Seeing is Believing: A Case Study of Interdisciplinary, Experiential Science Education

Abstract

Situated in a rural, impoverished town in Northeast Louisiana, this case study takes a deep look into two highly effective teachers’ pedagogical practices along with the concomitant patterns in attitudes towards scientific literacy among their students, as well as the role of the emergent curriculum in the process. It explored nuances of a unique approach to bring in interdisciplinary science through the backdoor, since science received little importance in the context of the school as well as community. Using qualitative measures, the study examined the teachers’ pedagogical practices and students’ attitudes towards science as well as subtle, everyday interactions involving the discourse of science and the resulting, emergent curriculum surrounding an innovative, teacher-designed intervention. Qualitative findings showed that the emergent curricular models in different teachers’ classrooms shaped the outcomes. Classroom interactions surrounding the intervention vis a vis the emergent curricula encompassed an open, dialogic and interactive discourse closer to a post-modern approach, where both teachers and students seemed to excel and together shaped a rich, recursive, relational, and rigorous process of learning and integration of the intervention, within a small creative window situated in a transitional context of K-12 education.