Teaching with Citizen Science—It’s More than Just Putting Out Fires!

Abstract

Reformers in science education continue to stimulate thinking, debate, and changes in the way we conceptualize the preparation of science teachers, reflecting a shift in emphasis from teaching skills and strategies of teaching to providing conditions associated with prospective teachers’ increased responsibility for their own learning. Yet, as Northfield (1998) points out, for the most part, pre-service teacher preparation programs are designed to present what “science educators believe new teachers need to know and understand to work in the profession” (p. 695). Researchers such as Aikenhead (2006), Elmesky (2006), Maulucci (2008) and Tobin (2006) suggest the need for changes in the way that science teachers are prepared to meet the demands of diverse communities who are often at risk socially and environmentally. Not surprisingly, a half-century after Sputnik, these science educators, and others like them point to the failures of science teacher preparation to align with criteria such as relevance, interest and justice underlying many of the pervasive questions of equity in science education and schooling in general. Thus, it is imperative that schools and universities come together to understand the intent of education in the twenty-first century and create a new vision of science teacher preparation, in which prospective teachers examine the way their assumptions come to be formed, and not only solve problems but discover how they originate. We share one perspective on how change can be enacted by drawing from research conducted in a secondary science teacher preparation course organized around the tenets of citizen science.