On Common Ground: Science, Technology, and Teaching
By Thomas R. Whitaker
On the facing page the American painter and inventor, C. W. Peale, portrays himself lifting the curtain upon the grand project of his later years, a museum of natural history. Let us here echo his gesture, in a modest way, by lifting the curtain upon a number of On Common Ground devoted to science and technology. Our first three numbers have emphasized some broader contexts of partnerships between schools and universities: federal-state relationships, the historical perspective, and the world of work. We now engage more closely some of the problems and opportunities that such partnerships must confront in the classroom.
The Essays: Some Connections
- How can school-university partnerships contribute to science education in the elementary grades? Bruce M. Alberts and Jan Tuomi recount how a partnership between the San Francisco public schools and the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) has led to the replacing of science textbooks with hands-on science materials. They point to several important aspects of this program, including dialogue with the school district leadership, and close working relationships between school teachers and members of the UCSF community. The "key" to this effort, however, has been the identification of outstanding instructional materials in effect, science kits. An earlier version of this essay provoked a very lively discussion at the January meeting of the Editorial Board. A number of reservations were expressed about its approach to science in the elementary grades. May kits provide too "ready made" and "self-contained" an experience? Do they help teachers to relate science to other aspects of a holistic elementary school program? Would the students' inquiry and problem-solving be furthered by having them prepare their own kits, which might also relate to other aspects of the curriculum? Might the teachers then become more deeply involved in the process of curriculum construction? These questions, of course, raise larger issues of curriculum design and professional development in the elementary schools. The Board thought it useful, therefore, to solicit some responses to that essay from other points of view.
- Our first respondent, Sharon Olguin, trains teachers in the Albuquerque Public Schools/University of New Mexico Collaborative. She agrees with Alberts and Tuomi about the need for an experiential approach to science instruction. She argues, however, that science kits are too easily used in ways that do not significantly advance the students' skills in problem solving and critical evaluation, that the kits too often seem to relieve the teachers from responsibility for their own continuing education, and that sets of fairly expensive and quickly expended materials do not constitute the most efficient use of a school's limited financial resources.
- Our second respondent, Eloy Rodriguez, established the "Kids Investigating and Discovering Science" program at the University of California, Irvine, in partnership with the Santa Ana Unified School District. The successful science teaching in that program for low-income Latino youngsters, he tells us, depends upon a network of interpersonal collaboration. Parents, becoming participatory partners, serve as teaching assistants and homework mentors. Minority faculty from the university become role models and mentors, for the school children and also for the minority graduate and undergraduate students who work with the K-12 teachers. Through such means, the university campus has become "a truly common ground for fostering the love and learning of science."
- How has the National Science Foundation been assisting university school partnerships in science, mathematics, and technology? Janice Earle and Julia C. Wan describe how the Statewide Systemic Initiatives Program (SSI) has encouraged the creation and strengthening of partnerships. They also point to four states Montana, Ohio, Connecticut, and Louisiana as examples of SSI programs that are oriented toward several types of curricular reform, teacher preparation and development, and the improvement of teaching methods.
- Can smaller and poorer nations teach us a good deal about creative and cost-effective partnerships? Stephen C. Ehrmann argues, on the basis of his experience in Portugal, that they surely can. He describes Project Minerva, which was designed to foster broader use of computing in the Portuguese schools. This project involved a "distributed leadership structure," with three partners: the Ministry of Education, the universities, and the schools. Each had its own area of leadership in a reform effort sparked by technological innovation but extending into other areas of the curriculum.
- What obstacles do we confront when seeking to introduce into our own public schools what is now our society's central tool for communicating and creating knowledge? In a sobering essay on that question, John Merrow identifies three major obstacles: inappropriate teaching methods, stereotyping of students, and obsolete facilities. Unless these are overcome, he argues, the gulf in our society between the "haves" and the "have nots" will grow yet wider a prospect that should frighten us all.
- Teachers also need to be alert to technological resources beyond the walls of the classroom. Robert Wheeler suggests how they can make use of artifacts in their localities as means of conveying the excitement of scientific inquiry. Wheeler's emphasis on links that connect science, technological invention, and economic processes in the larger society also illustrates the broadly interdisciplinary focus that he has found useful when leading a seminar on "Electricity," in the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, for teachers drawn from several different fields.
- Two other essayists in this number of On Common Ground address more general problems of curricular reform and each is concerned with the coherence of our educational efforts. Carlos Mora, who directs the Partnership for Minority Student Achievement in New Haven, reminds us of the dangers of fragmented reform efforts and suggests that "empowerment" and "constructive accountability" may provide a basis for better coordination and more fruitful decision-making. Carole F. Edmonds, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Michigan, is responding to Robert Reich's essay in our last number, on the role of the community colleges in providing new paths to the middle class. She calls attention to the need for more collaboration among the quite various programs within the community college and she describes how her college has met this challenge.
- Our regular columnist, Fred Hechinger, delivers a related challenge to Yale and by implication to all universities. Can university faculties that have experimented with interdisciplinary teaching now offer their experience to leading high school instructors and demonstrate the concept of such team teaching? If so, they may move into the forefront of the new high school reform movement.
- We also inaugurate in this number two "departments" that, we hope, will make at least occasional appearances in these pages. One is a place for book reviews. Toni Marie Massaro's Constitutional Literacy: A Core Curriculum for a Multicultural Nation spells out one way of balancing the demands of unity and diversity in our school curricula by "teaching the conflicts" in the area of constitutional law. (The phrase, and the pedagogical approach to which it refers, comes from the work of Gerald Graff, Professor of English at the University of Chicago.) Massaro's book is here reviewed by Robert A. Burt, from the Law School at Yale, who has led seminars on constitutional law for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, and whose own recent book is entitled The Constitution in Conflict.
- The other department, "Voices from the Classroom," will provide space for a variety of contributions from the schools. On this occasion, we offer excerpts from a conversation with three classroom teachers who have recently joined our Editorial Board: Sharon Floyd, Sharon Olguin, and Patricia King. They speak of their experiences in collaborative projects, and they express their views on the potential usefulness of On Common Ground.
The Images: Some Perspectives
The images in this number complement the essays in a variety of ways. Several of them quite explicitly provide artistic and historical perspectives on certain aspects of science, technology and teaching.C. W. Peale's The Artist in His Museum, on this page, celebrates the artist's own remarkably various career, which had taken him from painting (he was the most notable portrait painter of the American Revolution) and invention (he designed a truss bridge, for example, and a fireplace that consumed its own smoke) on to the study of natural history. He became an avid collector of birds, mammals, reptiles, and insects, organizing his collection in accord with the scientific principles of the day. And through twenty years of labor, he created the first serious museum of natural history in the western hemisphere. That museum sponsored the first American scientific dig, which excavated a fossil skeleton of a mastodon a process that Peale recorded in another notable painting.
In The Migration Series, Jacob Lawrence traces the great migration between 1916 and 1930 that took more than 4one million African Americans to the North. Panel 58, which we include on this page with "Voices from the Classroom," carries as its text: "In the North the African American had more educational opportunities." At age twenty-three, Lawrence had already married tempera technique with a synthetic cubist style. In this panel the jagged rhythms and bold symmetries provide a rather syncopated harmony with the arithmetic sequence that the girls are writing on the board. As Lawrence later said about this cycle: "I tried to create a staccato-like rhythm over and over and over again with the shapes as they move. . . I build on the geometry and I love it." And yet he so strongly identified with the figurative elements that he could also say: "I don't think in terms of history in that series. I think in terms of contemporary life. . . If it was a portrait, it was a portrait of myself, a portrait of my family, a portrait of my peers."
On our front cover, William H. Johnson's Dr. George Washington Carver pays homage to the great African-American scientist who was also an inventor of new agricultural products, a teacher at Iowa State College and Tuskegee Institute, and an artist in several media. By developing products from peanuts, sweet potatoes, and pecans, as well as cotton, Carver effectively revolutionized the agriculture of the South. Johnson's painting, which employs his late style of "conscious naivete," orders in a single brilliant design a multiplicity of scientific, technological, and economic relationships, glimpsed in part through moments in Carver's life.
On our back cover, a detail from Diego Rivera's fresco cycle, Detroit Industry, focuses on the manufacture of the engine and transmission of the 1932 Ford V-8. The entire mural project, on several walls at the Detroit Institute of Arts, places the automotive industry in a broad mythological, historical, geographical, and geological context. In this panel, however, the workers are given the faces of Rivera's assistants and Detroit acquaintances. Rivera thus offers a secular and pan-American answer to the cosmic scope, universal history, and contemporary details often found in the frescoes of European churches.
Other images in this number may seem to have abstracted science, technology and teaching from any historical context. But they teach us in other ways, leading us into a realm where design and color have merged with the depiction of a technological, geometrical, or arithmetic "subject."
That is true even of Thomas Eakins' Drawing of Gears (page 15), an academic exercise carried out by a student at Central High School in Philadelphia who later became a major American painter. Here the beauty of the geometrical forms that are essential to the mechanical transmission of energy seems at one with the beauty of graphic design.
Josef Albers' Homage to the Square (page 9) is one of many such works painted during the latter part of his life by this teacher at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture. They were part of his study of the "saturation of colors" and the mutability of color perception, topics treated in his book, Interaction of Color. This painting proposes a realm in which science and art overlap or merge a realm of ambiguity and mystery, where luminosity is a transcendent energy.
In Jasper Johns' 0-9 (page l6) on the other hand, the ambiguities are more jarringly insistent. Arithmetical symbols and aesthetic form here seem at odds and yet in harmony. They are mutually obscuring and mutually confirming. To look intently at this image is to be shuttled endlessly back and forth between digits and design.
Finally, we include with the "Book Review" (page 21) a work by John Frederick Peto, for whom books often provided the occasion for eloquent formal designs. Nine Books was given to the Yale Art Gallery by Charles F. Montgomery, late Professor of Art History at Yale, and the Curator of the Garvan and Related Collections of American Art. Had it not been for his untimely death in 1978, Montgomery would have led the first Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute seminar on American Art.
More on the Arts in Our Next Number
There are strong arguments for the importance of the arts in the educational process. Judging from the recent decisions of many school administrators, those arguments have not been heard. Herbert Read's Education Through Art, first published a half-century ago by Faber and Faber (3rd ed., 1961), is a classic in this field from which we still have much to learn.Our next number will focus on this topic. It will include, among others: Scott Massey on "The Arts as Knowing," Elliot W. Eisner on "Why the Arts are Marginalized in Our Schools," James Gray and Richard Sterling on "The National Writing Project," and Marty Trujillo on "Saint Joseph Ballet's Program for Inner-City Children."