Research School Network: Exploring Disciplinary Literacy in Science What relevance does the concept of disciplinary literacy have for science teachers, asks George Duoblys

How do scientists generate knowledge?

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, encapsulated it in three stages (Lewens, 2015):

• First, you guess, ie put forward a model.
• Next, you compute the consequences, ie work out what you’d expect to happen if your model was true. This part of the process generates testable hypotheses.
• Finally, you conduct an experiment to see whether or not what you expected to happen really did happen.

Humans have been following this method (or something similar, depending on whose account you believe) for around 500 years. Consequently, the scientific disciplines have become specialised to the point at which most people, even those with a high degree of education, would struggle to understand the vocabulary scientists employ.

This presents a problem for the teacher.

How can we support students in reading like a scientist when the majority of scientific papers are beyond the comprehension of most science undergraduates, let alone students at secondary school?

One solution to this problem, which will be discussed during our upcoming webinar on Disciplinary Literacy in Science, is to shift the emphasis.

Instead of seeing disciplinary literacy as a means of preparing students to read the specialist literature of the scientific disciplines, it can be understood as a means of helping students understand the scientific method outlined above.

This will help them frame science as one branch of human knowledge among others.

According to the curriculum theorist Michael Young, helping students understand the internal structures that define the disciplines, along with the boundaries that demarcate the disciplines, is an essential aspect of the role schools serve in society (Young, 2016).

Disciplinary knowledge in science

To put Young’s point in simpler terms, students must leave school with more than the substantive knowledge the scientific disciplines have generated.

They must also acquire the disciplinary knowledge that informs them how the way scientists think is distinct from the way artists, economists or historians think, to give three examples.

This is disciplinary knowledge taken in its broadest sense. Often, disciplinary knowledge in science is seen as synonymous with the Working Scientifically skills outlined in GCSE specifications. I would argue that disciplinary knowledge is better conceived of as an understanding of the tenets and methods of the discipline in question (Bakhurst, 2020).

In science, this means disciplinary knowledge must encompass not only the practical skills of science but also a broader understanding of the relationship between models, hypotheses and experiments outlined above.

Disciplinary literacy in science

If disciplinary knowledge is understood in this broader sense, then disciplinary literacy in science can be reframed as the process by which students’ attention is drawn to the language a writer uses to embody the relationship between models, hypotheses and experiments.

During the webinar, a number of case studies will be examined. Each will be based on an episode from the history of science.

One example, which I read with a Year 9 class in February this year, is a short passage of text on Edward Jenner’s development of a vaccine for smallpox.

It is reprinted below:

This is not a specialist text. It is a text written for the general reader. Primarily, the text aims to give the reader an overview of the major achievements of science.

Implicitly, however, it gives the reader clues as to the process by which scientific knowledge develops, as summarised by Feynman above.

It is these clues that I will be focusing on during the webinar. For example: 

• The development of scientific models: ​“Was it possible that cowpox and smallpox were so alike …”
• The generation of testable hypotheses from these scientific models: “… that a defence formed by the body against cowpox would also protect against smallpox?”
• The testing of these hypotheses by experiment: ​“First, he inoculated an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps with cowpox … Two months later … Jenner deliberately inoculated young James with smallpox itself.”
• The confirmation or falsification of a model based on observations from experiment: ​“The boy did not catch the disease. He was immune.”

There is more to be said about this text: both the possibilities and drawbacks inherent within it. These, along with the relative merits of other, similar texts, will be discussed during the webinar.

Conclusion

What I hope to have outlined in this blog is the way in which a seemingly simple text could be used to impart some important ideas around what makes science distinct from other disciplines. This, I believe, is a crucial aspect of disciplinary literacy.