‘She Has to Drink Blood of the Snake’: Culture and prior knowledge in science|health education

Abstract

In this analysis, we argue that science education should attend more deeply to youths' cultural resources and practices (e.g. material, social, and intellectual). Inherent in our argument is a call for revisiting conceptions of ‘prior knowledge’ to theorize how people make sense of the complex ecologies of experience, ideas, and cultural practices that undergird any learning moment. We illustrate our argument using examples from the domain of personal health, chosen because of its tremendous societal impact and its significant areas of overlap with biology, chemistry, physics, and other scientific disciplines taught as core subjects in schools. Using data from a team ethnography of young people's science and technology learning across settings and over developmental timescales, we highlight two youths' experiences and understandings related to personal health, and how those experiences and understandings influenced the youths' sense-making about the natural world. We then discuss the implications of our argument for science education.

Keywords:

• Culture and prior knowledge
• Ethnography
• Health and science education

Acknowledgements

The case studies we present in this article are drawn from research conducted by members of the Everyday Science & Technology Group as part of the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Science of Learning Center (http://life-slc.org/). We gratefully acknowledge the intellectual influence of our LIFE colleagues, and we also wish to thank the National Science Foundation for the opportunity (Awards SBE-0354453 and SBE-0835854), although any opinions expressed in this article our solely our own. We extend deep gratitude to Luke, Biqila, and their families, as well as to all of the youth and their families who participated in this study.

Notes

1. The following transcript excerpts are from conversations between the researchers and the Vuong family during a home visit following Agnes' return to the USA. Transcript conventions used in this paper (cf. Jordan & Henderson, 1995): double parentheses (()) = gesture, actions, and laughter; single parentheses () = dialogue is inaudible or uncertain; brackets [] = clarifying notes; double slash // = overlapping or interrupting talk; ellipsis (…) = words or turns of talk omitted for clarity.