Big picture Science

Abstract

This paper considers two teachers helping their students see the role of Science in their lives. It will consider a unit of work that was developed to help the students to better understand how science could assist them to make decisions in their lives and encouraged them to think about the way that scientific knowledge could help them to clarify their values. During this unit of work we incorporated an episode of "Grey's Anatomy" as stimulus material because we wanted to use a piece of stimulus that would be relevant to the students and would highlight that there was scientific knowledge in much of the popular culture they were seeing in their everyday life. The assessment for this unit of work considered "Who Makes the Decision?" in a variety of situations; a relative of a patient, a research scientist, the right to life group and their influence on people, the government and how they apportion funding to science or a doctor making medical decisions. It forced the students to incorporate their scientific knowledge with their values in order to make hypothetical ethical decisions. These teachers traced their journey in teaching/providing a unit of work based in science, ethics and decision-making. Beginning from the stimulus of a T.V. program, students formed groups, researched what governs the decision making processes of scientists in various fields and presented their findings in a multimedia format. The task involved significant risk taking for the teachers and for the students in the content and organisation of work. It is a journey for these teachers as the content has not been prescribed, but rather allowed to evolve. The journey has resulted in a learning journey for the teachers in their rethinking about science and science teaching, and their students in the relevance science has for them. The teachers raise questions that the process has rai sed for them for which they do not yet have clear answers. Student responses to this science task exploring ethics and values of science, demonstrated that they generally enjoyed opportunities to learn about the processes of science, they saw strong relevance to their own lives through learning about real life decision making and the opportunity to work in teams and to be self-directed in their research. The teachers used open ended questions, which led to student investigations being of depths that were unexpected. The reason for this appears to be the interest generated by the ethical issues -and the extent to which these were demonstrably authentic. More capable students showed high levels of interest and engagement which led to new questions for the teachers to investigate in future lessons.