WERE JUST SPECTATORS - A CASE-STUDY OF SCIENCE TEACHING, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT

Project 2061, Benchmarks, and National Standards for Science Education are forwarding a vision for science teacher educators in which a cons tructivist teaching perspective is implicit. Included in these documen ts is an epistemological treatment of scientific knowledge that contra sts starkly with what researchers have found prolific in most science classrooms. It is becoming a more mainstream perspective among science educators that classrooms are places in which students and teachers j ointly construct meaning from discursive events. Beliefs about the nat ure of science and the purpose of school are not constructed in isolat ion from one another. Rather, the philosophical treatment of science i n classrooms, especially physics, has revealed that the dominant epist emology is a strong predictor of the types of learning strategies depl oyed by students. Given that the dominant epistemological treatment of high school physics is of a positivist origin and the purpose of norm al classroom discourse is to make classrooms operate smoothly, we ask if the concerns of management are free from the influences of students ' beliefs of what science is and what school is for? Practical teacher knowledge often quantizes the complexities of instruction, management , concept development, and philosophical frameworks as separate and di screte components of normal classroom science. Our purpose is to raise the critical issue of understanding the nature of certain classroom m anagement problems as we examine the interaction of two contrasting ep istemological treatments of science ill a high school physics class an d the subsequent classroom management techniques influenced by these b eliefs. A physics teacher and his students were surveyed, interviewed, and observed during normal instruction and a range of epistemological commitments were identified. We argue that differences in epistemolog ical stances can invoke antagonistic interactions that may not be well understood from a purely management or pedagogical approach to teache r knowledge and, inasmuch, classroom management choices made independe nt of epistemological considerations miss the mark. (C) 1998 John Wile y & Sons, Inc.