Opening Plenary
VIIth International Congress on Research in Science Teaching
Granada, Spain (2005)
Research for the Future of Science Education:
New Ways of Learning, New Ways of Living
Jay L. Lemke
University of Michigan
jaylemke AT umich DOT edu
New information and communication technologies make it possible for students to learn about
science and about the natural world across multiple media and multiple sites of learning.
Research needs to help us understand better how to help students integrate learning through
text, spoken language, graphical images, animations, audio, video, simulations, and threedimensional models and virtual worlds. We must also learn how to effectively link learning in
schools and other educational institutions with learning online, in nature, at technological
sites, and through internships. With these many new possibilities, we need to re-examine the
goals of science education. Should they be the same for all? Should we focus science
education more on social issues and students' concerns? Can we make science education more
democratic and more politically progressive?
Re-engineering science education for the 21st Century
In the 21st century, what are the most important contributions which science education can
make to students and to society? How can we make science education better serve the
interests of all people? I will argue that science education needs more wonder, more honesty,
more humility, and more real value for most students. For the youngest students, we must
work to create a more profound engagement with the wonder of natural phenomena. For older
students, we need to present a more honest picture of the harmful as well as the beneficial
uses of science. For all students, we should offer a science education that makes science a true
partner with other ways of viewing the world and an essential contributor to students’ general
multimedia literacy and critical thinking skills. I invite you to think with me about how to
make a new science education that will not be rejected by the majority of students.
Science education research needs to re-direct its efforts toward better understanding: (1) how
emotional and intellectual engagement with the wonder of natural phenomena combine in
younger and older students; (2) how to promote critical thinking about the harmful as well as
the beneficial uses of scientific knowledge; (3) how to present scientific ways of knowing as
constructive partners with other human ways of knowing; and (4) how science education can
make essential contributions to students’ general multimedia literacy and critical thinking
skills. We need to focus more of our research on learning how to increase the value of science
education for those many students who have no special interest in scientific and technical
careers. We need more attention to learning that will last a lifetime, learning that demystifies
quantitative reasoning, and learning that provides the keys to thinking with multiple
representations for our new multimedia world.
Aims and Goals of Science Education: Fundamentals
Any serious consideration of how we might fundamentally change science education for the
21st century needs to begin with some larger questions concerning its goals. The goals of
science education need to be formulated within the context of our larger goals for education in
general, and our definition of what will make for a better society and a better life for all
people. The goals of science education cannot be merely technical. It cannot be our only
purpose to provide skilled workers and educated consumers for a global economy that
students have not learned to intelligently critique. So let me state briefly some of my own core
beliefs about the social goals of education.
Education must aim to contribute to the improvement of social life: To give more people in
the world a better opportunity for a better life and to safeguard minimum standards of social
welfare for all. To learn to take a global and not only a local or national perspective; indeed to
place the local and the global above the regional or national interest. Education must also
contribute to better lives for students, across the needs of many nations and many social
classes. A better life for those most in need means provision for health, education, basic
necessities, protection from disaster, insurance against disaster, hope. For those who have
these basics, it means greater opportunities to develop their skills and talents and to use them
in the service of a harmony between global society and the rest of our planet’s ecosystem.
How can we translate these broad goals to more specific aims for science education across the
years of schooling and learning? Here is one beginning of an answer:



For all young children to appreciate and value the natural world, enhanced by
understanding, but without removing the mystery, curiosity, and magic
For middle years children to develop a more specific curiosity about how
technologies and the natural world works, how to design and create things, how to
nurture and care for things, basics about human health
For secondary school to open the potential career path to science and technology for
all, to provide information about the scientific view of the world that is of proven
usefulness for most citizens, to give some sense of the role of science and technology
in social life, to help develop skills of complex logical reasoning and use of multiple
representations, and for those who wish it: (a) a less intensive path that keeps open the
option for a science or technology specialization, (b) a more intensive path for those
who have already decided they wish to follow this path in university or advanced
technical education
Across all the years of schooling, we also need to take science out of its isolation. We need:



To teach for a science that tells wonderful stories about the natural world and helps us
understand and create useful and marvellous technologies that do the least harm to
people, society and the environment.
To place more emphasis on the unity of science and technology and less on purely
abstract principles, until students have selected such an emphasis for advanced study.
To teach science in closer relation to mathematics, history, literature, economics,
politics, and moral values.



To eliminate claims that science is the one, best way of knowing, which often alienate
many students from science.
To admit to the historical complicity of science with immoral military, political, and
commercial projects and seek to change the nature and direction of science in the
future to make such complicity less likely.
To teach for a science that strives to be a good global citizen with humane moral
values.
Beyond trying to define a set of goals, about which we can and should have intelligent and
serious conversations and even disagreements, we need to become better critics of our own
work. For too long now, others have criticized us more than we have criticized ourselves.
Better than any others, we know the shortcomings of the work of science education, and we
need to discuss them more publicly and take action to change what we can change.
Among current criticisms of science education in the United States and a number of other
advanced societies, I would identify the following as especially important and troubling:











That its content emphasis is too abstract for most students
That its content selection has no empirical claim to usefulness for non-specialists
That it is designed far too much to train future technical workers
That it is boring and alienating for too many students
That it has the character of a compulsory activity and not a self-determined activity
That it seeks to impose a particular way of thinking as superior
That it is shallow and superficial across all topics
That it insists that all students learn the same content, in the same way, at the same
rate
That it puts no emphasis on creativity, moral concerns, historical development, or
social impact
That it neglects the affective and emotional dimensions of learning
That it projects an inhumane image of science as not concerned with the common
cares and interests of most people and existing apart from the lives of people who do
science as well as those who use it and are affected by it
Proposals for Action
Having presented ambitious goals and serious criticisms of our work, I feel a responsibility to
present some initial proposals for action. After stating these proposals, I will provide a more
extended analysis of some of the assumptions that lie behind them, and their implications for
future research on science education.
1. Let young children experience science mainly through nature study, working with live
higher animals, and reading or hearing wonderful stories about the natural world and
technological achievements
2. Let all students freely choose projects that have a science component and be supported
to conduct free and independent inquiry, alone or in pairs or small groups, over
extended periods of time (longer than one year for older students).
3. Let students experience the reality of science and technology by regular visits to
laboratories, factories, generating stations, nature sites, zoos, aquariums, and other
sites where science and technology are visibly in use, from the basement of the school
to regional centres. Let them experience not just the didactic displays, but the behind
the scenes work that really uses science and in some cases helps develop science.
4. Support students to explore in online communities and with online resources that give
information about scientific, environmental and technological topics, and make this
part of their total science education, with school-based learning one important
component but not the sole or central focus of concern for science educators and
government support.
5. Let older students learn from internships in organizations where science and
technology are central to the activities of the organization.
6. Let students have direct online relationships with adults who do science and use
science and technology as a key part of their work and lives, across a wide range of
careers and activities.
7. Let younger and older students work and learn together, breaking down the un-natural
segregation of students by age, and promoting cross-age learning
8. Support students to apply their scientific and technological knowledge to practical
problems in their lives and local communities and to take interest and action in
relation to larger society concerns where science and technology are central parts of
understanding and responding to issues.
9. Eliminate, once and for all, from all but the most advanced scientific education, the
assumption that learning abstract principles and decontextualized information will lead
to practical applications of knowledge or even enable such applications for most
students.
10. Recognizing the importance of language as the primary medium for reasoning and
conceptualization in science, help students to reason more effectively about scientific
and technological issues also in more quantitative ways using both algebraic and
graphical tools as well as numerical examples. Do this in the most concrete and
contextualized ways possible, and not as abstract procedures or the solving of artificial
problems.
11. Support students in reasoning about natural and technical phenomena through
integrated combinations of linguistic, mathematical, and visual tools, including
computer models, simulations, and interactive-immersive environments, but always
directly linked to concrete real-world experience and in-depth work on particular
topics or issues.
12. At the same time, recognize the importance of narrative as a medium of
communication and learning and restore it to a place of honour and prominence in
science education.
13. Explore the potential of other forms of language, such as dialogue and poetic diction,
as effective media for learning about the natural and technical world. Explore other
forms of visual and audio-visual media, such as three-dimensions interactive,
immersive computer simulation and gaming worlds for their value as well.
14. Eliminate once and for all the assumption that science education beyond the early
childhood years can ignore the emotional and affective dimensions of learning; make
the learning of science a subject about which students are enthusiastic and which they
enjoy emotionally as well as intellectually by whatever means are necessary.
I have based these proposals on several considerations. Some concern our new understanding
of the nature of learning. Others concern the role of science and science education in society,
historically, at the present, and for the future.
New Views of the Nature of Learning
Our best understanding of how people learn has changed a great deal in the last few decades.
Let me summarize what I see as some of the most important new principles to guide
education:
Learning takes place on multiple timescales, from moments to lifetimes. Some learning that
takes minutes becomes part of habits that last days, or years, but most does not. Students need
to learn how to cumulate and internalize for the longer term more what they learn in the short
term. They need to work on extended projects that afford opportunities for what was learned
before to be used in what is being done now.
Learning takes place across multiple sites. If something learned in one time and place is to
become part of our habits of action more widely, then it needs to be carried over from one
place to another, one task to another, one activity to another, and these cannot be restricted to
schools and classrooms. Students’ learning needs to extend across classrooms and
laboratories, online environments and natural settings, places of work and sites of community
activity.
Learning takes place across multiple media. If language is one primary medium for learning,
whether from conversations or books, it is far from the only one. We also learn from visual
representations of many kinds (drawings, diagrams, graphs, maps, photos, films and video,
3D simulations, etc.), both static and dynamic. And we learn from observing and participating
in activities, which are themselves structured in many ways like language (i.e. they form
semiotic systems). Most of all, we learn by integrating meanings across all of these
modalities, combining text and image, activities and summaries, narratives and observations.
This integration is not automatic or natural, it is culturally specific and must be taught and
learned.
Learning is a natural and inevitable part of lifelong human development. You cannot not learn
from everything you do. All that is at stake is what you learn from activity and how past
learning affects future action. Students who learn very little of the content of the curriculum in
school still learn a great deal about how to play the ‘game of school’, about social life among
their peers, and much else that we generally ignore. Students are always learning, but not
always learning what we want them to learn.
Learning takes place most naturally in mixed-age communities, where younger and older
learn from one another, and more generally in diverse communities, where we learn how to
learn with and from one another across divisions of age, gender, culture, social background,
etc.
Learning is not fundamentally the acquisition of abstract and general principles, but the
development of concrete habits and strategies, some more tacit, some more explicit and
reflective, for using a range of tools, from levers and microscopes to formulas and graphs, for
relatively specific tasks in particular contexts.
Science Education and the Needs of Society
Current science education is largely a product of the desire of governments and corporations
to produce a more technologically and scientifically literate workforce for commercial and
military enterprises. As such it has not been designed for success in educating more than a
small fraction of the population.
Current science education has become far too isolated from the everyday life concerns of
students of all ages and also from the larger moral and social concerns of older students.
At the same time, various historical trends defining social privilege and status have led to the
incorrect view that abstract learning is more noble than practical and concrete learning and
that it is also more effective as a basis for practical activity. Current science education suffers
greatly from this ideology.
The opportunistic basis of government support for science education tends to reproduce the
artificial divide between science learning and learning in the humanities and the arts, and
learning about society itself, including its history, laws, economics, and politics. National
pride, and elite self-interest, have also worked to render invisible the dark side of human
history and the dark side of the history of science, its long complicity with inhumane
commercial and military projects. Without a commitment to honesty and reconciliation in the
relations of our view of science to our view of the rest of human life, science education cannot
succeed in engaging most students with science learning in a positive way. We must honest
face the fact that many students today, at least after the age of primary school, have a negative
attitude to science and many of its technologies.
Many of our students are idealistic and altruistic in their basic social views. They see a world
rife with injustice and the horrendous consequences of prolonged injustice. There are also
many global problems they will not see unless we teach them how to see them. Science
education, in order to capture the imagination and loyalty of students, and in order to deserve
their commitment to learning what we have to teach, needs to orient itself toward social issues
and social problems, not toward teaching abstract conceptual principles of dubious practical
usefulness or skills needed for technical occupations.
Three great issues I believe will dominate the century ahead for all of humanity:

We are already on the cusp of a global environmental crisis of unimaginable
proportions, which governments and commercial interests blindly and self-interestedly
deny. Changes in fundamental understanding and attitudes to the relation of our
species to the rest of the planetary ecology are needed and science education must reorient its priorities in this direction.

Global social injustice in the distribution of wealth and resources will create
intolerable conditions for all peoples in all nations as the justifiable anger of exploited
people turns to acts destabilizing the comfortable societies which benefit from these
injustices. Science education must orient itself towards the role of science and
technology in these issues and their resolution by preparing citizens to understand
them.

The last invisible form of oppression and injustice in global society is the power
relationships that give the middle-aged (or in some few societies, those still older)
unjust privileges relative to younger citizens and in many cases also relative to our
eldest citizens. New technological changes in the means of production will shift
economic power toward much younger citizens and they will launch a political
movement for their just rights. Much of education today, including science education,
labors under the burden of an ideology of false beliefs about the incompetence of the
young. Science education must seek a new respect for and work to more effectively
empower young learners who are still denied the rights of full citizenship and are
treated by most schools as lacking in all fundamental citizen rights.
In all these respects, science education must take political and moral stands -- or else in the
judgment of its students today and tomorrow, and in the judgment of history and humanity in
decades to come, we will be found to have been as blind and socially irresponsible as the
educators who came before us who did not oppose imperialism, colonialism, slavery, or the
oppression of women, who did not prepare citizens to criticize levels of sanitation, industrial
pollution, or basic health care, deforestation, over-fishing, or the creation and use of
biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. These issues were never on
the agenda of science education in the past, and it is to our shame that they were not.
Who will history blame if citizens do not understand the risks of private ownership of the
genetic endowment of humanity and other species? Who will history blame if global
environmental catastrophes occur that could have been avoided by the political action of a
better educated citizenry?
What will be the attitude of the neglected peoples of the world toward a science education that
turned a blind eye to their needs and to the role of science in their exploitation, when they
who are the global majority eventually force their will to prevail in history?
What will be the attitude of the young whom we treat as mentally deficient and without rights
or respect in our schools and science classrooms, when they are earning more money than we
are and making their voices and votes heard regarding future policy for science education?
If this last dimension seems elusive or puzzling, imagine that you were teaching science
education to influential adults in the community. Would you design a curriculum without
consulting them at all about their interests? Would you insist that they all learned what you
specified, in the way you specified, at the time and the pace you specified, without any
consideration for their individual preferences for learning? Would you deny them the
opportunity to undertake science learning projects of their own and fail to support them in
these endeavours over extended periods of time? Would you teach them superficial bits and
pieces of mostly useless knowledge rather than giving them in-depth understanding of
particular valuable topics and problems? And if you did, what would they do? Would they
not look for another teacher or another school? Would they not take their money and
resources and come together to support alternative institutions that would be of more value to
them in their learning? And would not our students do this too if they only had the resources
and the freedom to do so?
If we do not design science education for our students as if their desires and preferences
matter, is it not because we have been taught to see students, even those who are biologically
adult (at age 12 for most today), or with many legal rights in progressive societies such as
Spain (at age 15), as mysteriously infantile, irresponsible, and incompetent? And is this not
the basis for a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby our expectations and treatment of the young
encourages just these kinds of behavior? Developmental biologists will tell you that juveniles
of all species are well-adapted to learning how to deal with their environments. For homo
sapiens, they are better, faster learners than we are, at almost any task for which they have
basic preparation.
This issue becomes more severe as our students become the young adults whom society
refuses to recognize as adults. Our society deliberately infantilizes young adults in order to
retain adult privilege and power over them, for they are seen as a dangerous and potentially
destabilizing force in many societies. For centuries society did the same with regard to
women, if for slightly different reasons (exploitation of their unpaid labour or sexual
vulnerability), and historically we have held the same ideological false beliefs about serfs,
slaves, workers, most non-European peoples, and even many poorer or more agrarian
European peoples). None of these false beliefs were contradicted by the voice of science until
after changes in the balance of political power. Will we wait for that to happen once again?
It may be the case that children below the age of four or five years are relatively unable to
participate in the structuring of their educations, but this is not empirically established. It is
certainly true that students from the ages of twelve to eighteen are able and interested in
having more of a say in what and how they learn. From the age of six to eleven, we can
assume there is a growing ability to form more equal partnerships with teachers, if we would
encourage students in this and help them learn how to do so. If we would teach them more of
the skills of independent judgment and independent learning.
Our present educational system of age-grading, or segregation by age, justified today by
relatively questionable evidence about developmental readiness for different kinds of
learning, was originally instituted because younger and older students worked altogether too
well with another in planning and executing rebellions against their schoolmasters. What was
then a strategy of divide and conquer to maintain the power of the masters has become today
an obstacle to cross-age learning and learning in naturally age-diverse groups and
communities.
Science education is not alone in labouring under these cultural biases. But science educators
claim to be guided by rational principles and systematic empirical evidence that challenges
conventional wisdom and seeks theoretically-guided ways of finding alternatives. By and
large we have not done this with regard to either the belief that our students are incapable of
having a greater voice in their own educations in science, nor with regard to the equally
unfounded cultural bias that favours teaching through abstract principles rather than teaching
through concrete experience and specific issues. We have watched the light of wonder fade
from the eyes of our youngest students, to be replaced in all too many cases by boredom,
alienation, resistance, or a cooperative docility.
Yes, we are proud of the exceptions. The classes and activities where students become for a
time genuinely engaged. The few students whose interest in science grows year by year. But
for the most part these instances are not typical. Schooled adults today are not for the most
part scientifically literate or prepared for technical careers. They are not prepared to make
intelligent personal or political decisions about medical or technological issues. Their early
wonder at the miraculous phenomena of nature has not been nurtured or supported to develop
in some direction that might continue with them for the rest of their lives.
I do not believe, after more than 30 years in science education and educational research, that
we are going to succeed where past generations have failed, unless we make major and
fundamental changes in our approach to science education. We must change the goals to
better fit with student interests and social issues. We must change the methods to support
student learning across multiple sites and multiple media. We must change the curricula to
support more in-depth study of fewer, more concrete topics. Above all, we must change our
own attitudes and beliefs, allowing us to make our students as much equal partners in the
design of their educations as they truly can be.
For all these changes, much research is needed. Many alternative paths must be explored and
reported on for the benefit of the teaching-and-learning community. I do not believe in a
‘science of learning’ in the same sense as a science of electromagnetism. People are not the
same sorts of natural phenomena as electrons. Electrons are all alike; if you know how one
behaves, you know how they all behave. They have no memory, no history, no culture, no
processes of interpreting the meaning of their environments. They have no emotions, no likes
and dislikes. We can generalize about them because they have no individuality. In the case of
many more complex natural phenomena, we can also generalize about them to the extent that
the ways in which they are alike are more important for our purposes than the ways in which
they are different.
I do not believe that the best education for every student is the same education. I believe that
the most important thing about educating a student is the way in which his or her education is
different from, not the same as, the education of other students. I do not believe that all
students need to know the same things, at least not beyond the most basic content of primary
education. If there are truly fundamental principles in science, then the extended study of any
few topics in science will eventually bring students into contact with those principles. (And if
not, then they were not really so fundamental, were they?)
We live in a society which tries to do mass education on the cheap. We inherit a system of
schooling and curricula that is based on the mass production model of the factory assembly
line. We know that system does not work well for most students. We know that it places
intolerable burdens on too many teachers. We know that it is not a humane way to approach
to upbringing of the young. It does not send to our children the message that we really care
about them as individual people. It does not feel right. Why should successfully educated
adults spend so little time mentoring the next generation and so much of their lives making
profits for the owners of large-scale enterprises? Why should society invest more resources in
the production and marketing of goods than in the education of its people?
Science alone will not make the world a better place. Learning the results and methods of
scientific research will not in itself help students make better lives for themselves. We must
all learn to understand how science and science education can help us help ourselves. Science
education still has a great potential for good, but only if we take the true path of science
ourselves, rejecting what has been and exploring together new ways of thinking, teaching, and
learning.