Appelbaum/Clark: Science! Fun?

Especially critical to learning from a science lesson is giving students an opportunity to make sense of what they have experienced. Without a well-organized session in which students are asked to summarize what they have experienced and relate their experiences to the concepts they already understand, a hands-on activity becomes time to ‘play’ with science materials; the well-meant demonstration becomes only an entertaining show. (Raizen and Michelsohn 1994: 93)

Science FUN! ... declares a web site associated with Beakman's World, a commercial U.S. television program with a science theme. Numerous such sites are readily found on the world wide web, with links to a realm of other ‘hot spots,’ and ‘fun science links’ throughout the web. There is an accent on fun, having fun with science, having fun through science, and, simply, ‘Fun Science’. And this fun is not unique to the web: in fact, the internet was the last place we explored in regard to fun. We began with a quest to understand where ‘fun’ in educational discourse comes from, where it can be found in educational discourse and practice, and where it goes. In proceeding with our research, we made it a point to avoid in-school/out-of-school boundaries, preferring to look at school science, professional discourse, mass culture, and popular media as multiple windows for the pedagogies of ‘science fun’, wishing that our categories be developed inductively by our interaction with the pedagogies and their discursive representations.

Is/Can Science (Be) ‘Fun’?

Preservice students in N-8¹ methods courses interviewed about their hopes for these courses overwhelmingly asked for ways to ‘make science fun’. Was science fun for them? Did they wish to share such fun with their own future students? No. They hated science in school. Science was scary. Science was a place of embarrassment. Science made them feel stupid, made them feel bad and angry. Preservice students in an N-12 practicum preparing for a career in science teaching were similarly interviewed about what they hoped for in their science teaching. Overwhelming consensus focused on the tedium of science classrooms they were working in at the time. ‘Science should be fun’, and ‘I want my own classroom to be a place where kids want to learn because it's fun’, were typical comments, which contrasted with another perspective: ‘My cooperating teacher is afraid they won't be learning anything -- they'll just be having fun; I think I agree with her.’

Professional development programs encourage hands-on/minds-on science, and declare to teachers that science can be fun. Resource books for teachers are filled with fun science activities, and have titles and subtitles such as ‘Science Fun’ and ‘Making Science Fun’. Searches of the ERIC and UNCOVER databases provide over 175 sources to examine with ‘science’ and ‘fun’ in their titles and abstracts. Standards documents and other literature from professional associations offer rationales for exemplary lessons that include, among other criteria, ‘fun’ as justification for the classroom experiences.

We wanted to know: Why fun? What does the fun do? How is fun relevant to curriculum design, content, and evaluation? Is fun targeted at the students? teachers? Who else? And does this have a ‘purpose’? Does ‘fun science’ have any particular affects? We analyzed sources mentioned above toward understanding better the role and function of ‘fun’.

Our first concern has to do with why someone would want to make science ‘fun.’ Does this mean that science is not really fun? Alan Block (1997) suggests this very point in his discussion of children’s magazines such as Highlights, subtitled Fun With a Purpose. For science educators, there seems to be a belief that science as a field of knowledge performed by scientists is fun, that scientists do a lot of ‘playing around’ in their actual work. In this sense, school science traditionally hides the ‘true’ nature of science as fun by cloaking it in a veil of facts and explanations. This contrasts with preservice teachers' excitement when they find a way to ‘make the students think they are having fun, not realizing that they are learning.’ In this particular preservice view there is a dualism between learning and knowing that one is learning, in which the awareness of learning is associated with a decrease in motivation to learn. In Alan Block’s sensitive reading, adults purchase for children materials that they hope will ‘ease their way to success while we assuage our consciences that our children are being pressured to be grown-ups before they have first been children.’ (Block 1997: 154) Joan Solomon (1999) notes a parallel professional intention to pull students away from the appeal of magic, new age ideas, and personal relationships with the natural world through a serious, objective sceince. The problem she highlights is that young people growing up in the post-modern condition want to claim a more varied attitude. The insistence, then, on the part of ‘rigorous’ secondary science, of a complete abjuration of all that is not logical, is in conflict with a cultural movement toward narrative and the personally meaningful.

In general, curriculum materials in the United States construct a contradiction between the instrumental view of science as cultural capital (get a job, increase the US position in a global market, etc.), and the means proposed to reach it (fun). There is often an attempt to reassure teachers that there is a ‘formula’ for fun. One example is the ‘play book approach,’ a pep talk and play book by Robert Barkman (1991). Numbered steps 1-5 elaborate on how to ‘coach students a little, let them play a lot.’ Another, with a large number of detailed lesson plans, is Teach with Energy! FUNdamental Energy, Electricity, and Science Lessons for Grades K-3, from the National Energy Foundation (1989). In this one, after all the ‘fun’ stuff, there is a section called ‘just for fun,’ prompting the question, how exactly does real fun differ from the so-called ‘fun’ of learning.

In resource books for teachers, a pattern emerges in which ‘fun’ appears in most introductory materials and in the justification for ‘starter,’ attention-grabbing activities, but is absent from all content-based discussion and evaluation or assessment plans. The activities are grouped by traditional science topics, in general, suggesting that this content is of most importance to the teachers trying to select from among all of the many options. What does this mean for the ‘meaning’ of fun? The planners see the fun as the hook that will draw the students into being interested in the material (which will therefore be defined as ‘non-fun’). But the students are likely to experience the fun as the content -- as far as they are concerned, the fun is what they are ‘doing.’ In fact, it may be that the more ‘fun’ something is, the less of the (implied boring) content they will ‘remember’ as decontextualized knowledge. We worry about possibly dichotomizing (falsely) ‘fun’ and ‘real science’ content, and hope that there are many situations where this would not apply; but most of the sources we studied were based on the fun leading to the ‘real’ stuff of science, or preceding it, or getting the students interested so that they would then be able to do the ‘real’ stuff.

One undercurrent from scientists writing about science education, evident in some professional development materials put together by scientists as well, is the notion that science is indeed fun. And we are not surprised that scientists say that their work gives them pleasure. Here the idea is that teachers need to see the fun that they and their students would have if only they did the science merely for the fun of it. In this perspective, one only needs a gimmick at the start because science content itself does not need to be dressed up in a fun costume to become fun. No maintenance of motivation is necessary; the initial hook would in a way lock the student into a cycle of Maslow's hierarchy of the need to know: scientific curiosity is its own perpetual motion machine. A byproduct of this view, however, is the impression that one cannot conform to the image of being ‘good at science’ unless one ‘finds science fun’ -- by which we imply, ‘find school science fun’ – regardless of the construction of science to be found in one’s school.

A possible explanation for the separation between motivational terms, such as ‘fun’, ‘interest’, and ‘hook’, and the ‘serious stuff’ of science, might lie in a traditional practice of disjoining content and pedagogical knowledge in the practice of education. Within this tradition, teacher preparation programs require science content courses as part of general education, and science methods as part of a certification program. The separation suggests that discussion of content is distinct from discussion of methods; consonant with this practice is the construction of an expectation on the part of practitioners that teaching science and science itself are separable realms of problem-construction and solution. Research into interdisciplinary, team-taught, or combined methods/content courses in preparation programs, inservice workshops, and graduate science education programs may prove useful in this context (McLoughlin and Dana 1996, Abell and Roth 1992). Solomon (1999) also notes the historical interest in science as content rather than pedagogy, and suggests an alternative to ‘popularizing science’ through the formation of a ‘popular culture of science’ in science education. She posits such a curricular perspective on school science enacted through the use of stories from the history of science to gain some understanding of the tentative and humanist nature of science theories, discussion of contested knowledge in the context of democratic issues and personal risk, ethical and social considertations (including New Age approaches) in addition to the explanatory rationale of science, and an emphasis on familiarity with science and its concepts rather than correct definitions (p.8).

The Typography of Fun

There is a typography of ‘fun’ in science education discourse. Its marker is the exclamation mark (!), which is a signpost in the terrain of fun. Words used by the host of a program or by characters in side-bar cartoons frequently help in identifying the typographical category, as one of SURPRISE!, TA-DAH!, IMAGINE THAT!, or LOOK! ‘Surprise!’ generates an expectation that the viewer, web-surfer or student will respond with a form of curiosity. ‘Ta-dah!’ initiates a magical element of science in which science is presented as a source of power for accomplishing something impressive, or impossible otherwise; the student, viewer or surfer is expected to want to obtain the power. ‘Imagine That!’ evokes fantasy; there is presumed to be a natural appeal of fantasy which constructs this form of fun. Finally, ‘Look!’ is associated with a base level of attention, in which extreme or unusual sounds, colors, etc., are deemed to be ‘fun’ by their apparent difference with traditional school science.

TYPOGRAPHY OF FUN

SURPRISE!

TA-DAH!

IMAGINE THAT!

LOOK!

Compare Malone (1981) on intrinsic motivation: Challenge, Curiosity, Fantasy

A variety of words conform to these main distinct categories of ‘fun,’ and in their use construct a field of possibility embraced and mediated by the construction of ‘science fun.’ This typography has much in common with a popular instructional design model suggested by Malone (1981). Intrinsic motivation in this framework is based on ‘challenge’, ‘curiosity’, and ‘fantasy’. We are currently investigating whether ‘Look!’ might be interpreted as a form of ‘challenge-fun,’ and will include our observations in later versions of this work. There is indeed a temptation to view ‘fun’ in this discourse in terms of a construction of ‘motivation.’ But we want to consider other plausible readings first:

Negative Reinforcement

A counting of ‘fun’ words on the science television programs Bill Nye the Science Guy and Beakman's World suggests a relationship between ‘real’ interest and ‘fun’. Different science topics are constructed as more or less ‘fun’ inversely with their apparent importance or inherent fun; that is, the more ‘fun’ a topic is in its representation, the less naturally the topic is considered fun outside of the representation, and the less attention to markers of ‘fun’ in the presentation of the topic, the more obivously ‘fun’ the topic seems to be. An excerpt from our notes illustrates this with regard to Bill Nye:

Fun words on Bill Nye the Science Guy

	Cool	Fun	Wild	Whoa	Other
Chemical Reactions	14	3	-	-	-
Eyes	5	-	1	1	-
Seasons	5	1	-	-	-
Buoyancy	6	1	-	-	-
Garbage	3	1	-	2	-
Blood & Circulation	7	-	6	-	-
Gravity	2	-	-	2	-
Moon	3	1	1	-	1
Cells	6	-	-	1	-
Outer Space	3	1	1	19	3
Magnetism	5	5	2	-	4
Transportation	4	1	-	-	-
Mammals	5	-	-	-	-
Matter	9	2	2	-	2
Volcanoes/ Earth’s Crust	12	-	2	2	-
Spinning Things	3	-	1	-	-

On the Garbage episode, there was very little use of ‘cool’, etc. When we thought about this, it seemed that garbage was a place where a political agenda displaced the science=fun thrust. It seems to be constructing a common-sense notion that a very ‘real’ interest in, or concern about, the environment means that the subject does not need to be clothed as fun (or is it that there is nothing fun about garbage?). On the Gravity episode, there was a rather long section on skateboarding, which might have been ‘cool’ enough in itself not to have to keep pointing it out by declaring it to be so. (The audience might have been moved to say ‘cool’ themselves simply by viewing the matter.) On the Moon episode, there were many sports metaphors (e.g., Bill runs around a baseball diamond to demonstrate the moon's cycle). Here, too, we may have fun without the need to say it explicitly. The episodes with the highest numbers for cool, etc., seem to be dealing with topics perceived as the most boring or difficult. So the vocabulary of coolness is employed to disguise the difficulty/boringness of the subject. Who is constructed as holding this perception, the student or the teacher? Do students think something is fun just because an (uncool) adult says it is? Or is this a signal to them that the subject is really uncool, a warning of horrible things to come, as when a dentist says, ‘this won't hurt much?’ Compare this quote from a teacher describing her image of her work:

As a teacher I am like a dentist. The dentist tells you what you have to do to have good teeth, but essentially you have to do it. Some days it is as hard as pulling teeth. And if they didn’t brush their teeth last night, they come back and you can’t get near them because they have bad breath. And you have this faint feeling as if they fail you in some way, or you failed because you did not press upon them the importance of doing it. They come with cavaties and you have to fix them. They come to you two hours before you have to turn in the grades and they ask, ‘What can I do?’ ‘Well, you really should have brushed. Let’s see if I can fill it. We’ll tick some silver in there and see if it holds. But next time remember to brush!’ (female, 44, High School, Small Town) (Joseph and Burnaford 1994: 54)

Are we detecting a construction of education which functions to limit the number of people who believe science can be interesting or fun? Surely not, especially considering popular rhetoric about a crisis in scientific literacy, and a need for workers with a knowledge of science. Yet, as we thought about this, we noted on the macro level there seems to be less and less ‘fun’ the higher one goes in the level of education. The science-fun resources are heavily targeted toward early elementary and elementary education, and emphasize that science can be fun. The more advanced the science, the less one needs for fun as one qualifies for the ‘real’ stuff. But is this not negative reinforcement, stood on its head? We are reminded of the story Charles Carter² often tells, of the old lady trying to take an afternoon nap while children make a lot of noise outside her window. As the story goes, she walks outside and gives each child a quarter, saying, ‘I love the sound of children playing; come back tomorrow.’ The next day, she gives each child 20c each again telling them how much she loves hearing children play, and that they should come back tomorrow. This continues until one day when the woman says she is running out of money and can only give each child a nickel, to which the children declare it is not worth coming around and playing for only 5c! and never return.

In this sense, we should pay heed to current studies of the overabundance of recent science Ph.D. graduates unable to obtain positions appropriate to their skills (Browne 1995). As Sheila Tobias (1990) has noted, there really is not quite a need for scientists per se, despite the popular declarations. But there is a need to maintain respect for scientists as potential experts. Thus there may be a very ‘real’ need to maintain respect for science as relevant and pertinent to everyday life, but simultaneously to decrease the ‘fun’ as one moves into the ‘real’ science. This dovetails with a democratizing function of the teacher as enactor of the curriculum, in which teaching needs to become a step-by-step formula for success: make science ‘fun’ so that even kids at home or in your classroom, with no hope of ever being scientists, will feel that they are getting ‘equal’ treatment. Science as ‘political pacifier’ is all the more effective because there is no danger that anything really useful will come of it. Because, even if there are fewer and fewer jobs for scientists, there is a REAL need for people to know something about science. How else can there be (democratic) political decisions, such as legislation on ozone, CFCs, industrial effluent standards, nuclear waste, and so on? More to the point, if a good number of the students (for example, girls) are NOT finding school science ‘fun,’ and thus are not imagining a science-related career, yet are still getting the message that science is ‘important,’ then the mission may indeed be even more successful.

Motivation Dualism

We question the political function of the intrinsic-extrinsic motivation dualism. Fun as ‘extrinsic’ motivation in the macro social context can be read as negative reinforcement even as fun as ‘intrinsic’ motivation on the local level can be interpreted as contradictory to learning (‘they don't even know they're learning...’) to become a scientist. Here we find it useful to recall that the agenda of science education, as stated in numerous position papers, and implied by the science education literature, is one of ideological enculturation. Goals such as ‘demystification’ and the ‘propensity to use the scientific method in the solution of problems’ signify the role of science education as a technology of power employed to support a normalizing function in which particular epistemologies consistent with scientific explanation are embraced as the template for making meaning out of experience. In multicultural and cross-cultural contexts, this means that ‘Western’ science education programs resolve issues of cultural difference (Gough, 1999a); within the rhetoric of ‘science for all’ egalitarian theory has been difficult to implement in practice because practice positions students in a relationship with science in which only the students, not the science, can change Calabrese-Barton, 1998).

Adopting the language of motivation itself, we can read science education as accepting a ‘truth’ of motivation theory, that we cannot directly control the behavior of others. We cannot get inside a child's mind and make them, through brute force, think in a way that takes scientific explanation as ‘right’ and science fact as ‘truth’. What we can do, however, is make it easier and safer for the child to make the ‘correct choice’. Early motivation theory (Dreikurs 1968, 1982) posits four ‘natural’ sources of motivation for ‘misbehaviors’ (the ‘wrong choices’ of behavior) or resistance to ‘being educated’: a need for attention, a need for control, a fear of failure, and a desire for revenge. More recent works on motivation as a technology of power point to its role in ‘the pleasure of the interface’ (Shutkin 1994). Reading motivation theory as supportive of and concurrent with science education instructional discourse, we can interpret non-scientific attitudes and perspectives --not thinking ‘scientifically’ -- in terms of these categories of misbehavior and resistance. We can then reinterpret the typography of ‘fun’ as working within a field of intrinsic motivation discourse that constructs its own problems and then seeks to construct solutions consistent to its internal logic as a technology of power. A need for attention is best served by providing the attention at prosocial moments, such as ‘Look!’ fun. A need for control is nourished by the prosocial reconstruction of it as ‘Ta-dah!’ power to accomplish something, to make something happen. ‘Surprise!’ fun is an appropriate form of support for strengths and encouragement as given to the fear-of-failure student. And ‘Imagine That!’ turns out to isomorphically map onto the motivation theory categories as the response to a desire for revenge.

Need/Motivation Theory	Fun Discourse/’Technique’
Attention	Look!
Power	Ta-dah!
Revenge	Imagine That!
Avoidance of Failure	Surprise!

There is thus an internal consistency among motivation theory, science-fun as a reduction of potential scientists, the construction of teaching as a ‘formulaic method’, and the by-now conventional wisdom that you learn better if you want to. Of course, we return again to the implication that school itself makes it difficult for people to want to learn.

Enculturation

This is why it is important to look in general at the pedagogies of ‘science fun,’ and to avoid the obvious boundaries of in-school/out-of-school science and learning. Reading in the science museum literature, we are struck by the attention to the difference between ‘presented problems’ (which are rarely enjoyable) and ‘discovered problems’ (which are more tantalizing, inviting, etc., and should therefore be what people find in science museums). Our own ethnographic studies of science museums confirm previous research that points out how visitors experience ‘science fun’ at each exhibit by investigating how they can manipulate the buttons and levers, but do not experience the designed science or the designed ‘fun’ as intended by the curator (Ramey-Gassert et al. 1994). We wonder if kids have more ‘fun’ watching Bill Nye and Beakman than going to a museum, and if this is because of what Bourdieu calls ‘frequentation,’ regardless of the content in each specific place (museum or TV). TV is intrinsically cooler or more fun. Museums carry the baggage of ‘be quiet and learn/appreciate’, even as they try to get away from this. The need to seek knowledge by means of the scientific method, or the desire to ‘enjoy science’ is a cultural need acquired via such enculturation.

Since we know that the need to frequent museums or churches is conditional on frequenting museums and churches, and that assiduous frequentation supposes the need to frequent, it is clear that breaking the circle of the first entry into a church or museum requires a predisposition towards frequentation which, short of a miraculous predestination, can only be the family disposition to cause frequentation by frequenting sufficiently to produce a lasting disposition to frequent. (Bourdieu 1977: 38)

In other words, if people in your home tend to watch TV rather than go to museums, you are more likely to have fun watching TV than going to a museum yourself -- unless there is the intervention of ‘Pedagogic Work’:

Only the concept of Pedagogic Work can break the circle in which one is trapped when one forgets that a ‘cultural need’ is a cultivated need, i.e., when one severs it from the social conditions of its production. Thus, religious or cultural devotion, which engenders religious or aesthetic practices such as assiduous church-going, or museum-going, is the product of the Pedagogic Authority of the family (and secondarily of the institutions, the Church or School), which, in the process of a biography, breaks the circle of ‘cultural need’ by consecrating religious or cultural goods of salvation as worthy of being pursued, and by producing the need for these goods by the mere fact of imposing their consumption. (Bourdieu 1977: 38)

Pedagogic Work thus becomes a technology of enculturation into a world of science, as science fun is a goal of frequentation that normalizes the child as one who has ‘fun’ doing science. Deviations from this normative child become a problem of ‘motivation’ within this discourse of science education, leading to solutions that reconstruct the ‘fun’ of science. The more science looks like something else, the more it can be fun. But what is it being contrasted with that all of us seemingly have constructed as ‘science?’ In the end, school science must look like the stuff that is not dressed up as fun, the more authentic ‘science’ implied by the ‘need’ for motivation in the science-fun curriculum. ‘Success’ of the practice of education, as determined by structures of ‘evaluation’, is measured according to criteria of sustained participation in science, which should no longer need to be dressed up as ‘fun’ but becomes ‘fun’ in its own right. The deployment of fun is therefore internally consistent as a technology of power and completes its cycle.

In a career planning guide for precollege students with disabilities who desire careers in science, mathematics, or engineering, students are supplied with help in evaluating themselves through considering what interests them, who they admire, what they read, and what they do for FUN. Next, suggestions are offered for seizing opportunities toward the students' career goals, including finding out about summer programs, joining a school club, and finding a mentor. The following section asks students to evaluate whether they have the personal qualities, such as determination and self-esteem, to be a successful scientist. Keys to success identified by scientists include asking for help when needed, asking teachers to teach to one's strengths, pushing oneself to the limit, trying new ideas, and seeing disability as the mother of invention. The final section gives specific tips on getting started, emphasizing guidelines for choosing a college. Interspersed throughout the booklet are photographs of successful individuals with disabilities and quotes giving their advice.

The career booklet illustrates effectively the role of fun in the evaluation of oneself as qualified, within the normative technology of science education practice, to become a ‘scientist.’ Ultimately, the special privilege of scientist should be acquired only if one is prepared to take on the extraordinary task of becoming a scientist, because one is motivated to ‘do’ science. This reconstructs the opposition between science as instrumental cultural capital and the experience of science as fun, incorporating within the deployment of science education the boundaries between a public democratic ‘fun,’ and ‘real’ science performed by scientists.

Whoa! What Now?

‘In a world filled with the products of scientific inquiry, scientific literacy has become a necessity for everyone. Everyone needs to use scientific information to make choices that arise every day.’ So begins the recent U.S. National Science Education Standards (National Research Council 1996) But should science be ‘fun’? Interestingly, there is no direct mention of ‘fun’ in the standards, nor does motivation appear in the index. The discussion seems to be moving in a different direction. However, illustrative vignettes help us to see that the standards reproduce the initial injection of ‘fun’ at the start, followed by a drift through the content. The code words are often ‘interest’ and ‘responding to student interest.’ These forms of motivational practice are enacted within a field of science education that expects the students to perform as a scientist, understanding science in the way of the ‘ideal scientist’ and deriving pleasure (motivation) from the science itself. As Matthew Weinstein (1996) has noted, ‘this asks students and teachers not so much to understand science, but to love it. The standards are asking for our unquestioning eros rather than our empowerment.’ (Weinstein 1996: 23) Here are some examples (emphasis added):

Willie the Hamster. Ms. W. encourages students to engage in an investigation initiated by a question that signals student interest. The context for the investigation is one familiar to the students -- a pet in the classroom. She teaches some of the important aspects of inquiry by asking the students to consider alternative explanations, to look at the evidence, and to design a simple investigation to test a hypothesis. Ms. W. has planned the science classes carefully, but changes her plans to respond to student interests, knowing the goals for the school science program and shaping the activities to be consistent with those goals. She understands what is developmentally appropriate for students of this age -- she chooses not to launch into an abstract explanation of evaporation. She has a classroom with the resources she needs for the students to engage in an inquiry activity. (National Research Council 1996: 124)

Pendulums. Ms. D. wants to focus on inquiry. She wants students to develop an understanding of various variables in an inquiry and how and why to change one variable at a time. This inquiry process skill is imparted in the context of physical science subject matter. The activity is purposeful, planned, and requires teacher guidance. Ms. D. does not tell students that the number of swings depends on the length of the pendulum, but creates an activity that awakens students' interest and encourages them to ask questions and seek answers. Ms. D. encourages students to look for applications of the science knowledge beyond the classroom. Students keep records of the science activities, and Ms. D. helps them understand that there are different ways to keep records of events. The activity requires mathematical knowledge and skills. The assessment, constructing a pendulum that swings at six swings per second, is embedded in the activity. (National Research Council 1996: 146)

Funny Water. In this example, Mr. B Makes his plans using his knowledge and understanding of science, students, teaching, and the district science program. His understanding and ability are the results of years of studying and reflection on his own teaching. He usually introduces new topics with a demonstration to catch the students' attention. He asks questions that develop understanding and designs activities that require students to confirm their ideas and extend them to situations within and beyond the science classroom. Mr. B encourages students to observe, test, discuss, and write by promoting individual effort as well as by forming different-sized groups of students for various activities. Immense understanding, skill, creativity, and energy are required to organize and orchestrate ideas, students, materials, and events the way Mr. B does with apparent ease. And Mr. B. might repeat an activity five times a day, adapting it to the needs of different classes of students, or he might teach four other school subjects. (National Research Council 1996: 150)

Our Advice: Reverse the Direction

In the end, recent standards documents offer a view of the teacher carefully composing and orchestrating science as entertaining, enticing, intriguing, or otherwise a ‘hook’ that pulls students into the discourse of ‘science fun.’ We want to point toward a parallel development in science education not represented in the standards documents. Instead of ‘hooking the student’ onto science, the teacher becomes a scientist of the student. And, rather than constructing an environment that rewards students’ ‘appropriate mental behaviors,’ the teacher begins with the assumption that the students are doing science; it is the teacher’s job to recognize the science of the students. This direction, usually found in narrative-based studies of practice by practitioners, reveals a powerful alternative model which foregrounds the need for the student to awaken interest in the teacher in what the student is thinking. The teacher constructs classroom activities in a way that promotes his or her own interest in understanding how the student is doing science, as opposed to the teacher teaching science. One early example of this ‘pedagogical technique’ is Children Closely Observed by Michael Armstrong (1980). More recently, Karen Gallas has offered an updated version in two books, Talking Their Way Into Science and The Languages of Learning (Gallas 1995, 1994). According to Gallas

The ways that we expect children to talk, think, and write about science make a large assumption about what the language of science is and ought to be. That is, the language of science must be formed and articulated ina particular way, using previously established vocabulary and specific cognitive structures ... They speak and write metaphorically or in terms of the particular. The form of THEIR language of science does not orginally parrot the forms that we believe indicate real mastery of that subject matter. (Gallas 1994: 97)

What then is a teacher to do? For we need to feel like we make a difference, otherwise why are we doing what we do? By being interested in what the children are interested in, and how the children communicate this interest, the teacher can learn about and document his or her students’ interest in science. Gallas continues:

However, as I confront the different forms that children use, and struggle with my own need to somehow improve their use of terms and the ways that they process and interpret information, I wonder if the ways that science is spoken and written about, ways that were established by a small and elite portion of Western society, reflect more an elitist discourse than a natural mode of communicating about the world of science.

...As a teacher, my growing discomfort with the lines that are drawn between colloquial language and the language of science, between children's stories about their observations of nature and the objective descriptions required in most science discussions, arise from the fact that over time many of the children I teach may eventually be excluded from those conversations by virtue of the fact that they cannot say what they know in the correct terms! (Gallas 1994: 97)

Adults assume things are science or not based on weird adult expectations; we should let children work their way in to science the way they figure it out for themselves. For example, Gallas describes a child that writes about liking rap music in his science journal -- the teacher and student teacher do not see this as science. Gallas realizes she is messing up and asks the him why rap is science. He says because it is ‘exciting’. Throughout the year, he gets excited about all sorts of things and writes about them in his journal. By the later third of the year he is writing about ‘exciting’ animals and nature things and what he knows and conjectures about them,which looks like science to us. Gallas’ startled us when we noted that she too found the ‘exclamation mark’ to be a sign for significant issues in science curriculum development and evaluation. In her interpretation the sign is ‘invisible’ but present; the exclamation mark now provides for us an alternative, enabling educators to use the signpost in already existing curriculum materials in ways not intended by the materials’ creators. Fun is projected in this new mapping onto ‘symbolic representations’ and the ‘interest’ - ‘motivation’ discourse is now a cultural resource for children as they develop their own languages of learning and forms of communication.

From the narratives that I have heard used in science talks, I have concluded that children ... observe the natural world very carefully and mark certain obervations with an invisible exclamation point, as it were. If the opportunity arises, many of these marked obervations are then brought into play as potential symbolic representations of an idea. Often, however, adults mistake the child’s symbolic representations as immature conceptualizations of an idea ... My stance as a listener changes from one of listening to one of evaluating. (Gallas 1995: 103)

Returning to Donaldson’s (1978) work from the seventies, Gallas notes that it can be the adults, not the childern, who need to decenter their thinking. We are often easily diverted thanks to our retrospective heirarchical thinking; communicating with children requires that we enter a radiational-thinking environment. ‘What we consider quaint examples of the child’s imaginative thought might more often be metaphoric attempts to build theories about how the world works.’ (Gallas 1995: 103)

So the main thrust turns our to be about settin gup an environment rich with possibilities and allowing students to tell you what science is for them. Radiational thinking identifies the ‘fun’ of the science in what the students are themselves constructing as science. Now, radiational thinking need not be based on a thoroughly ‘open’ classroom environment. As David Hawkins (1974) pointed out a long time ago, a teacher-student relationship should be grounded in actually talking about ‘something’; and we do find it apt for the teacher to provide a subject or situation about which to talk. But key to a kind of educational encounter that awakens in the teacher an interest in what the students are thinking is for the initial conversation to be formed around what the students themselves are thinking. One common technique that can be used to foster such an horizontal approach is for the teacher or a facilitating student to record class members comments about what they know and wonder.³ Based on this group chart, small groups are formed around which ‘wonders’ students find interesting or expect to be important in the long run. Indeed these two criteria – interesting (to the students) and important in the long run (according to what the students believe) – can be critiqued and modified as the class develops as a learning community. What is crucial however is for students to design an investigation or text-based research grounded in what they think science is. For the teacher, the question is not whether or not they are doing the ‘right’ thing – whether they are or or not doing science; rather, the question is, why and how are they defining science in this way. Typically, groups formed around starting lists of ‘wonders’ come back from their initial investigations with data or records that lead to a new, refined list of Know/Wonder. Based on the refined list, new groups can be formed. At this point, the teacher is again interested in what the students create as science in the classroom community. Methodological issues of data/information collection and analysis can be raised in the context of what is important to the students’ research.

Noel Gough (1998b) characterizes science education as a theater of representation. He suggests that the majority of science classrooms construct a copy of a copy of a copy of science that, according to popular mythology, looks like a scientist fiddling at a bench, but which, in reality, never occurred, even in the nostalgic eighteenth century upon which the myth is based. Certainly ‘fun science’ seems to us to do this. But we believe that Karen Gallas’ theater is a different one, and so is the one in the class that effectively leads students through a series of Know/Wonder collections. For one thing, in both situations, science itself is studied as a phenomenon of social or personal reflection, and is not set up as something that students need to be tricked into or guided into performing properly. Instead the teacher begins with the assumption that students are scientific beings. Further it must be assumed that any appearance of non-science behavior must be the result of school as a warping instution. It is the teacher’s job to ‘use’ the human practice of making meaning out of experience as an entry into science and the social practice of science. In this way, what students engage with is what science is about.

‘Fun’ in some theaters of representation, then, becomes what students and teachers would call the experience after the fact rather than during the experience. During the experience, they are too busy doing the work. Only later might they be able to think about what they were doing as ‘fun’ or ‘not fun’. And the meaning of ‘fun’ would not, in this context, have the same meaning as the ‘fun’ of playing a video game, or hanging at the mall. Perhaps the fun is more of what Patricia Clifford and Sharon Friesen (in press) describe as ‘Hard Fun’: ‘a deep sense of connection made possible only by imaginative engagement.’ Paraphrasing Clifford and Friesen, if students only go as far as obtaining scientific insights, their accomplishment will be considerable. But they really must do far more: they must show how imaginative engagement lends power and meaning to life. In Clifford and Friesen’s story, they write, ‘Years later, we still remember how the children swivelled around to look at Jason. Somehow, in one image, he had gathered up all the threads of our conversation. Excited by this new way …’ The children swivelling around is for this classroom the marker of ‘hard fun,’ just as the exclamation point is the marker of ‘science fun’ in a teachers’ manual The question is, how can we promote more hard-fun glyphs where we find the less-appropriate copy, the exclamation point in the pre-packaged materials?

We treat science pedagogy as a disciplinary practice in Foucauldian terms, and note that this pedagogy warps science into a self-perpetuating construction of meaning and problems that need to be solved within the discourse of motivation, in turn reducing the pedagogy itself to the behaviorist notion of ‘shaping’(Krumboltz & Krumboltz 1972). As teachers and students together seek to make schooling as ‘painless’ as possible, school constructs learning as something that must become fun if it has any hope of happening. Fun is defined as the opposite of ‘hard work’. Clifford and Friesen’s ‘Hard Fun,’ on the other hand, raises a powerful alternative. Instead of ‘fun’ as the reduction of pain, fun can be the marker of a serious engagement. Failure in the common sense pedagogy becomes out of necessity a reflection on practice cognizant of the critiques of modern practice as ‘surveillance’ -- in listening to students are we facilitating learning or merely constructing a system of self-revelation?

Science! Fun?: a critical analysis of design/content/evaluation