If anyone knows Prof. Alan Cromer's book
'Connected Knowledge: Science, philosophy, and
education, they will know he rants at
'constructivists' and 'constructivism' (although
his real target seems discovery learning). Cromer
claims that in the US science teachers and
science educators are ignorant of science -
strongly implying that such people would not be
science graduates, which I find hard to believeŠ

But anyway I was interested in his account of how
middle school science teachers were on successive
days given a 3 hour 'constructivist' workshop on
floating and bouyancy, followed the next day by
"a ninety-minute demonstration-discussion period
, several hours of laboratory work, and an hour
of final discussion" on the same topic. According
to Cromer "the teachers were confused and angered
by the constructivist's workshop".

There are a range of interesting points here
about the choice of sequencing of the workshops,
the difference in duration of the two inputs, and
how it is implicitly assumed by Cromer that
"ninety-minute demonstration-discussionŠ, several
hours of laboratory work, and an hour of final
discussion" could not be a constructivist
teaching approach!

Anyway, given the implied criticism of the
constructivist educator who kindly agreed to
participate in Cromer's programme I wondered if
anyone knows who this was. I would be very
interested to hear the other side of the
argument, as from my reading this person seems to
have been set up, and I wonder if they were
clearly warned of the context of this work.

I would be rather reticent in involving myself in
a programme with someone who has Cromer's low
opinion of science educators and constructivists
as having "no knowledge of science", being
"ignorant" of science content, "ignorant of the
theoretical structure of science. Š ignorant of
the standard experimental techniques" etc.

I'd very much like to hear from this brave soul.

Keith

--
Dr. Keith S. Taber

http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/staff/taber.html
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/kst24/

University Senior Lecturer in Science Education
Science Education Centre
University of Cambridge Faculty of Education
184 Hills Road
Cambridge CB2 8PQ
United Kingdom