How do I describe, analyse and shape the world around me?
The New Basics category, Environments and technologies, provides students and teachers with the opportunity to examine and interact critically with the physical world. It is based on the premise that our environment, and the technologies we use to manipulate it, can be studied and understood through active participation in real-world contexts. Natural and built environments interact with each other in complex ways, and issues of sustainability and adaptability are not exclusively the domain of one or the other.
It is important that public concerns are not dealt with by value-neutral experts or by manufacturing controversy. But a cautionary note must be sounded. It is also important that public concerns are not turned into a forum for sharing ignorance or withholding the worst aspects of a situation. The way to ensure that the expression of an opinion on such matters is founded on a knowledge base is to ensure that students are not scientifically illiterate.
In Environments and technologies, knowledges and skills from various scientific, technological and environmental domains are combined with design processes and practices to complete practical activities. Study should focus on the application of basic scientific understandings to relocate learning within contexts from the wide world (and the universe).
This category stresses the importance of people developing a harmonious relationship between natural and built environments. In this context, ecological and economic sustainability have become both cultural and curriculum imperatives. Living in and building sustainable environments involves careful planning and consultation, and is an area in which schools have become increasingly involved. The implementation of this category means that students will have the opportunity to apply their scientific, technological, environmental and design understandings within a practice-oriented framework.
Issues of adaptability and transformability, which are normally associated with technological progression, take on new significance. The discussion paper, Today Shapes Tomorrow: Environmental education for a sustainable future (Department of Environment and Heritage, 1999) proposes that, in order to deal with environmental challenges, we need people who think broadly and who understand systems, connections, patterns and causes. These issues have social, scientific, cultural, economic and ethical aspects-all of which are important for incorporation into a school program. The report also argues that specialist discipline-based knowledge, while providing critical contributions to our understanding, is no longer of itself adequate. Such knowledge needs to be harnessed and applied to the broader environmental and technological issues facing the world.
This category is concerned with enhancing activity in context. Unless that activity is made integral to the learning there is a risk that scientific understanding and processes will be regarded as irrelevant to the lives of the vast majority of students who choose to not study science at advanced levels after leaving school.
Science defines what is natural and what is rational. Its values can be seen in what are sought out as facts and made as artefacts, what are designed processes and products, and what are forged as weapons and filmed as wonders. In our daily experience, power is exercised through expertise; for example, in science, technology and medicine.
Science mediates our cultural experience. It increasingly defines what it is to be a person, through genetics, medicine and information technology. Its values get embodied and naturalised in concepts, techniques, research priorities, gadgets and advertising. Many films, artworks and novels express popular concerns about these developments.
Developing a scientific understanding of the world includes exposure to the central concepts of chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, biology, mathematics and statistics. By drawing on the traditions and resources of specific disciplines, teachers and students will be able to select and contextualise skills and knowledges that grant access to powerful ways of working in the world.
The design and engineering technologies have the potential to form the basis of the implementation of curriculum in new and interesting ways when they are presented as part of a series of practically orientated tasks rather than as contrived activities. The development of skills associated with design and aesthetics, manual arts and engineering can work in a range of contexts, bringing together new and old technologies in ways that encourage the nationally agreed upon educational goals of innovation and enterprise.
Sustainability is at the heart of this category. Perhaps in the past, the nature of environment education has too unilaterally magnified the need to care for the planet without a complementary perspective on the needs of society to work within the environment. The study of environmental issues has become the staple diet in many classrooms. Much of this practice, however, assumes or emphasises conflict between concern for the environment and human manipulation of that environment; for example, through industrial development, land use practices and advances in technology. This particular segment of Environments and technologies should provide opportunities for a transdisciplinary examination of local environmental issues by taking into account not only physical but also social, ideological, political and cultural aspects of the debate.
Copyright |
Disclaimer |
Privacy |
Access keys |
Other languages
© The State of Queensland (Department of Education, Training and Employment) 2004.