So what is science?

A quick note at the top! I think this blog subject could be an interesting one for a staff or syndicate meeting, one for teachers to discuss and grow their own understanding of what science might mean.

Last week, as I went for my evening walk I came across a couple of people putting out a net. They were quite focused about it and the net was held up by blown up milk bottles. They were busy untangling the net and checking for holes:

Photo by me!

The question I found myself asking was Is this science? I asked a few teachers as well through the week to see what they thought. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a teacher a while ago where they were adamant that turning on a light was "science". It challenged me to think a bit more about what I thought!

This is just my opinion and I really welcome your thinking and questions being shared too. To me, I like to think about how there are many different disciplines in science, for example, marine biology, astronomy, medicine, horticulture, zoology, etc but why are they all called "sciences"? What ties them all together to be science and not art or history? For me, it's what's behind each discipline. Scientists, regardless of the subject, could be observing, asking questions, posing hypotheses, discussing results, critiquing one another, etc. I don't want to add too many as I think it could be an interesting question to ask fellow teachers or even the children.

For me, this is what science is all about! Of course it's about the big issues and sustainability, etc but behind these are the attitudes, processes and skills, or 'the Nature of Science'. I tend to work with schools around the science capabilities and they reflect this nature of science too. This is the stuff we can support students to develop regardless of the context, the bits we could assess to see how students are growing. The NZCER Science Thinking with Evidence explore student understanding of these, rather than how well they know the solar system or the biology of the daisy. 

We do need these rich contexts, issues that affect students and their communities, questions we would like to answer (which may not be big issues but as simple as how come magnets stick to some things but not others? which as I write, I think this could be quite deep!) or simply a that's strange... There's a neat Dr Suess quote I saw on twitter the other day: It's better to know how than to know which I think could reflect my thinking here... Better to know the how to do science than the science itself...

Yes, the above picture could have used science in terms of where the net is places, the material of the net, how many milk bottles, etc but to my thinking, simply going fishing isn't science! And yes, you can disagree with me!

Goose-neck barnacles

I saw these on the same walk earlier and later thought about the difference with the way I was acting to the fisherfolk... I observed closely, noted that the shellfish were all in the same horizontal areas of the log which caused me to wonder if the log had been floating a particular way. All the barnacles were very dried up and dead so I thought about how long it had been out of the beach as well as how long it might have been at sea for this many barnacles to be living on the log. I noticed there were many different sizes of shell, the way the shell was designed (in five parts!) how it connected, etc. I had lots of questions so when I got back, I looked them up on the internet to see if I could find some answers. In my thinking, this is science! 

So what do you think? What do your children think? Of course, we could go deeper... did Monet use 'science' to paint?, or a person designing a guitar?, or Roald Dahl in writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

Keep sciencing on!