning and teaching socio-scientific issues such as sustainability; and
Understand, apply and consider the implications of socio-scientific learning (specifically sustainability) utilising student-framed participation learning models.
Introduction
We have all been children once but this does not mean we understand what it is to be a child in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The mechanics of growing up, of negotiating rites of passage may bear some similarities but the contexts are entirely different. A driver of a Morris minor in the 1950s could not immediately jump into a Toyota Yaris … and manoeuvre his or her way around the M1 – there might be two cars involved but the road conditions are entirely different. Perhaps the first thing we have to do, therefore, when rethinking what it means to be a child in the twenty-first century is to acknowledge that we have much to learn
(Kellett, 2010, p. 5).Many of the views that students hold about science centre on the lack of relevance that science has to their everyday lives. In learning and teaching primary science, opportunities are opened up for students to be supported in the exploration of scientific phenomena that occur in their daily lives and as part of their world. Teachers need to be mindful of these connections and develop strategies that make links not only with their students’ prior learning but also with their everyday contexts.
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