Transcript and Video: Sifting through the Draft Science Curriculum - AEC (Aotearoa Educators Collective)
- Lian Soh
- Dec 21
- 49 min read
Updated: Dec 22
On 9 December 2025, the Aotearoa Educators’ Collective (AEC) hosted a Substack Live session to unpack the draft science curriculum.
This page includes both a video recording and a full transcript of AEC’s webinar on sifting through the draft science curriculum. The session focuses on slowing down the noise, making sense of the draft, and supporting kaiako to engage critically and constructively with the proposed changes.
The kōrero brought together Professor Sara Tolbert, Madeleine Collins, Associate Professor Chris Eames, and MC Claire Coleman for a discussion relating to the purpose of science education, curriculum design and the current curriculum reform process happening in Aotearoa.
About the panel
Madeleine Collins: 2023 winner of the Prime Minster's Science Teacher Prize and 30+ years of science education experience covering all year levels, Madeleine brings the voice of an experienced science educator and lead of Learning Area at her kura.
Sara Tolbert: Professor of Education whose research focuses on science education, equity, and social justice. Sara’s work explores how curriculum, pedagogy, and policy shape learners’ experiences of science, with particular attention to whose knowledge is valued and how science education can better serve diverse communities. Sara contributions in Aotearoa New Zealand also include Enduring Competencies (NZCER).
Chris Eames: Associate Professor of Education with extensive experience in science and environmental education research. Chris has worked across curriculum development, teacher education, and education policy, with a strong interest in how curriculum design, knowledge, and educational purpose intersect in schooling. Chris has contributed to the PISA Science Framework via Agency in the Anthropocene as well as the Climate Literacy Framework.
Claire Coleman: An experienced educator and facilitator working across teaching, professional learning, and education leadership. Claire brings a strong background in curriculum, assessment, and professional learning, and is known for supporting thoughtful, inclusive dialogue around complex educational change. Claire plays the role of M.C in this panel.
Watch AEC's recording
Open Poll
Which best reflects your current position on the draft Science Learning Area (Years 0–10)?
Largely works — minor refinements needed
Mixed — strengths and significant gaps
Major concerns — needs substantial change
Not sure / still engaging with it
Transcript
The transcript below is provided for accessibility and reference. While it reflects the content of the live event, some sections have been edited for clarity and flow. URLs and contextual notes in square brackets have been added to support clarity - more of these may be added in the future.
If you have any questions or messages of tautoko, please share them in the comments below. To keep kōrero genuine, first-time commenters are asked to sign in via Google or Facebook, with a brief waiting period while we confirm you’re a real person.
Claire Coleman 0h 0m 13s | Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Ko Claire Coleman tōku ingoa, carrying this afternoon and welcome to our panel discussion around the draft science curriculum, science education and how this has all come to be more broadly. I’m going to start with karakia. Kia hora te marino Kia whakapapa pounamu te moana Hei huarahi mā tātou I te rangi nei Aroha atu, aroha mai Tātou i a tātou katoa Hui e! Tāiki e! All right, greetings. So I'm just going to do a quick bit of housekeeping about how things will work, and then we will launch into what I'm sure will be some interesting and thoughtful discussion.
We’re going to organise things a little, in terms of the chat and the Q&A. As I mentioned to some of you who were here a few minutes ago, if we can just keep the webinar chat space for greetings and hellos and “how are yous” and things of that nature, and leave the Q&A really for questions.
I have set the Q&A up so that you can up-vote questions. I will curate those questions, and we'll have a moment where I will put those questions to the panellists. We're going to organise into two sections for this afternoon's conversation. The first section is to look at the draft science curriculum as it is, and we will have the questions related to that in the first section. The second section of the conversation will really be more around the process: how that process was enacted for creating that draft curriculum, some issues, and broader concerns around what science needs young people have going forward into the future, and how we can voice thoughts, feelings and opinions about what has been presented to us.
Okay, so I'm going to start by greeting all of our beautiful panellists who have come with lovely smiles after a little bit of a ticket getting us here, as you know, in terms of getting this panel together. I’ll ask them to introduce their lovely selves, and then we’ll do our introductions first. So Madeleine, can I start with you, please? I know it's mortifying to have to introduce yourself, but you feel free to share whatever you want to.
What I can tell you is all of these panellists are great science people. |
Madeleine Collins 0h 2m 57s | My name is Madeleine Collins. I am currently a chemistry and science teacher at an average – or not-average – state school in West Auckland. I'm also the Head of Science faculty, I'm one of them, and the school-wide curriculum lead. That's quite a number of hats here. I originally trained as a secondary school teacher, but I've actually taught all levels. I spent quite a few years teaching primary school as well, so I understand that progression through from Year 0 to Year 13, quite totally the whole way. I also do a lot of PLD facilitation, mostly around engaging science programmes in primary schools. I've also done a lot around helping beginning teachers to develop science education in the classroom, especially at a primary school level. And I've done lots of work with regional council education programmes as well. I've had quite a lot of experience in curriculum writing. In 2023, I was lucky enough to be awarded the Prime Minister's Science Teacher Prize. My picture in the little advert looks a lot different, because I did Shave for a Cure a month ago - it's a whole head of hair gone, so that's why the picture is quite different from the face in front of you today. |
Sara Tolbert 0h 4m 30s | Kia ora koutou. My name is Sara Tolbert. I’m zooming in from the lands of the Kulin Nations here in Melbourne, Australia. I’m a Professor of Science and Environmental Education at Monash University. I've just started at Monash this year. I was formerly at the University of Canterbury in Ōtautahi, where I still hold an honorary position as Adjunct Professor and co-lead the Learning for Earth Futures Lab with Professor Ben Kennedy.
At Monash, I co-lead the Science Education for the Anthropocene Impact Lab and lead the Science Education Research Group. Before my career in the university, I was also a junior high and primary science educator and ESL educator in the US, and taught in South Auckland in 2006 for a semester as part of my master’s, and in Latin America, in Mexico in Guatemala. It's great to be here with you all today and I look forward to the conversation. |
Chris Eames 0h 5m 40s | Kia ora koutou katoa. Ko Chris Eames tōku ingoa. Ko Pirongia te maunga, ko Waikato te awa, nō Kirikiriroa ahau.
So I'm beaming in from Kirikiriroa. It's 29 degrees. I think the heat is melting everybody, by the sound of the information coming through the chat. I work in pre-service teacher education at the University of Waikato, and I work in science and sustainability education. I've got a range of different things that I bring to this conversation this afternoon.
I've worked for the OECD on the PISA framework, both in the science and environmental science space, and more laterally in the climate literacy project that we're just completing. I've also done a range of curriculum and assessment development over the years, particularly in relation to environmental education and a little bit of science education. Those will be the kinds of things that I'll be coming to you with this afternoon.
Lovely to be here, and good to be in the shade, I think. |
Claire Coleman 0h 6m 45s | Thank you. Chris, if you don't mind, we’ll start with you and then maybe we move back through you and then go to Sara and Madeleine. The first thing I just wanted to do is set the scene as to what you think science education should be or could be. |
Chris Eames 0h 7m 01s | Yeah. Well, it's a great question, isn’t it, when we consider a curriculum, because obviously curriculum is about setting the scene for the generation to come. Generally a curriculum lasts about a generation, sometimes slightly less, so we are at an important and pivotal moment at this stage.
There are three points I think I want to raise around this. One is the idea of science being for all, for everybody. This is a strong theme, a strong movement that came out of Australia and other places a number of years ago and led us to understand that science is not just for scientists; it's actually for everyone.
Everyone needs to have a sense of science and to be able to use some scientific capabilities in order to navigate their life. But also, science is for vocation and for economic and technological advancement. So if we look at those two general ideas, it helps us to think about what the curriculum is doing for us and whether it's positioning us in the right spaces.
Secondly, obviously, science is about knowledge – knowledge of the world around us. That's a really important element to be considering. But it's not only about the knowledge that we gain about 'stuff' and how things work, it's also about how we can engage in the process of science: the procedural knowledge elements which help us to do things like exploring, investigating, discerning, and even communicating.
Then there are the dispositions, or the thinking about science – what's often called epistemic knowledge. Thinking about science as an endeavour itself. The curriculum does have some elements of this, but some that were in the previous version of the curriculum seem to have disappeared. And we're particularly concerned, or I'm particularly, concerned about how it might diminish epistemic ideas like curiosity, rigour and trust.
I think those are things we might touch on as we go through. The last point I want to make about what science education is all about is that we are facing, at all times but particularly right now, a number of contemporary challenges. One of these, which is close to my heart and that we're currently dealing with on a number of levels, is climate change - so we need to think about how young people are positioned to live in a world where those challenges are upon them and will continue to be upon them in years to come. In some ways, science education must serve those young people and position them well enough to make good decisions and to take appropriate actions in order to deal with some of those challenges.
So those are the three things that I want to comment on this stage. I’ll pass to Sara. |
Sara Tolbert 0h 10m 03s | All right. Thanks, Claire, and thanks, Chris. I'm just going to echo some of what Chris was commenting on. I also agree that science education is for everyone. Science education, especially at the primary and secondary levels, is not just for those who are going to enter the sciences. Certainly I think we have a responsibility to help prepare all students to have that opportunity, if that's what they choose to pursue post-secondary. But I think it's really critical to understand that science education plays a key role not only in teaching students what science is – including the conceptual knowledge – but also how scientific knowledge is produced, how scientific knowledge is constructed. That includes looking at multiple contributions to our knowledge and our understanding of the natural world from many different communities, particularly – and I'll say in Aotearoa – looking at contributions from Māori. I think this particular draft is missing that aspect, and so I will add that as well as a concern.
Chris mentioned that we've lost some of the aspects of Nature of Science or science as a human endeavour from the 2007 curriculum. I just want to say that we've gone backwards from 2007. A curriculum should, as Chris mentioned, look into the future. We're trying to prepare young people for today but also for the future. So we need to be thinking: what are the Anthropocene challenges, as Chris mentioned? What are the contemporary challenges, and how might science education better prepare young people and children to address those challenges in empowering ways?
A lot of my work both as a science educator now and before I pursued my PhD, as well as in my research, stems from my experiences with children and youth who have felt left out by school science and left out by science education. They have felt as if their experiences and their ideas don't matter, aren’t scientific.
So that’s a concern of mine as well – ensuring we're thinking about a curriculum that all of our young people can see themselves in, that all children can be excited about, that engages their curiosity and their interests and their questions about the world. That's something I would like to see more of and more opportunity for [in this curriculum draft]. I'll pass to Madeleine. |
Madeleine Collins 0h 12m 31s | I just very much want to tautoko everything that Chris and Sara said. I agree completely. For me, at the heart of good science education is creating democratically capable citizens, and I've had that as my mantra for science teaching for a long time now.
Really, what that means is everything you’ve heard Chris and Sara put together and already say: that students, young people, should be able to understand how the natural, living and physical world works – hopefully from a range of knowledge perspectives, not just from Western Science. They should understand how that knowledge has been developed – again, not just how Western science knowledge has been developed, but how many knowledge systems have been developed – and how that knowledge is communicated. They should be able to question that, critique that, and then be able to transfer those skills into many aspects of their lives, especially with the onslaught of misinformation and disinformation and social media. If they've got those skills developed through science, they can transfer them into, hopefully, a well-established democracy and participate in that.
So I know that's a really huge philosophical umbrella of what science education can provide, but a great curriculum should enable us as teachers to deliver a science programme that looks like that, that becomes relevant and engaging to the young people we each have in front of us. It will look different in every classroom, but it will help them develop those skills to be really good, contributing, visible members of society. For me, science comes down to that one sentence, and it drives my teaching quite a lot. Everything else we do connects back to it. |
Claire Coleman 0h 14m 30s | Okay. As we talked about before, we're going to tackle the actual draft now. I know our panellists have looked very thoroughly at the draft science curriculum, as many of you who've joined us today might have done. We'll start talking about the content – the stuff that's in the curriculum.
I don't know who among you want to leap in first, but I'll let you just unmute yourself as a signal and begin. |
Chris Eames 0h 15m 07s | Okay, I'll have a go. The phrase I wrote down about 20 minutes ago to help me get my head around this was “lots of bits of knowledge.” Then I went and underlined all the bits that are important in that statement: the “lots,” the “bits,” and the “knowledge”.
It's highly knowledge-focussed – that's obvious and that is clear, and that's what the curriculum actually says. There's lots of it and they're fairly 'bitsy'. So when you look at the way that elements of knowledge are positioned within the curriculum, it seems to me that very often they're in isolation.
While it's important – and not surprisingly reductionist in the way scientists think about curriculum – it's also really important to make coherent connections. It is kind of curious to think that the people who were driving this curriculum rewrite process, at least in the background, were part of the Curriculum Coherence modelling, to now see that what we've got is something that is not very coherent. It will at least appear fairly fragmented, I think, to teachers, and particularly to students.
So those are my main concerns around how the curriculum now looks. It might be that they're going to produce lots of resources – we know the science kits are on the horizon – that will help teachers and students create some of that coherence. But otherwise I think we're going to find a situation where students might build some knowledge for a while, and then start thinking, “Well, what do I do with this? Where does it connect into something else?”
I'll leave it there. I'm going to pass it over to Madeleine |
Madeleine Collins 0h 17m 05s | Yes, I'll have a turn at this. For me, the stand-outs with this draft curriculum are the gaps; the things that are missing. It is very content-heavy, and no matter which metric I try to put on it to make it make sense, I can't. So whether we look at it from Hirsch’s philosophy of education – that it should be content-driven – it's too broad for them to gain really good in-depth curriculum knowledge. If we look at it from a “knowledge-rich curriculum,” as Chris says, it's not coherent. It's not sequenced. Even within science, or across learning areas, it doesn't match that. If we look at it from, say, PISA outcomes, it doesn't fit that either. So although there might be snippets of things that are good within it, I can't see any part of the draft, or measure it in any way that actually makes sense, because it doesn't seem to tick any box well. That's a big concern because I don't quite understand the scope or pathway that's trying to be chased.
The biggest gap for me, in terms of what I said before about what I think science education is, is that there's no space for Nature of Science – if we want to look at it from that perspective – or for capabilities, or for students to develop their own curiosity or questioning or creativity within science. There's no progression of skills. The “skills” are really just content sentences with a doing word stuck at the front. There's no ability to switch those skills between different content areas. There's so much lacking in terms of how we could really support our students to develop those great capabilities that have been a central focus of our science education for the last ten years.
There've been some comments that Nature of Science has never been done well, so why would we want to keep it? I don't think it's okay to say that. There’s been very, very little resourcing for Nature of Science in terms of understanding what it looks like, and very limited resourcing provided to schools, especially for primary and intermediate levels.
So of course it was never done well – teachers were never taught it in school when they went to school. It's not done (enough) in teacher training – whatever that may look like, and so suddenly teachers were in classrooms expected to teach Nature of Science without having ever experienced what that looks like in the classroom and without resourcing to support them. Then we blamed that it's “not being done well”. I think that when teachers have actually had time to explore what Nature of Science should be and could be, and how great it looks in the classroom, it's done very well - and that's when they should get, you get really great outcomes from it... and yes, I see your comment [name], so Nature of Science is taught but very limited and in the first ten years there was very little of it in I.T.E, it's much better now for sure.
So my biggest issue is that I can't see any of the research that this curriculum can align to that makes sense; the gaps for our students’ learning will be massive. |
Chris Eames 0h 20m 55s | There’s a comment in the chat from [name] about “Can you explain the Nature of Science?” – she’s not a science person. Would you like to have a go at that Madeleine? |
Madeleine Collins 0h 21m 08s | So, the Nature of Science: science is made up of two main parts. There's the content, and then there's how we do the science. Some would even argue that the content – the knowledge – is the outcome of science, and the science is actually the doing, the questioning, using investigations to find an answer, communicating that idea, taking action based on that investigation and that learning.
So Nature of Science is all of those things. It's understanding how science works, how we build knowledge. Science is a robust form of understanding the world. It's how we carry out investigations – a range of investigations. How we communicate using science conventions, but beyond that as well: to other scientists, to everyday people, and also importantly how we participate and contribute to the world around us using really good science understanding.
How’s that? Do I pass the test? |
Chris Eames 0h 22m 13s | Ah yeah, good! And [name] has put a comment into the chat as well, saying it's about the philosophy of science too, which is really important to include.
In the previous curriculum, the 2007 curriculum, there were four main sub-strands of Nature of Science, and I think Madeline has covered those.
One of those that wasn't so prominent in in a lot of ways was the idea of “participating and contributing” – participating in science, actively engaging in the process, but also using that information for conversations with whānau and friends, actually doing something with science in an everyday sense. That became an understanding that Nature of Science is pervasive in our daily lives.
Sara, you must have something to add. |
Sara Tolbert 0h 23m 08s | You’ve done a really thorough job of addressing this particular issue, so thanks for that. I would just add that the idea that this is a “knowledge-rich curriculum” is untrue. You can't have a knowledge-rich curriculum when you're missing two of the really important domains of scientific knowledge which are in fact, Nature of Science, that epistemic and procedural knowledge.
Epistemic knowledge is knowledge about how the discipline of science is constructed: how knowledge claims, for example, in scientific disciplines might differ from another discipline, such as religious studies. It's really important that children and young people understand things like peer review and consensus building. The importance of understanding scientific consensus – which Naomi Oreskes talks a lot about in her books about scientific knowledge construction – and the importance of how that builds trust in science. Without an understanding of how scientific knowledge is produced, it's very difficult for an individual or a community to make sense of scientific knowledge in the context of other types of knowledge.
If you're trying to make decisions for democratic participation, for example, it's critical that we keep working at this. Like anything else, as Madeline mentioned, it's an ambitious construct. That's why I think including epistemic knowledge and being very deliberate about epistemic knowledge in the Nature of Science is part of a knowledge-rich curriculum, if that's what we're arguing this curriculum is.
I think what's being referred to as “scientific practices” – because I've seen this come up on various social media groups and websites – isn't actually scientific practices. What's being referred to as “practices” in the draft curriculum as a placeholder for procedural knowledge is, in fact, not representative of scientific practices. It's more like discrete, observable skills that you might use to break down how you would teach a particular concept. For example, observable skills like success criteria – but those are not scientific practices. A curriculum is meant to be a high-level document that helps guide teachers and guide schools, and then adapting the curriculum to make sense in context, we need those high-level aspects of knowledge construction. We need high-level attention to epistemic and procedural knowledge – to things like: how do you argue from evidence? That is a scientific practice. Arguing from evidence is a scientific practice. Comparing and contrasting happens in science, but it's not uniquely a scientific practice. So that is a huge gap in this curriculum. And the way it's being marketed – as if it is attending to this idea of practices, just because the word “practices” is used in the document – I think is a falsehood. Understanding claims and evidence and reasoning, and the difference between evidence and claims, interpreting data – all of these are skills and practices we're really trying to support students to participate in.
I think the Science Capabilities were getting us there. The work that Rose Hipkins and others did around the capabilities has made some headway in that direction, but we still have work to do.
I don't think curriculum materials should drive curriculum. If there's this idea that curriculum materials and kits are going to be designed and sold, or however this is happening, to schools, I don't think that's the way we go. We should have a high-level curriculum and then figure out what support educators need. Perhaps that was the challenge with the Nature of Science work in the 2007 curriculum – that there was an ambitious curriculum document, but it didn't necessarily get the full support it needed, that teachers, I think, would have been eager to receive.
We need to remind ourselves that curriculum materials are meant to support the curriculum, not be the curriculum. |
Chris Eames 0h 27m 30s | Okay. I'll just pick up on a couple of things that have been in the Q&A, because [name] has been posing a range of questions and I think it's timely to recognise the first one there which is around Nature of Science, particularly talking around the contestation of the Nature of Science.
I think Sara has mentioned very nicely around the argumentation, evidence and reasoning – but also that science moves on. Science is not static. It's quite okay to do some science and be proven wrong if you like, to say that you're “proven” in the right way – and that things change, and there's a sense of that.
I think that this was very clear during the COVID times, when a lot of scientists were trotting out in the media and said things which were uncertain, and people felt uncomfortable about that. Then they appeared to change their minds when the evidence changed. I think that's a really key thing that we’re not seeing this curriculum setting people up for, and that's a concern.
Secondly, there was a question asking whether anyone on the panel would like to comment on the seeming lack of any recent developments in the 'science understandings' in the document. Oh yes, absolutely. There's a whole lot of solid information, or solid knowledge, currently in the draft curriculum – but nothing particularly new, aspirational or in some cases, contemporary. I think it reflects the worldviews of the people who've been writing the curriculum – not knowing who they are; we'll come to that later – and also the notion that there's a lot of “front end” stuff. One of those front-end things is AI and how that works and all the elements associated with that, which students need to know about and would love to know about. I’m not sure this curriculum is going to deliver those sorts of things.
I'll leave my brief comment there. Madeleine, do you want to comment on that? |
Madeleine Collins 0h 29m 46s | Yeah, I agree, Chris. There's very little in the curriculum that shows development of science in recent decades. The people (scientists) that are linked in the draft curriculum, I'm going to continue calling it draft curriculum out of hope.... are mostly from one part of the world and from centuries long gone. Yet, there's been so much development even in the last ten or twenty years. If we think about COVID and the scientists that spoke up at that time, so much development around vaccines and our understanding of infectious diseases, and even non-infectious diseases. Our work in knowledge about space and exploring space further. We've gone from only being able to use our eyes to this huge development in technology around that, and so then our extended learning... to the work being done in Antarctica around climate change and all of that research, our current scientists are amazing. We should have space, as Sara said, in the curriculum to take a high-level document that allows us to explore relevant and current scientists that connect with the passions and interests of the students in front of us, and look at what they’re doing, what new knowledge they’re discovering, and how they’re discovering that new knowledge – not just look at Bohr's theory for 13 year olds or... they'll just get bored. |
Claire Coleman 0h 31m 29s | I think that brings us quite nicely, Madeleine, to the next section of looking at the document, which is: how does this suggest science should be taught – the pedagogy? |
Sara Tolbert 0h 31m 43s | Can I just add one more thing, and maybe this moves us into the next question about pedagogy? I think the scope for how science is changing – again back to some of our earlier comments around this needing to be a curriculum for now and into the future – is really important. As Chris mentioned, it's for a generation, so it's critical that we think about how this curriculum sets us up for understanding the ways in which science is changing, and the practice of science, is changing... and it always has and always will. As Chris pointed out, science knowledge shifts. That's part of understanding the Nature of Science, and that's important for students to understand that as a critical aspect of scientific knowledge construction - that we refine our thinking based on the evidence that we have available to us. That changes through the development of different tools and technologies that help us better understand phenomena we couldn't have observed in the same way in the past. So there's this constant updating of knowledge, but also the changing of knowledge through collaboration.
In my experiences, I collaborate a lot with scientists in Faculties of Science across disciplines. My experience is that there are increasingly collaborations between Indigenous communities and scientists – not only in Aotearoa but globally. This is being reflected in a lot of recent updates to curriculum documents around the world. So I think it's a real setback for Aotearoa, which could be a leader in this space because of the work that’s already going on here – in the practice of science – in Aotearoa. I wanted to point that out as well, and how science is changing through these collaborations.
I have a colleague who was a translator for the Dalai Lama, and he now works for the Emory University Centre for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics. Part of his research had focused on how scientists and monastics – monks – learn from each other. At the Centre, they're looking at the science of consciousness, and through these collaborations [between Buddhist monks and scientists], how the science is changing, and then also the practices of both groups were changing. Through collaboration, knowledge systems continue to grow and develop. These kinds of collaborations and new developments should be an integral part of any curriculum moving forward. |
Chris Eames 0h 34m 12s | Yeah. I'll follow on about pedagogy. It's interesting when you look at a curriculum, because it doesn't usually say anything explicit about pedagogy. However, this one kind of does.
If you have the curriculum in front of you – which you probably don’t – on page 3 there's the Purpose Statement. The first paragraph struck me, because in the second-to-last line of that paragraph it says: “Students are taught foundational scientific knowledge”.
That simple phrase positions students and teachers in a particular way – in a very didactic: “this is how things happen; students are going to be taught.” Then it goes on in the rest of the Purpose Statement and later introductory areas and alludes to the idea that interesting pedagogy such as guided inquiry and place-based and locally relevant curriculum opportunities might all be possible.
Yet, when you look through the main curriculum, there's very little evidence of that, and very little in terms of supporting students and teachers in that way. I can't remember offhand, but I don't think when I looked through all the “practices” – which Sara and Madeline have talked about as being very task-orientated – I don't see any of those contextualised with any examples of possible local curriculum.
Obviously they would have to be for a particular curriculum, but they don't even hint at that. One of the things I'm worried about in this curriculum is that if if you look at the sense of Te Mātaiaho across the whole, what seems to have happened here is that they co-opted a lot of the language and the structure of what was there but changed the content which seems to kind of create a smokescreen of "this is still subtly what it was, but we've kind of changed and moved things a lot more" in the morals that they're interested in. I think that's something to be aware of.
I think pedagogically that there is a signal, but I don't think that there is, a lack of possibility of contextualisation. No matter what the rhetoric might be. I think the opportunities are not being pursued.
Having said that, of course fabulous teachers like Madeline will always contextualise, because they know their communities, they know their local space, they understand the knowledge, and they can apply it in ways that make it interesting to students. So I have some hope that teachers, whatever this curriculum ends up being, will do what they think is the right thing to do because the enacted curriculum isn’t necessarily what's written on the page. |
Madeleine Collins 0h 37m 14s | I completely agree with that, Chris. There are a number of things I could talk about with pedagogy and I could probably use up the next hour if I had to – but I won’t.
Something that stood out to me as well is that as teachers, we should be incorporating in every lesson aspects from the front half of the curriculum with things from the back part. They should always be woven together.
Initially, when I saw what the draft science learning area looked like, I was... not happy. But I thought, “Well, if the front half of Te Mātaiaho still looks as it does, then there’s some space here.” It seemed to be signalling that we could contextualise and make it local and relevant. The titles, as you say Chris, are all the same as previous documents, but actually everything underneath those titles has changed, and the meanings have changed.... almost to a point where it's not okay for those gifted kupu to be used in the same way anymore, because it’s not how they were intended to be used. So when I look at it from that perspective, I don’t see how we can make this a really well-contextualised science education programme in the classroom.
As you say, Chris, I have the skills to do that, but I can only actually enact that because I also work in a place where I have 15 other science teachers to collaborate with. I have some time to do that. I have a community of other schools around me that I can bounce ideas off at primary and intermediate school level.
But if I were a teacher in an area school, say rural Aotearoa, and I was the only science teacher or one of only two science teachers, and I had this content-heavy document in front of me that I was expected to somehow unravel and teach to the students, I think it would be extremely challenging – even with highly resourced support from the Ministry.
I still think it would be very difficult to get any depth of learning or understanding of what science is. I just don't see how it can work. As I said at the start, it doesn't matter which metric I line it up with; it just doesn't make sense. The draft curriculum doesn't make sense in terms of what we're striving for our learners to achieve.
Another pedagogical point I think is important, is that when there was the Nature of Science in the 2007 curriculum and the content strands, there was really clear progression, and you could support that progression in your learners.
For example, it wasn't about “making careful observations to understand the world around you” you might in Year 2 learn about the life cycle of a butterfly and make careful observations about a butterfly or chrysalis or caterpillar or the whole lifecycle. Then you might never look at butterflies again, but you've got those really clear observation skills that you can then transfer into another learning area. You could apply that to how different objects move across different surfaces, and incorporate other ways of noticing. That progression of making careful observations can be carried across all content areas and different contexts, with really clear progression. That’s missing from this curriculum, the opportunity to develop that pedagogically, to be able to support that in our learners, to be able to contextualise the skills or the understandings in many ways. It's not possible from that curriculum. Again, we know what our students thrive on and so some teachers will still do that, but without a team around you it would be really difficult. |
Sara Tolbert 0h 41m 36s | I think that goes back to the issue of there being more of a behaviourist model underpinning in the curriculum because what is being called “practices” are not really practices; they’re just observable actions lifted from Bloom's taxonomy. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's just not necessarily connected to current thinking around scientific practices and how children and young people are fully capable of engaging with and then deconstructing scientific practices - these should be an integral part of the curriculum.
There was a point in the chat about explicit teaching. I want to make the point that I don't think any of us is saying that explicit teaching is bad. That term has been misused and misappropriated, including here in Australia in education policy.
Good teaching includes moments where we step back and we do explicit teaching. No one is saying that shouldn't exist. Even when I was working in schools and districts that used the “gradual release of responsibility” model, I would say: just shift the order of things a bit. Instead of “I do, we do, you do”, you can shift it so that it's more inquiry based [e.g. with the you do/we do as individual and collaborative exploration before the teacher-led “I do”]. Explicit teaching can still happen. Same with modelling. One model I use in primary science is “experiences, patterns, explanations”. The experiences come first, so all students are having a shared experience. Then they work together to identify patterns, and think about what claims they can make from those patterns, and what their evidence is. Then there might be opportunities for explicit teaching – which might be from the teacher, or from guest speakers, field trips, or which might happen through a range of other resources that are available to us - online/offline resources, or by going back out into the world to collect more data and make additional observations.
So I think it's important that we articulate that having knowledge in the curriculum is not a bad thing, nobody is saying that having knowledge in a curriculum is a bad thing. It's about what kind of knowledge, what is the research behind it? What is the framework? Nobody knows. Where is this coming from, other than... I don't know. I'm confused too, Madeleine. I would just like to better understand, what is the research base? What is the evidence base? Because if we're talking about a knowledge-rich curriculum, then what knowledge are we drawing on that is informing this curriculum? So far nobody has been able to answer that question [especially within the science disciplinary context]. |
Chris Eames 0h 44m 42s | Sara, I like how you picked up on connecting to real-world experiences, because one of the things this curriculum may further exacerbate is a reduction in outside-the-classroom experiences that students might gain. All sorts of reasons have already been diminishing those. But it's clear from the evidence in the literature that taking students out and gathering data, observing and experiencing the real world can be very powerful – if nothing else, to connect what they learn in the classroom with what's going on in the real world. Can you imagine trying to teach about Tongariro National Park and never taking a group of students there, and just standing on the land. Of course, that's a challenging example at the moment with the fires that are going on, but let's pretend the the fires are out and that it's safe to go there. I can only vividly think how impactful those experiences would be. Or simply going to a river or creek and looking for critters – macroinvertebrates, turning over rocks. I've taken lots of kids to those sorts of experiences over the years. They are unbelievably excited when they find a mayfly larva under a rock. When you look at a mayfly larva under a microscope, you might think, “Okay, interesting,” but for some kids it's amazing.
If we're losing that type of learning opportunity, I think we're in serious trouble. |
Sara Tolbert 0h 46m 19s | Can I just add to that, I'm just reading through the chat and want to respond to the points about this being “imported curriculum” from Great Britain or elsewhere. The advantage Aotearoa has in this moment is that we can learn from those who have come before us and have implemented or have tried to go to a more rote-learning approach with curriculum documents or with more scripted approaches. The evidence from those, like for example No Child Left Behind in the US is very compellingly against this approach. It doesn't prepare students to think critically, it doesn't promote in-depth conceptual learning. It might help some children do okay on a pub quiz for a minute until you've processed something else in your brain and that knowledge is gone because you haven't really learnt it. We have the advantage of trying to develop a curriculum with evidence of what does and what doesn't work, and yet then there's over-reliance on an approach that has been largely ineffective - and we have a lot of evidence that it is ineffective.
When I was living in Singapore in 2011, and I know we always talk a lot about Singapore and how they do on the PISA tests, but actually when I was there the teacher education faculty and education policymakers were reflecting on Singapore needed to shift from this rote learning and test-taking approach towards education, and towards creativity because they were having to import a lot of innovators.
So there was a big push towards creativity education, because they recognised that a focus on rote learning can help with these standardised assessments but it doesn’t actually prepare students for the kinds of things that Chris talked about in the beginning - the roles that require dealing with uncertainty and complexity, including socio-scientific issues. Those are the skills we really need to prepare our children and youth with, to help them face the challenges they're already addressing in their lives on a daily basis as well as the ones they will face as future citizens. |
Claire Coleman 0h 49m 05s | I'm just going to jump in because I'm looking at the time and considering whether we're going to get through everything. I feel like we've already covered, in some ways, the position of teachers... but I’ll throw that out again: does anyone want to speak to teachers and their autonomy? I think you've spoken a little bit about that in terms of the contextualisation of things, but does anyone have anything you'd like to chime in about what the draft curriculum currently does in terms of how it positions teachers? |
Chris Eames 0h 49m 31s | It definitely positions them in a didactic way. In other words: here’s a bunch of knowledge, please teach it for us. That’s one way of looking at how teaching can occur. Good teachers like Madeleine will take that and do what they wish with it and make it exciting for students.
There was a comment in the chat earlier that many teachers don't have a strong science background, particularly in primary. I work with primary student-teachers in science education and we don't get very much time. Often they've come to teaching because they didn't do so well in science at school, so they’re not doing engineering or medicine or law. They're doing teaching. That doesn't mean they’re not capable, but they've moved away from those spaces.
While they have a passion for it, it's a little fragment of what we can give them. So to a certain extent, this curriculum may support them, and it may support teachers who are teaching out of field at secondary level, which we know is increasing amount of that mode of operation occurring. I think maybe that there is something around that.
But ultimately, it potentially diminishes the relationship between teachers and students, because it's basically saying. “Sit down, listen to me, take these notes, regurgitate it in some way.” We don't quite know what that looks like at senior levels yet, because they're refreshing that too, but I think it's going to change the face of how some teachers operate. |
Madeleine Collins 0h 51m 31s | I guess this is actually, if I'm honest, quite a difficult one to answer, because if I'm honest, how this positions teachers makes me feel really undervalued and hurt that we haven't been consulted.
We know what we're doing. We're passionate about our jobs. Nobody does teaching because it's easy. Nobody does teaching because we're well paid. We do it because we really are passionate about it and we know it inside out. We know what our students really want to learn.
This positions teachers as if we can't think for ourselves. As if we can't figure that out for ourselves. As if, as Sara said before, we can’t take a high-level curriculum and relate that to what we have in front of us, which will be different in every kura, in every area, every everything.
I think it positions teachers as not being a valued resource in education, because of a lot of the reasons that Chris just said as well. So it’s not just about pedagogy or autonomy; at the heart of it, it's quite hurtful. |
Chris Eames 0h 52m 48s | One of the ramifications of this is that good teachers like Madeline might go, “What am I doing this for?” They might look for another life where they can find stimulation and we’ll lose good teachers. Others who might have thought of going into teaching will say, “I don't really want to do that.” |
Sara Tolbert 0h 53m 05s | We have evidence of teacher attrition that shows that is exactly what happens. We can learn from the multiple failures of this kind of approach, including the harm it does to students and the harm it does to teachers and the way that it pushes good teachers out of the profession, particularly when we move towards scripted curriculum - that is essentially the direction this is taking us.
It's great to have science kits, and great to have curriculum resources, but those should be in the service of teachers being able to work with their students, in their classrooms and their schools, and make collective decisions about what's best for our school and our community in that context. That’s really, I think, a huge concern for me as well. I 100% agree with you, Madeleine. The thing that I love about teacher education is that it helps me stay in this field when things get hard, because I find teachers incredibly inspiring.
A lot of my work since I've gone into tertiary education has been in partnership with educators, including with Madeleine – we’re working together with a group of kaiako on bringing a multiple-knowledge-systems approach into science classrooms. It's just very inspiring to be able to work with teachers, and I think that's why I'm very concerned about the potential this kind of curriculum has to impact those who are doing such innovative work... and who continue to do despite always being the blame for the problems of society, and despite always never being paid what they’re worth or for the number of hours they put in.
It's a concern. I think it does have the effect of taking some of the joy and autonomy out of teaching, and education. |
Claire Coleman 0h 55m 12s | I'm going to move us to other issues around the science education curriculum. I just want to pick up a couple of questions that have come through:
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Sara Tolbert 0h 55m 40s | We had a conversation a couple of times about what we might identify as strengths. Our biggest concern is that the process itself, to me, makes it very difficult to look at this document and try to find strengths when there has not really been any meaningful consultation with those who are meant to “deliver” the curriculum, and there’s a lack of transparency around the development: who's involved, what the research base is, what the evidence is. Where's the evidence of ongoing consultation?
In the past, that has been part of the curriculum revision process: ensuring that we have partnerships with schools who are giving feedback on drafts, articulating concerns and identifying strengths. That is the role that I think stakeholders and the public should be involved in – not just this very singular opportunity to give feedback, and we're not even sure what's going to happen with that feedback or whether it's going to be taken up in any meaningful way, particularly as curriculum materials are already being developed around this draft.
So yes, there are likely some positives in any curriculum document, but I have too many concerns about the process to go there in this one. |
Madeleine Collins 0h 57m 29s | I'll add to that. When I first looked at the curriculum, there were a number of points that looked good. The overview, the front Purpose Statement looked good. But then the content behind it, the phases, don't really match that overview. The overview is promising.
There are some good points around ecology, diseases and climate change, but they're so few and far between, and so much is lacking, that you almost have to hunt around for the good things. There are definitely some good bits, but you have to hunt for them.
I agree with Sara that to give feedback is really about the process and how this has all come about, as opposed to the detail in it. Until we can review the processes as an education system, at all levels, there's not really much point in just talking about, I think, the nitty-gritty good or not-good bits. That needs to come after we review the process and have proper consultation. |
Chris Eames 0h 58m 46s | For me, looking at the curriculum, there are some important and useful things. They haven't thrown everything out. But there’s a lot of concern about the way this curriculum is positioning the whole Nature of Science and science education. It will help some teachers, I'm sure – they'll be able to latch onto the ideas that are there and understand them, if the curriculum is supported well by resources. I'm not sure yet whether science kits will be the thing to do that; I’m interested to see what other curriculum materials emerge.
I'm not sure how many on the call have attended one of the Ministry’s briefings recently where they gave a snapshot of prototypical unit plans and lesson plans. Those could be useful for some people, but they might also be quite narrowing and confining.
So there’s still a lot of water to go under the bridge. I'm with Madeleine and Sara in being very concerned about the process and transparency, and in understanding who was able to have input into this. A whole lot of people I know, who have good skills and knowledge about this type of thing, weren't involved in the process.
That does give you a bit of a concern about things going for. Which is not very positive, Claire, but that's where we're at I suppose. |
Claire Coleman 1h 00m 25s | So I guess do we just want to go into that space now? We've had some more questions about some of the critical capabilities, critical thinking, ethical reasoning and preparing students for the future - things that can't be automated, building the capacities for those things.
I guess just my own chiming in was about the process. I can say from the Arts perspective, a question was asked about whether there were any foundational scoping documents like we had previously that outlined direction. I was quite surprised to receive correspondence that basically said there wasn't a foundational scoping document like we had had. When I asked that question, I asked it of the Science learning area as well, on behalf of colleagues, and was told there wasn't a foundational directional document either.
So whatever has been created didn't have that kind of foundation. That seemed a pretty astonishing revelation. You can see that in the lack of cohesion in what’s been put together. |
Chris Eames 1h 02m 20s | I think that was part of the process: they probably had a bunch of people working in bits because the timeframes were extremely tight. Let's be honest: the timeframes were extremely tight for a lot of the people doing this.
To briefly address the feedback scenario: the time between the cut-off for feedback at the end of April and the time for release of the final version is very tight, very short. Which means there must be some mechanical system doing some of the analysis, if not all of it.
So that kind of bitsyness around people doing writing but not doing joined-up thinking has been one of the key challenges for creating this draft. It hasn't allowed people to sit back – even those who were involved, and let's say they were good people – they weren't given good conditions to work under and that may have been part of the deal. Understanding how what we've got in front of us has evolved is key. We’ve talked a lot – and others have too – about needing to slow down the process. I guess that's what I'd say for now. I think Sara wanted to talk a bit more about the process. |
Sara Tolbert 1h 03m 40s | I think it just needs to be slowed down so that we can re-evaluate and weigh in on whether or not this is the direction the sector wants to go in. We also talked about the need to do more education and have more conversations with those around us – within schools, within communities – so that people in the general public can understand some of the key issues here. There needs to be time to engage the public. That's always a challenge with curriculum documents, but working with teacher unions is also really important, and having those conversations in that space. I think slowing it down. I think the process is entirely undemocratic. I think the roadshow is just a form of manufacturing consent. It's not a meaningful democratic dialogue. |
Chris Eames 1h 04m 58s | The challenge, as we talked about, is if you don't give feedback, does the Ministry think everything's okay? And if you do give feedback, do you appear complicit in the process? That puts us in an awkward position in terms of deciding what the right thing to do is. But I think if we think about how we are engaging in that process and make that very clear that we don't think the process is working well, then perhaps that's one of the best pieces of feedback we can give. |
Claire Coleman 1h 05m 36s | You can look at what the Principals’ Federation has done in terms of saying, “We'll collect our own feedback and do it ourselves,” because they have limited faith in the process that stands. I think it's good to express feedback publicly and not rely solely on the system, because of the timeframe and because of how these things ordinarily operate. Ordinarily there would be consultation, a report generated from that, decisions made about changes based on that report, and then work will happen. All of that takes longer than the couple of months between the timeframes that the Minister has announced. I do wonder about that point that you made too, about... how if we are trying to have conversations with whanau, with communities, during the break... how do we expand beyond the education audience – the many of you here tonight who understand curriculum creation – to people who don't. How do we succinctly express why this is so concerning? Why what we’ve been presented with needs to be resisted and challenged? |
Madeleine Collins 1h 07m 12s | To people who don't understand curriculum, they do understand young people and they care about young people where they're parents, grandparents, aunties, employers – care about young people. They want them to be successful.
The curriculum we're looking at is going to make it challenging to create those kinds of young people. It will fail many of them. If we can pose it from that point of view and then explain why, that could be a starting point to engage people who don't normally understand curriculum or education. Even people within the school who don't understand curriculum because their focus is not understanding how curriculum processes develop... or if you're a primary school teacher as well, you could be delivering the curriculum but it doesn't mean that you understand the process behind it and how undemocratic this one has been - so perhaps, helping people understand how it's failing our young people.
I agree with Sara that we need to not rely on the process we've been asked to use, but make sure we’re taking these ideas public – whether to MPs, media... where ever else we might be able to get the word out there. Making sure our Boards of Trustees understand that this problematic, and can they take that to their community? It shouldn’t just be teachers or people in education saying, “We need to slow this process down and we need to do it properly, we need consultation.” And it's not that we're complaining - we are unhappy - but it's not that we're just complaining and whining about it, it's not that we don't want a new curriculum it's just that this one... isn't fit for purpose. Until we slow it down and have proper review processes, it's going to remain that way. |
Chris Eames 1h 09m 21s | One of the things we’ve talked about at another AEC meeting was: if we don't want this curriculum, what sort of curriculum do we want?
I think, having those conversations over Christmas with whānau and friends, if we do say "What do you think of the new curriculum?" they might go "What? What are you talking about?" so maybe another way could be saying “How would you like your children to be educated for the coming world?”. Then they might say something and so fourth.
Then we can say, “Do you realise the new curriculum isn't going to do that for us very well? I can tell you why, but here's an alternative that we think would be useful. It would be more like an amalgamation of what we've had and what we've been given at the moment, some sort of combination of those things, potentially. But, maybe there's a group of people here, and of course there is, who might have some ideas. But because they haven't been asked their ideas, I'm assuming, so what are they going to do? [Name]'s question of "If you're going to offer one piece of feedback to the MoE about the draft science curriculum, what would it be?". You need to show how you're going to engage students and teachers with this curriculum because at the moment I don't think that's going to happen. |
Sara Tolbert 1h 10m 52s | I also think that in the associations and the organisations that you're already involved with, whether that's the subject associations - I note Bay Science is here, and have their own regional teacher collective of science educators in the region who have come together and meet periodically and are reviewing the draft curriculum - so working together and with others, there is power in numbers. One person is easy to ignore, but I think it's really important to grow these collectives of like-minded educators who care and can articulate your position more powerfully as a collective than as an individual... and again, I'm just going to plug for the unions as well because I always think they're a good place to be organising and making your voice heard. |
Claire Coleman 1h 11m 57s | We've got lots of stuff coming up in the chat, people sort of question things in various spaces but, you know, there are lots of... I mean, this comment from [name] "Students will see science a disjointed collection of topics rather than having a sense of belonging". I think, too, that issue around Māori an Pacific students not seeing themselves in this curriculum document is another avenue, potentially, for pushing back on some of this material. |
Chris Eames 1h 12m 43s | And yet again the curriculum does hint that possibility. There are few bits and pieces in there. and So the govt or people in the ministry can point to those and say "oh look we have included them" so we got to be careful and smart about the way that we build a case and build our arguments.. look at the evidence and look at claims we’re able to make about what this curriculum does and then show that evidence very clearly. I think Sara has been very strong in telling us about how the res lit over the years, and we know in some of the documents other people have shared, to say that this hasn't worked in the US and hasn't worked in the ULK. Why is it that we are suddenly trying to do it here? And people don’t know that sort of stuff, so it’s actually bringing those things out which will help us make a case strongly, I think. |
Sara Tolbert 1h 13m 44s | Just a point here in the chat and yes, I agree, that there could be alternative forms of grassroots collectives that could be pursued - like Bay Science, I'll just put another plug for Bay Science so you can see what they're doing. |
Chris Eames 1h 14m 00s | ...and do you know why the subject associations are sometimes tip-toeing, because I'm associated with one of them? It's because there's funding available from the ministry so it's a little bit like "I don't want to really bite the hand that feeds me..." because then it's going to be tricky, and its been very clear in some communications that that's a possibility. So I can understand that subject associations need to be careful, but therefore don't necessarily represent the views they would like to. |
Claire Coleman 1h 14m 42s | I've got a question here from [name], "How did this not work in the U.K?" |
Madeleine Collins 1h 14m 47s | There was a really good article written recently. I'll see if I can find it and link it in, from the New Zealand Principal's Federation - actually I saw it linked on Bay Science. I'll put it on the chat. It describes how it was recently reviewed and actually the students didn't get a breadth of knowledge, or a depth of knowledge, and that they couldn't critique work or think creatively - there were many things found. They didn't say to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to evolve what was there and add in more of those skills and reduce the content. I'll put the link in, it was really interesting. |
Claire Coleman 1h 15m 35s | Just thinking about the ways that this is not fit for purpose, and someone talked about this in the chat earlier, again, was around the time factor - the ‘doability’ factor of this document. You stack it u with all the other curriculum learning areas and how much of something you're supposed to do, particularly in our primary spaces, just the logistics of how you're going to squish all this into the time you have available. I think that the work that hasn't been done to figuring that out, because I know we did some work on it while I was there just trying to think about some of that stuff... the content now is... five times as much. |
Chris Eames 1h 16m 23s | I think, Claire, that's an interesting point because the mantra from the government has always been around this curriculum refresh now that students should all have that same access t knowledge and we understand that this is not going to understand under this curriculum because there's so much knowledge that a lot of teachers are going to have to cherry pick what they can and can't do, or they'll just do a tick box thing and say "Yep, Covered that. Mentioned it for five minutes, covered it" and move on, without any hope of most students grasping it as learning. I grapple with that a little bit and think "Is that a problem? Because students can't know everything anyway.” Under the previous curriculum they certainly weren't going to, so where does the reality lie? Where does the balance lie? That's where I was thinking about, what do we say when someone says "What sort of curriculum would you like, and what should students know?" . It's a difficult question to answer. |
Madeleine Collins 1h 17m 27s | I think things like the work you do, Chris, with OECD... the PISA framework is a really good place to start for science learning, because it frames the learning around important content knowledge, but as Sara mentioned before, the epistemic and procedural knowledge – so how that knowledge has grown in the first place, and then why it matters now in the Anthropocene in terms of climate change, biodiversity loss, increase of infectious diseases – all of those ideas. The PISA framework is a really good starting point to develop a great New Zealand Aotearoa science curriculum from. |
Chris Eames 1h 18m 08s | One thing it does is it's a global look. I have to say, having worked in the group, and they;re great people --really really knowledgeable and thoughtful -- but there isn't a lot of contribution from some parts of the world. We're still missing some voices in that space, even on the wider PISA team those people have an opportunity to have an input. But yes, it's a great place to start, and it's highly research-based. People have read the science education literature and thought about these things, so crikey that must count for something I guess. |
Claire Coleman 1h 18m 47s | I'm just going to pop in because I can see some things and this is a comment and a question - don't mean both of them, was talking about concerns raised in the social sciences about their draft, and from the arts perspective.... very similar! If there’s any cohesion between these draft curriculums, it's in the concerns people have about the draft curriculums.
A question was asked about the hours that primary have for science. So, at the moment they are not mandated hours in the 2007 curriculum and there's a lot more integration that happens across learning areas. That was one of the aims when we were originally working, in 2023, on the refresh – that there would still be a good deal of integration which is why the learning areas were being worked on together so that we could see those synergies and look for those spaces.
How does everyone feel about that in terms of this draft, or in terms of "What is the place for integration, in terms of science?" |
Madeleine Collins 1h 19m 57s | From what I've seen, there's not a lot of coherence or sequencing. There are things that are taught in multiple learning areas are not necessarily written in the same year levels. – for example, between Maths and Science there are discrepancies about when overlapping content is taught. Same with Social Sciences and Science. Social Sciences seems to have everything about Earth Science, and Science has very little - if nothing - and social sciences doesn't have it in any depth either. They will be quite busy, though, teachin the history of refrigeration to Year 10 students that leaves little scope to teaching about tectonic plates in New Zealand. I have looked a little bit across the learning areas and there doesn't seem to be a lot [of coherence or sequencing]. So for Primary school teachers trying to fit everything in it will be challenging. |
Chris Eames 1h 20m 53s | That's where we've lost the contexts which were in the Understand-Know-Do model - now there were, of course, some flaws and challenges with those but at least it had potential to bring bits of knowledge together. In the curriculum it does say, sometimes, at some points “see Year 6 Geography” or whatever the terminology is, so there is some hints around that space but its pretty piecemeal. I just wanted to respond to [name]'s question about the new climate change framework and whether any of its parts are reflected, or not reflected, in the draft. I guess wanted to say three things, because I've just been working on this for another project as well -- in the Climate Literacy framework, that the OECD have been working on; knowledge and understanding of systems is key. There isn't much about systems thinking in this document. We've made the point, I think, a number of times this afternoon about fragmentation; we're not thinking about systems and how things are linked together, and that kind of relates to your point about interdisciplinary work as well. The second, there is very little in this curriculum about the rise and significance of misinformation and disinformation, and having a critical voice around that and understanding the role science can play. Third, there isn't really much in this curriculum about the role emotions play in our understanding of issues and how to deal with those issues. We know for instance climate anxiety and eco-anxiety are real -- and it's only going to get worse, I think as young people grow up into a world where they are significantly challenged by these things. Lastly – and this has been a key point over and over tonight – this curriculum positions young people as non-agentic. It positions them as "just learn your stuff and then when you come out from school, magically you'll be able to do something and contribute to the world" which I don't think is what we need right now -- I mean we do need people to do that bit, but that's not the process that's going to help us to get us there.If I was the young person, a 14-year-old- at school, and I was told "Just sit down and learn this stuff" and I had climate change raging out the window - firguriatively rather than literally - I'd be asking “Why am I doing this? The world's burning” and this is what Greta Thunberg said -- “our house is on fire.” |
Sara Tolbert 1h 23m 27s | Yeah I think that's a really important point you're making, Chris, about the position of students as non-agentic. There was a question in the chat about "Are we looking for more, or less knowledge than the 2007 curriculum?" and I think the question is "What kind of knowledge?". All of the curriculum documents are knowledge-rich, but what kind of knowledge and at what depth? I think what we need in this particular moment is an empowering curriculum; we need empowering knowledge. That includes all the types of knowledge we've talked about that help support students' civic capabilities to use scientific knowledge, and critique scientific knowledge, in ways that are meaning for them and their communities -- children are also increasingly positioned as non-agentic in society because of that disconnect between what we're learning in schools and what's happening outside. This is all the more reason for thinking very carefully, and being very intentional, about the curriculum refresh in this moment. |
Chris Eames 1h 24m 38s | It's once in a generation. If we don't get it right now, it’ll be another 15 years before we are going to have a chance. Although, they have said they'll tweak it as they go along, but what that looks like in reality is unknown. |
Sara Tolbert
1h 24m 52s
| We also know from decades of research on rote approaches to curriculum that it pushes most students out. It doesn't necessarily push the students out who are probably already on a particular pathway, but that's a very small percentage - I mean, we're talking maybe 5% or 10% [e.g., of all NZ high school youth who eventually graduate with at STEM degree] - so those who are already feeling like "science isn't for me" or "school science isn't relevant to me" or "school science doesn't interest me" or "I'm not confident and I'm not capable", this curriculum exacerbates that problem, it doesn't address it at all. Even if you were of the mindset that "all we need to fix all of the major problems in the world is to stuff children’s heads with more facts" -- it doesn't work. I mean, we know as educators as much as we'd love that to be the case that doesn't work for the vast majority of the students. You can't open up somebody's brain and spoon in facts. It doesn't work to teach that way, that's not how people learn. We know from - and all this stuff about the science of learning - from the learning sciences that this is absolutely not how people learn; we know from decades of research on conceptual change in science [which was very much focused on building conceptual knowledge] that you cannot just overload a curriculum with facts and expect children to learn in a meaningful way. |
Claire Coleman 1h 26m 21s | Okay, I'm conscious of time, so I’m just going to do a quick last round. Reading comments "Facts are important but not everything". Ok. Maybe we'll just do a quick last 'anything from anyone they want to say. before I thank everybody and close with karakia? Chris, any last gasp from you?' |
Chris Eames 1h 26m 43s | Just a message of hope, really. I, like many of us, have been involved in education for many years. Things come around again and again. When they do, we draw on our experience and knowledge to understand what is good and what may not be so good.
So let's reflect, but also have hope. I have hope that teachers, whatever curriculum they're given to work with, will do a great job as much as they possibly can. But we need to be aware of where they’re being positioned at the moment, and I think that is cause for a lot of concern. |
Claire Coleman 1h 27m 25s | Madeleine? |
Madeleine Collins 1h 27m 27s | I agree with Chris. I've been in education now for nearly 30 years, and there are a lot of pendulum swings and roundabouts that we go through. This is just another one, and it will pass. But I think it's really important that we reiterate again: use your voice, everyone. Talk to your whānau, talk to your Boards of Trustees, talk to your MP, talk to whoever you can to have this process just slowed down because I think that's how we might affect some change in what the draft curriculum looks like: slow it down, allow some proper consultation, and have it change a little bit for the better before it becomes set in stone. |
Claire Coleman 1h 28m 13s | Sara? |
Sara Tolbert 1h 28m 15s | I'll just echo what Madeleine and Chris have already said. It's really important that you articulate your concerns. I think, use the mechanism to give feedback, but make sure you save a copy of it – and any way you can make it public, I think reaching out to your MPs is great, but yeah making it public. I have heard through the grapevine that a lot of people are saying they've heard that the 'powers that be' have heard [from] other curriculum areas, that there are a lot of concerns from other curriculum areas, but they haven't heard much around Science.
So it is really important that you articulate any concerns you have and find a way, as much as possible, to make that feedback public or to bring people together around them – if not in public forums, then say at your schools or with your Board of Trustees, etc.
Thanks for being here (agreement from Madeleine and Chris). |
Claire Coleman 1h 29m 15s | Thank you for that, Sara.
I'm going to do a closing karakia.
For those of you who've been asking, yes, there will be a recording made available of this soonish. There are also links in the chat to various articles that can support you in your conversations. We encourage you to continue having those conversations.
Thank you to our panellists. Thank you to everyone who has attended.
Kia whakairia te tapu Kia wātea ai te ara Kia turuki whakataha ai Kia turuki whakataha ai Haumi e. Hui e. Tāiki e! |
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