Saving Science Class by Christopher McGowan

Author:Christopher McGowan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633882188
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2017-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

During the late fifties and early sixties, science teachers in the UK established a working group to devise new and better ways of teaching science. What they wanted was to break away from the traditional approach, where teachers did the talking and demonstrating of practicals while pupils passively listened and learned. The Nuffield Foundation, a charitable trust, had also been investigating the problem and agreed to fund and coordinate the process. This resulted in the Nuffield Science Teaching Project, which began in 1962. It was decided that the best way to engage students in science was to have them explore and discover things for themselves, learning through hands-on practical experience.

There was no standard Nuffield approach to teaching science, and three separate teams of teachers—for biology, chemistry, and physics—worked largely independently. Professional scientists were available to help the teams, and a large number of schools across the country took part in trials and in adopting the new Nuffield curriculum. Each of the three groups produced a set of textbooks for students, along with a companion series of teachers’ guides, which I found particularly useful.

The first Nuffield biology class I taught (equivalent to grade 7) began with a unit on bacteria and disease. This introduced the students, and me, to Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) and his classic experiment showing that bacteria existed everywhere in the world, floating in the air. Back in Pasteur's time, there were two competing ideas to explain what caused things to spoil, like milk souring, meat rotting, and wine turning to vinegar. According to some, this happened spontaneously when harmful microbes suddenly appeared where there had been no microbes before. These minute organisms had already been seen by studying droplets of water beneath the primitive microscopes then available.1 This process, called spontaneous generation, was also thought to be the cause of infectious diseases, like cholera and typhoid, which were rampant in the overcrowded and unsanitary towns of the day. Other people, Pasteur included, believed that these harmful beings—now referred to as bacteria—floated in the air, along with dust particles. This idea was called the germ theory.

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