Kits are not the best answer...

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” Abraham Maslow

I was interested to observe a vigorous discussion of kits on the NSTA list serve which left me with the impression that using kits was inevitable for many school districts, despite the cost and difficulty of using the kits as they were designed. I see the issue of kits as one which demands that they are tailored to a district’s curriculum, are maintained and stored in a central area, and come with proper inservice time before they go out to teachers. Having custom kits for your curriculum presupposes that a comprehensive and integrated curriculum development process has been undertaken in the recent past. When was the last time that happened in your district or state? I’m concerned that many of the pre-teaching components and vocabulary for science are non-existent in a kit based culture of teaching elementary science. Developing a rich language and culture of science can't wait until the kit comes on the scene. I do give FOSS credit for having a coherent internal curricular flow in their kits, but they are only meant to supplement a comprehensive and pervasive science curriculum. What is the answer? Ideally, science specialists should be as prevalent as art and PE teachers to provide continuity, expertise, and depth to a comprehensive program. Relying on kit based science is akin to solving all of our medical problems with handy pharmaceuticals rather than getting in shape and improving our diet. Why get caught up in the fine points of kit based education when a cadre of science specialists could do the job with expertise, passion, and creative use of real science tools?

Teaching elementary science in Belize

Belize is the size of New Hampshire but is its opposite in many ways. First, its culture is a mix of Maya, Garifuna, Creole, mestizo, middle eastern, Chinese and latin people. While english is usually understood, most people are tri-lingual. The population is less than 300,000, most centered in a few large towns on the coast. Its warm, with a hot, dusty dry season in winter and a humid wet season which parallels the arrival of hurricanes. Many people are quite poor, eking out a subsistence living in a village or working as a laborer in agriculture or shrimp farming. Schools are in every area, combining a small tuition with meagre government subsidies to provide a thin but pervasive educational program. I was in Stann Creek district with the UNH-Belize Teacher Program. New Hampshire teachers are afforded a look at life in the tropics and the challenges of teaching with minimal supplies or central support. In return, they model their own skills to a few Belizean teachers. My second trip with the program had me asking lots of questions about the administration of curriculum in the schools and looking at science in particular. First, with 37+ students in many classrooms, the task is daunting for teachers. Many teachers are young and started to teach the fall after finishing high school. Supplies for teaching elementary science are non-existent and overcoming ESL challenges takes up much of a teacher's time. One of the most obvious problems is the rote pedagogy of mandated science curriculum. In most of the observations I made, the biggest problem was presenting material which children were developmentally unprepared to comprehend. Because of the large differences in between village and town resources, some village children are at a disadvantage in terms of exposure to the world at large. The result is that comprehension of science content is very low and the ability to engage in inquiry style thinking is not modeled. My travels to other Central and South American countries indicates a similar pattern in terms of resource allocation and poor pairing with developmental readiness. For Belize, the science gap is particularly acute, since the country's economy relies heavily on its eco-tourism resources in the cayes and reefs of the coast and the highland jungles of the Maya mountains. In many developing countries, Belize included, resource decisions are made by a few wealthy and educated families with little regard for the overall well being of the majority of citizens. With so much at stake environmentally, science education will be a test of education policy and priority.