The Science Teaching Group has concentrated in the last few months on sales of the 3 “Science and Society” pamphlets, on a Biology Teachers’ Conference in Framingham and on consideration of new projects. Sales of the pamphlets have been going extremely well with both “The Energy Crisis” and “Genetic Engineering” (2000...
Tag - education
Two of the major goals of the course were to develop the intellectual confidence of the inmates and to enhance their abilities of collectively understanding and solving their problems. Group oral reports and attempts to draw out collective solutions in discussion were methods used to accomplish these goals. The group...
Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York Herder and Herder, 1970) is a critical book for all those who are seeking alternative lifestyles in the teaching of science life styles which are grounded in and have bearing on the social, political and economic reality of the contemporary world. It is a book for...
Second semester, Al taught a course on computer technology and its social and political implications. The students actually used a computer terminal and worked with it practically as well as theoretically. Here is his bibliography, which may be of help to some readers.
The course began with an analysis of the institutional and conceptual foundation of physics today. In fact, since Al's first lecture came the day after the Attica massacre, it was devoted to how science and technology in this society provide methods for repression, control and murder. It was magnificently received.
This past year I have been part of a nine-member staff teaching a one year (three quarter) sequence in social science at the University of Chicago. About two hundred students registered for the course. They were divided up into sections of 25 each. The sections met for discussion three hours per week and all 200...
At the end of the first semester a proposal was made by a group of teachers: instead of giving another semester of general biology to the freshman class, why not offer areas or study which differed in content, so that students would have some choice in their scientific curriculum, and we could thereby pursue our own...
It would seem that confrontation, restructuring, or issues by themselves are not enough to change peoples' attitudes. One key factor is to what degree the people are involved in any of these tactics. We should be particularly aware of the concrete conditions within which we act and of the mood, attitudes, and...
In the last few years many of us have begun to question various aspects of our jobs as teachers. In part this has been due to an awakening consciousness among all teachers about the authoritarian nature of schools and the socializing function they perform. It has been due also to the broad recognition now that...
Each year, sandwiched between Christmas and New Year's days, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) holds its annual meeting in a major American city, with its headquarters in a towering hotel of a major American hotel chain. Invariably, not very far away is a major American ghetto, and of...