This article describes a teaching method observed in China in 1977. It is not known whether it reflects current practice, but we feel the teaching method is a valuable model.
Tag - education
Most of us remember relatively little about learning to read. It involved little books with a pretty picture and a few short words on each page. For some of us, there was a lot of rhyming of words, like "hat-cat-fat"; only many years later did we learn that this was called "phonics." Some of us found it pretty...
Educational testing in America has become a cradle-to-grave arbiter of social and economic mobility. Tests determine who succeeds and who fails, who receives remedial or enrichment services, who goes to college or graduate school, who has his or her way paid, and who practices medicine, law or the other prestigious...
The last six months have seen a considerable heightening of political struggle in Britain—a struggle which deeply involves issues of concern to the radical science movement. Two areas in particular may be of special interest to SftP.
Last May the Science Teaching Group was asked to participate in the Great American Food Act, a festive day on the Boston Common, devoted to the food crisis. In line with other current crises, in ecology, energy, war, and unemployment, this year it was food. We wished to expose this crisis as symptomatic of the...
I teach a Science and Society course at Somerville High School, a large working-class public school near Boston, where I have free reign over course content, but am constrained by an otherwise rigid structure, and the common problems of students who, because of the continual irrelevance of school to their lives, are...
This Autumn, the City of Boston began the massive busing of school children under a Federal Court order to end forced segregation. A continuing crisis has ensued punctuated by violent attacks on the Black citizens of Boston. This has included the repeated stoning of Black students being bussed and an armed terrorist...
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...
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...