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79 7 linking integrated Middle-School Science with literacy in australian teacher education david r. geelan “i’m sorry,” she sniffed, wiping her eyes and nose with a crumpled tissue. “it’s just that i really have no science background, and your presentation this morning made me really scared. i’m not sure i can pass this course, and i’m pretty sure i can’t teach science.” perhaps Shelley’s story is not typical of all students in Middle Years of Schooling Science education, the course i teach to prepare teachers to teach grades 4–9, but i will usually talk to at least one student like Shelley each semester, and know that there are perhaps three or four others in the class who feel the same way but don’t approach me about it.1 The majority of the class will have more science background and be more confident— perhaps too confident in some cases—and four or five will have science degrees and be very confident about teaching science. a large part of the challenge in teaching this course, though, is that many of the beginning teachers i teach will have to teach science at the upper elementary and junior high level soon, and many have little science content knowledge and even less confidence in their ability to understand and teach science. The Middle Years of Schooling program (MYS), in teacher education, at the University of Queensland’s ipswich campus (UQ ipswich) is one of australia’s leading middle school teacher education programs. Modelled on middle school reforms in the United States, but designed from the ground up in the early 2000s for the Queensland school syllabus and context, it is an innovative program that is achieving excellent results. graduates are sought-after teachers in public and private schools with middle school programs,2 as well as in more traditional elementary and secondary schools. Middle school teachers are trained as generalists who are qualified and credentialed to teach in all school subject areas. 80 | Structures That Support Integrative Learning participating beginning teachers come from two streams, which are sometimes taught together and sometimes separately. one stream is a “dual degree” program comprising a bachelor’s degree in another field such as arts or behavioral sciences combined with a bachelor of education degree. Students spend their first two years predominantly studying in their other field and their second two years studying education . The other stream is a one-year postgraduate diploma in education for those who already have a three-year degree in another field, including science. This chapter focuses on a core curricular subject from the key learning area of science. it is considered a “curriculum and instruction” course intended to prepare the beginning teachers in the program to teach science to students in the middle years. The course emphasizes developing students’ “pedagogical content knowledge” (Shulman, 1986) in school science, including knowledge of the Queensland science syllabus.3 all students must successfully complete this course in order to graduate from the program . Those who go on to teach in middle school programs will usually teach science, as will those who teach in elementary schools. Some of those who will teach in secondary schools will teach in other specialist subject areas and avoid teaching science. The beginning teachers’ own confidence and knowledge of science are, however, not the only challenges they face in preparing to teach in Queensland schools. The Queensland science syllabus for kindergarten to grade 10 is very open-ended. it prescribes broad general topics that must be addressed, but does not tightly prescribe the order in which they should appear, nor tie specific topics to specific years of schooling. it is an outcomes-based approach to creating a syllabus, and is intended to provide overall guidance for teachers to develop their own rich curricula within school contexts and in response to student needs. as with any syllabus document, there are trade-offs between specificity and prescription on the one hand and openness and flexibility on the other. perhaps it is too broad a generalization, but i often think of the balance in terms of this formulation: “tightly prescribed syllabuses support poor (or poorly prepared) teachers but tend to stifle excellent teachers, while highly flexible, nonprescriptive syllabuses tend to mean poor teachers teach poorly, while excellent teachers have the flexibility to achieve excellence .” educators have a wide range of positions on where the best balance lies, but it is true that the quality and amount of...

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