Teachers' and Pupils' Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge of Natural Phenomena

Abstract

ABSTRACT The interface between school science and indigenous knowledge has until recently been ignored in curriculum development efforts throughout the world. However, in the last decade or so, for one reason or the other, a greater attention has been paid to this crucial subject. One obvious phenomenon forcing this subject to the fore perhaps, is the challenge of cultural identity in an era of rapid socio-economic and educational globalization. Today, science teachers in many a South African classroom is confronted with the enormous task of communicating science to pupils from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds. In fact, it might not be far fetched to suspect that both teachers and learners in South Africa as elsewhere, are faced with the massive challenge of “border crossing” (Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999) between school science and indigenous knowledge of diverse natural phenomena. The report presented in this paper seems to buttress this suspicion. An analysis of the responses of 40 science teachers and 92 primary and junior secondary school pupils in the Western Cape to eight fictitious stories about nature reveals the existence of both the scientific and the indigenous notions about nature. As expected, the teachers appear to learn more towards the scientific world view than their students. In certain cases there are similarities between the teachers' and their pupils' world views about nature while in others they are different. While some of the notions held by the subjects about nature are similar to that of science others are distinctly different. This paper provides a documentary evidence of the interplay between two distinct world views within the framework of critical theory. It attempts to explore the underlying mechanism of border crossing in terms of the so-called contiguity hypothesis as well as highlighted the physiological/logico-metalogical implications of the phenomenon of dualistic mentality for mass scientific and technological literacy or what has been termed, “public understanding of science and technology” in South Africa.