How to Teach Science in Emerging and Developing Environments

Abstract

The complexity of science education today, particularly the areas related to chemistry, needs new teaching approaches, new teaching resources, new skills of the teacher and an alternative focus for the subject itself. All of these factors need to be considered in the context of all countries of the world. In developing countries, there are still further challenges ahead, as teachers struggle to enable their families to survive and do not always have the necessary training, while schools are overcrowded, operating multiple sittings in a day and textbooks are few and far between, with new copies often too expensive to purchase. All too often in these countries, student-centred learning is a dream that is far from being feasible and assessment systems are a burden, serving to determine how the selected few students can progress, while ignoring the exciting challenges and intrigues from stimulating learning which the subject has to offer. Despite these problems, improving science education is often regarded as a priority for developing countries — the goal is nothing less than the capacity to apply learning, whether this is knowledge, skills or values, to new situations. This chapter addresses some of the issues currently facing science education in developing countries. In so doing it draws also on ideas expressed in earlier chapters of this book.