Once a student becomes more comfortable with their own culture, and discussing parts of their culture, an instructor can include discourse and information within their lessons that allows students to identify with a lesson. This, in turn, will allow students to participate more readily because they are able to identify with the information. Also, once a student feels able to communicate about their culture the process of including a more global perspective within a class may ultimately become easier for an instructor.
Published in Chapter:
Relevant Issues that Challenge the Designing of Transformative, Liberating Online Science Courses
H. Prentice Baptiste (New Mexico State University, USA), Jennifer J. Neakrase (New Mexico State University, USA), and Ashley N. Ryan (New Mexico State University, USA)
Copyright: © 2011
|Pages: 20
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-046-4.ch003
Abstract
Science as a discipline has gone through many paradigm shifts, both in terms of scientific knowledge and science pedagogy. One recent trend is the movement of science courses into an online environment. While this shift started as supplemental instruction, a movement in education is to offer entire science courses, normally taught in a face-to-face format, online. Moving science instruction into this type of environment illuminates many challenges in science education to a different and critical level. These challenges include issues in equity, accountability, identity formation, and appropriate pedagogical practices. The authors explore these challenges in general for online learning and specifically for teaching science online. It is clear that these issues, while heavily researched in face-to-face science instruction, have not been seriously considered in the online format. Currently it appears that those teaching science online have simply ported their face-to-face course without considering the fact that instruction needs to be changed when teaching online.