Tag Archive for research

Are you Educationally Literate?

11/09/2010 change, Reading, reflection No comments

This is my first attempt at blogging from my phone, so please bear with me.

To what extent are you educationally literate? What does that mean I hear you ask…this is something that we’ve spent some time discussing this morning on my return to my CTeach MEd.

The discussion follows on from some reading we are asked to do from Reading Educational Research and Policy by David Scott. Scott argues that teachers today are educationally illiterate which means that we take texts on face value and don’t criticise their intentions and messages. Whilst his choice of language is often unfortunate, I do know where he is coming from. I am slowly developing the tools to critically analyse both research and policy texts. Looking back at my earlier career I would say I was a lot more accepting of what I read and questioned far less. Scott argues that by becoming more educationally literate teachers can become more empowered to enact change.

Despite this developing ability to be critical, I think I still feel that I would like to continue work on the assumption that the authors of the vast majority of educational texts are writing in good faith and with good intentions. I really wish to avoid a paranoid approach to research and policy, whereby I could slip into negativity for the sake of it.

Science Teaching: Integrate or Separate?

04/04/2009 science No comments
Image from Cartoon Stock

There has been much discussion within my department over the past year or so on how to approach Science teaching in S1/2 and possibly S3 once aCfE is here. We currently teach the three sciences separately throughout the school and as the new curriculum approaches we took the opportunity to think again about how we should be going about this.

It was a while after this discussion came to some sort of conclusion, that it occurred to me that no-one had really looked to literature or research to inform the debate. Being on the road to chartered teacher, I was surprised that I hadn’t already thought of this – so I decided to have a go. Amazingly I found nothing.

I decided to ask for help and sent an email to Peter Gray who coordinates a lot of communication between education researchers across Europe and he kindly advertised my request:

Although some interesting discussions arose from this, no-one was able to provide genuine research into this question.

So what do you think? Should Science be taught as one subject in the junior secondary or as three discrete subjects? Have you come across much literature on the subject?