Biologilæreres kryssing av kulturgrenser – fra en naturvitenskapelig kultur til en skolekultur

Abstract

The aim of this article is to understand biology teachers’ challenges with laboratory work in the light of tensions between the different cultures, or discourses, in biology teacher education. The data material in this study consists of a survey with 314 responses from biology teachers as well as a group interview. Our findings suggest that teachers struggle to transform the knowledge and experience from their pure biology education into their practice in the laboratory. Concepts from a scientific discourse, such as ‘hypothesis’ and ‘report’, are therefore integrated into traditional teacher-directed laboratory tasks where the results are given in advance. We argue that this contributes to a misleading image of science. One of the major challenges for teachers, we argue, is to design appropriate contexts for addressing aspects of nature of science in the laboratory. However, many biology teachers report that they lack knowledge about teaching methods in the laboratory.

Pre-service science teachers’ and in-service physics teachers’ views on the knowledge and skills of a good teacher

“…The pronounced focus on content knowledge displayed by our in-service teacher respondents resembles the findings of Larsson et al (2018), where experienced physics teachers acting as mentors in the physics teacher training programme displayed a 'physics expert model' of teacher education with the ideal that a physics teacher is first and foremost a physics expert. de Winter and Airey (2019) also found physics subject knowledge to be among the central attributes valued by stakeholders in physics teacher education in the UK, and Sjøberg et al (2020) made a similar observation for Norwegian biology teachers. In line with the assumption for biology teachers made by Rozenszajn and Yarden (2014), it is possible to speculate that the focus on content knowledge among in-service physics teachers, in particular, is a result of physics as a discipline being in rapid progress and therefore a need for always being updated is imposed.…”

“…A recent survey asked Norwegian upper secondary biology teachers (a comparable group to the one investigated in the present survey) how various components of their pre-service education had prepared them for their daily classroom practice. The study found that subject matter was the component from their training that teachers felt was most important in this respect (Sjøberg, Gregers, Ødegaard, & Tsigaridas, 2020).…”

“…Larsson, Airey, and Lundqvist (2017) pointed out that in physics departments, 'teaching physics is framed as coming naturally to anyone who knows physics' (p. 2). Similarly, in Sjøberg et al (2020) survey among biology teachers, some respondents expressed that good subject matter knowledge would give good communication skills. This point of view was also expressed by one of the interviewed pre-service physics teachers in our survey.…”