Science curricula design: analysis of authors’ ideological and pedagogical principles

Abstract

The study analyses the extent to which the sociological message transmitted by the Official Pedagogic Discourse of the curriculum for Portuguese middle schools contains the ideological and pedagogical principles of its authors. The research is epistemologically and sociologically grounded, placing particular emphasis on Bernstein theory of pedagogic discourse. The ideological principles underlie broad educational aims and the pedagogical principles underlie characteristics of the pedagogic practice. Data was obtained through a semi‐structured interview with the authors and documental analysis of their publications. The results suggest that the authors were distinct in the ideological and pedagogical principles they valued and that discontinuities were evident between those principles and the curriculum message. These results are discussed and their consequences in terms of scientific learning are explored.

Keywords:

• scientific education
• curricula
• ideological principles
• pedagogical principles
• social context

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the Foundation for Science and Technology for financing the study.

Notes

1. A former version of this article was published in Portuguese by the journal Educação & Realidade.

2. Bernstein’s model of pedagogic discourse is accessible at http://essa.fc.ul.pt/researchmat_modelsofanalysis_text.htm and its characterization is available at http://essa.fc.ul.pt/bernsteinstheory_text.htm.

3. The field of symbolic control is the field where discursive resources are produced.

4. With regard to the relation between discourses of the same discipline, we considered the degree of relation between distinct kinds of scientific knowledge and between the scientific and the metascientific knowledge. With regard to the Ministry of Education‐Teachers relationship, we considered the degree of control given by the Ministry of Education to teachers – degree of explication of the OPD. Classification and framing were used to characterize respectively relations between discourses and between subjects.

5. The level of conceptual demand of the OPD transmitted by the curriculum was analysed in two dimensions, scientific and metascientific. In the case of the scientific dimension, we considered three parameters: complexity of scientific knowledge, complexity of scientific cognitive competences and intradisciplinarity between distinct kinds of scientific knowledge. In the case of the metascientific dimension we considered only the complexity of the metascientific knowledge.

6. This study used Ziman’s (1984) conceptualization of science construction, according to which science is seen as a social institution with various dimensions: philosophical (science methods), historical (science evolution), psychological (scientists’ characteristics), internal sociological (relations inside scientific community) and external sociological (relations between science and society). This allowed a detailed analysis of science construction, that is, of metascientific knowledge, present in the curricular documents, by studying the various dimensions separately.

7. Portugal does not have a specific agency for Curriculum Development. Curriculum Projects are developed by teachers invited by the Ministry of Education for that purpose. In the case of this study, five authors of the curriculum were higher education teachers in the areas of science teaching methods (three in the area of Biology/Geology and two in the area of Physics and Chemistry) and eight were secondary/middle school teachers that were working in the Ministry of Education and/or the university.

8. See interview guidelines in Ferreira (2007) (also available at http://essa.fc.ul.pt/ficheiros/instumentos/5_diversos/5.2.pdf).

9. This analysis was made in terms of the possession of recognition rules for the pedagogic characteristic under analysis. When, for example, the component ‘intradisciplinarity between distinct kinds of scientific knowledge’ was considered, the interviewee showed possession of recognition rules when she selected the situation that expressed the principle ‘in science education, intradisciplinary relations should exist between scientific knowledge of distinct themes’.

10. The analysis made to the curriculum of Natural Sciences (Ferreira 2007) showed that that curriculum privileges the relations between science, technology and society according smaller importance to other aspects that influence the construction of scientific knowledge.

11. The contextualization of learning is one of the aspects of the principle of curriculum flexibility that is the basis of the current curriculum reorganization.

12. Studies carried out by the ESSA Group have shown a relationship between students’ achievement in sciences, their social background and teacher’s pedagogic practice when the level of conceptual demand of that practice is considered (e.g. Domingos 1989; Morais 1991). The studies suggest that the teacher has a tendency to vary the level of conceptual demand of his/her pedagogic practice according to the social context where s/he teaches in the direction of lowering that level when s/he teaches in a working‐class school and/or in a country school.