It is important that young people learn scientific ideas, learn to engage with science activity in the community, and learn the value of scientific approaches for identifying, understanding, and resolving some of the world’s major problems, such as climate change. This is recognised by the inclusion of science as a core learning area in curriculum documents for all learners in the compulsory years of education (Foundation to Year 10; typically, children of ages 5 to 15) across all Australian states and territories since the mid-1990s. 

However, a science degree is not necessary for the effective teaching of science to young people. The scientific ideas suggested by the Australian Curriculum: Science can be understood by any interested member of the general population. And every primary teacher is not just any member of the general population! Today primary teachers study education for four years at universities and engage in a minimum of 100 days of professional experience in classrooms, before they can be employed as a teacher. If university graduates from four-year teacher education programs cannot learn the understandings of and about science that are described in the curriculum for students in the compulsory years of education, then we would have to conclude that the curriculum is inappropriate (Pezaro, 2017).

But you do need a good understanding of science!

Primary teachers need strong understandings of and about (the nature of) science in order to effectively plan, teach, and assess the understandings of young people in their classrooms (Harlen & Holroyd, 1997; Harlen, 1997).

Primary teachers care about the quality of their teaching of science.

As a primary teacher, I participated in as much professional learning as I could access to improve my teaching in this area. It was common at the time for teachers to self-select attendance at professional learning workshops in science teaching. I noticed that the teachers participating with me in the workshops I attended often already had the pedagogical beliefs and capabilities to teach effectively, but lacked confidence in their knowledge of science to interpret the curriculum, recognise opportunities and contexts for teaching and learning, develop teaching plans, facilitate student learning, and assess students’ understandings of science. I came to believe that the professional learning opportunities offered did not actually meet teachers’ needs for deeper, more connected understandings of and about science.

Since then I have continued to work with primary teachers of science both formally and informally, through the Science Teachers’ Association of Queensland, as a science teacher professional learning facilitator at CSIRO, and through my networks of friends and colleagues. For nearly a decade I taught both science and science education pedagogy to preservice teachers at the University of Queensland. I have spent a lot of time with teachers, working with them to discover and understand the reasons for their lack of confidence in their science understandings and skills, and helping them to develop their personal beliefs and self-efficacy for teaching science along with their knowledge of and about science. I have also spent much time investigating and analysing the perceived problems surrounding primary science education.

Unfortunately, the solutions proffered in recent years have created new problems. Measures toward increasing accountability and compliance have eaten into teachers’ time and energy for planning and developing worthwhile learning experiences for their students. In response, departments of education have provided extensive teaching and learning resources to schools, effectively dictating not only what is to be learned by students (the curriculum), but how it is to be taught (pedagogy). Due to the range of pedagogical and discipline-specific understandings and experiences across the massive cohort of teachers, these resources have been designed to be accessible and useful to the least-experienced, least-knowledgeable, and least-motivated of primary teachers, and targeted toward students in the ‘middle’ of the spectra of interest, prior knowledge, and needs for learning. The implementation of this top-down approach has had the effect of removing opportunities for teachers to develop their necessary and desired pedagogical understandings to teach science effectively as well as weakening their capacity to cater to the needs and interests of all the students in their particular context, effectively deepening the problem and de-professionalising teachers in the process. Along with teachers’ autonomy to develop and enact plans for teaching science to young people, opportunities to develop the expertise through experience and reflection have all but disappeared. To quote Dr Peter Ellerton, Director of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the Critical Thinking Project, “if you have an idiot-proof curriculum, guess who’s going to end up teaching it?”

The latest proposal for the effective teaching of science to young people is the introduction of specialist science teachers to primary school. However, this too will inevitably have a negative impact on primary science education in two ways (Pezaro, 2017). 

Firstly, the isolation of science from other subject areas will make for less meaningful learning of science, as the integration of subject areas across a range of learning programs including science enables students to develop relevant and significant connections between ideas and insights into their world and their role within it, as well as important skills and capabilities, particularly literacy and numeracy. 

Secondly, the perception that science is only for the most intelligent, ‘weird,’ or special people is perpetuated when it is taught by specialists. A child’s teachers are their best role models for ‘everyday people.’ Young children identify with their teachers and take normative cues from them on how they should act and what they should learn. The best role models for learning in young people’s formative years are those who hold broad knowledge and skills that cross many disciplines and value learning new skills and knowledge themselves; this is what primary teachers must be (Pezaro, 2017).

Let’s do this instead!

I propose that instead of bringing in specialist teachers or prescriptive lesson plans, we enable and empower those primary teachers that lack confidence in their understandings of science through professional learning in scientific ideas. While there are plenty of opportunities for teachers to develop and enhance their pedagogical knowledge, without sufficient conceptual understandings (or sufficient confidence in their understandings), there is little opportunity for teachers to apply their pedagogical knowledge in meaningful ways. 

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