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GLEN S. AIKENHEAD. Science Education for Everyday Life: Evidence-based practice. London, ON: The Althouse Press (2006). 185 pp. $32.95. (ISBN 0-920354-61-0).
Science Education for Everyday life offers a powerful framework for thinking about the diverse issues impacting the quality and usefulness of science education (as well as education in general). The choices facing educators in science education are characterized in the opening pages through a foundational dichotomy that is used throughout the book as an organizing principle: "pipeline versus humanistic science." Pipeline science is the science curriculum that most of us have been exposed to in secondary education and beyond. The goal of this curriculum is to transmit science's history, conclusions, and methods to students in order to create scientists or like-minded citizens who can understand the problems and solutions society faces. Humanitarian science attempts to develop a student's self-identity within the context of a relevant problem that students address with a variety of tools, including those that science offers. Although these definitions are necessarily brief, Aikenhead devotes much of the first chapter to mapping out the differences between these two perspectives in order to highlight the failure of pipeline science and the potential of humanistic science education.
Aikenhead invites the reader to evaluate the humanistic approach through evidence rather than through philosophical or political argumentation. With nearly 40 pages of references, Aikenhead's documents the failure of pipeline science and the importance of replacing this traditional program with a humanitarian curriculum in science education. The book is succinct. In eight chapters and 136 pages, the author quickly identifies major themes, and then upon the weight of the references he sets out to tip the balance towards a humanitarian perspective.
Pipeline versus humanistic science is the first of several dichotomies that Aikenhead uses to consider how major factors such as "curriculum policy," "classroom materials," "teacher orientation" and "student learning" impact the implementation of a humanitarian science curriculum. In the introductory chapter a second critical dichotomy focuses on the importance and perspective of the student. This dichotomy is the outcome of two opposing political positions that emerged in the 19th century in response to Spencer's (1859) question, "what knowledge is of most worth?" At one extreme, policy-makers value empirically tested approaches to evaluate what is best...