Faculty of Education - Theses

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Type: Masters Research thesis × Subject: Science × Author: Campbell, Alasdair C. ×

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    The Public understanding of techno-science in a rural community: culture & agency
    Campbell, Alasdair C. ( 2003)
    This is an ontological inquiry into the public understanding of techno-science, held by adult members of a local school community. In this light, it seeks to establish a platform from which to reassess conventional assumptions about the curriculum and cultural agency of science teaching. The inquiry is rooted in dissatisfaction with a current transformational model of science teaching, which is defined solely in terms of the transfer of ideational possessions to the students in science classes. Both teachers and students are agents in their own and others' symbolic life worlds. Their identities are constructed in a dual praxis, a dialogue between self as product and self as process in every day conversation in established communities. The study draws on the work of Coulter on Dialogical Research, Harre on the analysis of social episodes, Latour, Rechwitz & Schatzki on the place of the material in theories of culture, of Harvey, Ratner on Agency and Community . Through dialogues with persons in a rural community served by the author's school, the thesis explores the public understanding of techno-science within the community and considers whose interests the school education in science best serves. The centrality of "community" is claimed in characterising a model of embodied cultural change over centrally imposed change. It is proposed that change is a "two-way" interaction where the individual "agent" both socialises & is socialised by the cultural structures that exist, and where the "artefact" is the "knot of reasoning" at the centre of personal identity formation "actor-networks" (ANT - Latour). It suggests that society empowers or does not empower - through the processes of recognising, and allocating control of empowering artefacts to persons as agents working within a social & cultural framework of responsibilities and duties. The thesis offers a new transformational model of social action, which suggests renewed attention in research & practice should be given to ontologies of the mind and person of the agent and the mediating function of "community" in the future restructuring of the public education of science if it is to serve its broader function in cultural transformation within the small rural community of Erehwyna, or anywhere.