Madam, - Twenty years ago I started to teach science subjects in Ireland. I was 24 years old. A member of staff on my arrival told me, "you are like the Rock of Cashel: permanent, pensionable and no one will move you".
Unlike the Rock of Cashel I moved freely between schools in Ireland, Zambia, England and Scotland and my teaching skills were definitely the richer for this experience. The science curriculum in our schools also changed during this time in an effort to encourage more students to study science.
Yet the recent figures showing the low number of students pursuing science in our tertiary colleges suggest that students leaving secondary schools have not engaged with science. So where is our system failing? I would suggest we look at the view of science presented within the curriculum and the conduct of practical work in the school science laboratory.
In my opinion our science curriculum is traditional in its view of the nature of science. It encourages students to know what scientists know giving them a view of science as fact. Understandably, there will be scientific knowledge that students need to know and recall, yet not all scientific knowledge becomes fact.
Practical work should not be a simple set of instructions that students follow. Instructions followed in a mindless fashion will lead to poor learning behaviour in the laboratory, little if any development in higher level reasoning skills and could be part of the reason why students don't do science.
I suggest that improvements can and should be made in the conduct of practical work. If at this point in science education in Ireland we are to make our school science laboratories centres of excellence and engage our students in science then practical work and overall learning style in the school laboratory will have to be raised. - Yours, etc,
MARY LANIGAN, B.Sc., M. Ed., Sundays Well Road, Cork.