 So, welcome everyone. So, we'll start today's session. I'm very pleased to welcome Professor John Lawrence Benz to deliver his review talk titled, Altruistic Uses of Social Scientific Capital, a Pro-Eco-Justice Pedagogy. Professor Benz has been an associate professor at the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada, since the past 15 years. His research interests relate to the promotion of social justice, environmental sustainability, with particular concern for issues stemming from neoliberal capitalism. He has several publications which include books, peer-reviewed articles and journals and edited books. He's also in the editorial board of journals which include the Cultural Studies in Science Education and the Research in Science Education, as well as the online community-reviewed journal, Journal of Activist Science and Technology Education, JASTE. Professor Benz's research program revolves around the stepwise curriculum and instruction framework about which he will be talking about today. More importantly, his work actually materializes the vision of politicization of science education that a lot of us have been reading about. In particular, we've read about Derek Hodgson's, I mean we've read the paper titled, Science Education for an Alternative Future. So this work in some sense sort of concretizes that work and we actually see it in a material form, in the form of a curriculum framework. So the Homibaba Center also has its tradition of work in STSE research. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. I'm sorry. So the Homibaba Center also has its tradition of work in STSE research as well as curriculum development. So a lot of us are really excited to hear you today. So welcome once again. You have 45 minutes. Okay. Okay. She gave away my first slide. So yeah, I just wanted to thank everyone on the organizing committee and lots and lots of other people for all the hospitality. Obviously there, I don't know if you would have known this, but from Canada there was a challenging process to get a visa to enter India. And I was on pins and needles. I think to the last five days, maybe even less as to whether or not I actually be here. So with all of that, plus the hospitality here with providing meals and transportation and entertainment, purchasing of crafts and this sort of thing, it's been wonderful. So thank you so much. Now I'd like to start by looking at STEM education movements. I don't know the extent to which STEM education is a mainstream movement here in India or in any states in India. It's very large in other parts of the world in the USA, particularly in the UK, Australia, my own country, Canada is strong with STEM education. So sort of integration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. You'll have to excuse my cold again. Excuse me. And there's a lot of money being poured into this movement to essentially educate more STEM workers and often the discourse is around competing in the global economy and to provide more jobs, more wealth, more happiness. So if you look at the lower right there, ultimately you have lots of products and services that are going to make people happy. The economy will be strong and so on. So it's a bright future. It's a promising future that's promoted by people who promote STEM education. In many cases, not always, of course. Now by the way, before I go too far, I just did want to mention that there is a I have written a paper that covers most of what I'm discussing. And there's lots of other stuff on the web that you can look at. And I will be giving you a link to that paper at the end of the talk. So if you stay long enough, you'll get the link. So having said that there is a strong STEM movement, the concern that I have is that there are and the interest that I have is that there are many controversies around products and services generated supposedly generated by STEM fields. And so these are some of them. But some people think that STEM products are fantastic. And I'm one of them. I'm actually a survivor of a serious health issue. And medical science and technology, STEM, whatever you want to call it, came to my rescue, along with a lot of people. And I was able to survive a crisis. And we know that many, many people around the world benefit from STEM products and services. But having said that, there are many people who are concerned about many of the kinds of problems that we're discussing here. These just come off the top of my head. So we're concerned about obesity and diabetes and other diseases related to fast foods. We're concerned about the poor labor conditions of many of the workers who generate STEM products and services. We're concerned about the extent to which many of the products and services purchased ultimately end up in landfills. And there are all kinds of problems associated with that. And of course, we're concerned with popular entertainment and the extent to which it's draining the brain, if you like, and causing people to behave in certain ways. So it's a form of control, mind control. And for me, near the top of the list, although I've been thinking recently that there are other major issues, is climate change due to the burning of fossil fuels. We really need to be concerned about these kinds of crises. So overall, although there are lots of positives about STEM fields, there are people who are concerned about these kinds of problems. And this is actually my area of interest. Now, from my basic philosophy, though, the question becomes, can we blame STEM fields? Are people who, you know, are scientists, engineers, mathematicians, technologists, are they to blame for these kinds of problems that we appear to face? I think the answer is largely no. And part of the rationale is that I think that STEM fields are embedded in a network of all living, non-living and symbolic or semiotic things. They're embedded in an actor network from my work with actor network theory. Excuse me. Now, this is just one depiction of such a network, just basically me playing around with graphics. But the idea being that if STEM fields are embedded in networks, the responsibility for these problems are distributed across the network. So you have to ask yourself, well, perhaps people in STEM fields are not particularly to blame for the problems that we're facing. Now, having said that, I'm particularly concerned as Aswathi was saying that, perhaps many of the problems that we're facing are due to the power that seems to be implemented through what I've been describing or using, let's say, the idea of dispositive from Foucault, the idea that we have collections of actants that are cooperating in ways to promote certain kinds of ends. And what are those ends? The bottom line, as I'll describe a bit later, seems to be wealth concentration and destruction of habitats and communities. And so you'll see within this network, this capitalist, neoliberal capitalist network, you see things that, such as obviously transnational corporations, but transnational entities that support them, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and others, but also forms of currency that float around the world. And of course, forms of mass entertainment that are distributing knowledge and perspectives around the world through a form of biopolitics. So strong concerns around the work that Foucault has provided us, the lenses through which he has provided us to look at this. So these are my concerns. And so because of these, for the last 10 years, I have been focusing on a project perhaps inspired by Marx, but the idea being that we can't just know the world. So if we know the world has got problems, fine, that's enough. For some people, we can just say, okay, you've been educated. But for me, we have to go one step further and say, no, we have to do something about it. That's our job. That's our responsibility. Those of us who have a knowledge of this, and I would suggest an ethics around these concerns. So community members, in my view, must become critical or be critical and activist through that symbolism, remembering that any form of symbolism is problematic. So it's just stolen off the web. Now, a basic question becomes, if you get into this work, well, why would any students, and I work with students in schools and undergraduate students and others, students and youth after school programs and other situations at museums and so on, why would they want to take actions for the other? Why would they want to behave in an altruistic way? Why would they want to give of themselves? Well, one answer that we've come to essentially is they have to, in a sense, own the problem. They need to own the controversy, but certainly they need to own the potential problems. And how do we get them to do that? We get them to conduct student-directed and open-ended research. See if I can use this pointer correctly. So something in this area here, so open-ended being no predetermined conclusion, a wide variety of possible conclusions, open-ended. And then procedures could be completely student-directed. So what we're trying to do is promote student-directed and open-ended research, both primary research where they're conducting their own investigations like experiments and studies, or secondary research such as the accessing information generated by others available on the Internet. So you can see one little example. This is more symbolic than real, although the data is from a high school kid, a group of kids, but around climate change. And we've indicated a number of actions that they have developed and some of the secondary and primary research that they have developed. So what we do is we promote what we call research-informed and negotiated action projects. And we've reduced that to RENA projects just for short because it's a mouthful. But the negotiation part is very important because we believe that decision-making around actions are a very complex negotiated phenomena that arise from many variables such as emotions, such as data, which are never emotion-free in my view, and culture and so on. Theory, don't forget theory. So given that the school system, correct me if I'm wrong, and this is in my world, the school system still tends to prioritize teaching of the achievements of science and technology or STEM fields. We want you to learn what we know. And that's not a bad thing. But the emphasis seems to be excessively in that direction. And because of that, largely students, they really get anxious around being asked to conduct their own research, design and conduct their own research, and of course they haven't had a lot of chance to do action. So the existing conditions are that it's a struggle to get students to do these sorts of things. So we've developed this pedagogy that you see here on the left. And it's basically, and quite simplistically, based on constructivism, constructivist learning theory. So we asked the students to reflect on their existing conceptions of STEM and society and environment relations. What do you currently know? What are your beliefs? What are your attitudes, et cetera, around the way the world is now? And we place a lot of emphasis in this stage on where the kids are at and honoring those positions. We want the kids to feel good about where they come from, what their cultural backgrounds are, what their historical backgrounds are, et cetera, their parental backgrounds and their daily lives and so on. It's about them. Having said that, we are conscious that, for example, from the idea of differences in cultural capital that we learned from Bourdieu, that many students struggle with discovering concepts, attitudes, skills and so on that could be useful to them. So there's a phase in which we actually teach them some things that we think they wouldn't otherwise discover. And I'm going to stress this a bit later. And then having passed through that stage where the teacher is a bit more in control, teaching them some things that they should know, we give the kids an opportunity to practice these rena projects with some support from the teacher as needed. Not a directed kind of practice, but a supportive kind of practice. And then we return to the students reflect phase where the students can now say, now what do I think about STEM-SE relationships? Now what do I think about the world of science and technology and so on? And if the teacher feels through those kinds of works, and by the way, one of the key things we've done here is we've asked the students to reflect on the nature of rena projects themselves. What's the nature of STEM-SE relationships? What's the nature of research? So it's nature of science, nature of research. And what is the nature of action? So it's a meta-analysis that these kids are being asked to conduct in this stage. And then at that point, the teacher then decides whether or not they need to go through another loop. And then, but it may be, and we've seen some cases where they can then be led over to conduct their own self-directed rena projects. Okay. The time period varies with the students, and it varies with the teacher. So if there is no formula for this, it's very, sorry. Oh, yeah. So one cycle would normally be conducted over the period of a, let's say a quarter of a course. Yeah, normally. Somewhere in that ballpark. So, and actually in my part of Canada, it's Ontario, which is a province. They require the students in the middle grades to have four units of study. And so this could run through one of those units. And they may have to do it again in a second unit. And then the third and the fourth units could be used for the sort of student-led project, because they tend to take a bit more time. And they're usually more extensive. So thank you. Yeah. Any questions about, other questions about the overall framework? I'm going to give you examples now. So it's not like I'm, I'm not, I'm done with this. I'm telling you about stepwise. And I've been asked to talk about that. So I'm going to give you some details. Any other questions of clarification? Just want to clarify, this model applied mostly on the right-hand side. I mean, the first quarter, the open-ended and the student-led one. Yeah. No, no, I'm looking at the chart there. Oh, this part, yeah. Yeah. This is applied on the first quarter. So, okay, that's a good question then. So all of this would be here. So this would be kind of here because there needs to be some teacher direction. But you know, there's a tendency to try to keep it more open-ended because we want to know what do the students know and believe and so on. But then when we get to this stage, the teacher teaches, then it becomes quite a bit more here. And then what it's into the where am I? Yeah. Oh, yeah, the student's practice stage. Then we're, again, we're back to over here somewhere. But it varies depending on the student, the teacher, the availability, materials, all kinds of factors will vary that. Yeah. Are we not compartmentalizing again the whole process? Because I thought, I was thinking that everything that you explained comes into that particular quarter, the right-hand side. I don't understand the question. I mean, the moment that you bring back again the teacher-led discussion only, then you're again compartmentalizing, isn't it? Well, you're providing them with access to ideas, and as I said, so I'm just repeating myself. You're providing them with things to which they would not otherwise have access. And this is particularly a problem, and believe me, it's a huge problem. And for me, this is extremely important because our world is highly segregated, as you know. The poorest kids cannot discover these things. So we need to teach those kids. We have a responsibility to do so. Okay, so what I'm going to do at this stage is use the simpler model. It's the same model, but it just doesn't have as much sort of noise to go with it. To give you some examples of each of the phases of the apprenticeship versus me of the pedagogy that's on the left. Now, there are many ways, have a look at these pictures, but there are many ways in which one could ask the students to reflect on and express their preconceived notions about STEM S-E relationships. I keep saying S-T-S-E because in Ontario we don't have in the curriculum STEM S-E, it's S-T-S-E. But anyway, in asking the students to reflect on what they know, they believe, what they would do, how they would do things and so on and so on. There are many things you could do, and I could go over many of those, but we don't have time. Now I am doing a workshop over the next two days starting tomorrow, so if you're involved in that, then you'll get a lot more ideas about how this can be done. But one of them, because of my interest probably, is that because of the concerns around consumption that we have presented the students with various forms of consumer products and services and or ask them to supply such products and services or name such products and services themselves that they're commonly using. And we simply ask them questions such as, what do you like and dislike about these things? And you might be doing the same thing as I talk. What's good and what's bad about them? You might also be asked, as the teacher might ask the students, what other people or groups would like or dislike these things? Now what you'll notice, you may or may not notice, is that I'm using more divergent style of questioning. I'm attempting not to influence the particular responses of the students. And then we might also ask them if there are any problems or harms that you feel are happening, what would you do about it? And they're just vague, open-ended types of questions and we have the students explore those. And through that exercise, as you can imagine, the students' views, attitudes, skills of knowledge are, as we say, all over the map. They're just a huge range of things. Now you as a teacher are placed in a situation where you have an idea that, oh, yeah, well, I could see the problems with those. You should know that. And you might evaluate the students in a way that isn't necessarily honoring their backgrounds as I said before. So at this stage, I want to stress again that we place a lot of emphasis on asking the students to express their views. And the teacher, we put a lot of emphasis on the teacher honoring those views and celebrating those views and attitudes and skills. Again, I can't stress that enough. I don't want to make the mistake of going too far too fast. So going back to the model, again, for those students particularly, and this is Bourdieu largely, who struggle with capital, who struggle to discover, and by the way, I wanted to mention something very important to me after I lubricate. There is a huge inquiry-based learning movement in parts of the world. And I don't know if it's here. Inquiry-based learning is here. Okay, so I have serious concerns. I've written about problems around inquiry-based learning. And you might detect that it's because if you have a particular thing you want the students to learn and you ask them to conduct their own inquiries to do so, you're placing them in a situation that is not unlike what that would scientists have had to do and how long has that taken scientists and engineers to do these things? And can all kids do this because of their differences in cultural capital? I think the answer is no. And so for those reasons, as I said earlier, I just wanted to stress that we actually spend time teaching particular things. And I'm going to give you some examples of things we teach. Now, this is just a little exercise, which it may be elementary to you, but this is to make my point that I've been saying. But tell me quickly, anyone want to just tell me, if they haven't seen this one before, what do you see? Okay, anyone else? Quickly? No? Okay. A map? Okay. I haven't heard that one yet. That's good. Okay. A face. Okay. Right. So this is, in a sense, making the point of trying to stress. And that is that you all have different conceptions. You have a common experience. The data coming to you is common relatively. Angles are different. But the data coming to you is common. Whatever's in your head, as you probably know, is causing you to construct a different image from this. And so basic constructivism. So yeah, it is a lot of people think, you know, the main thing that people see there, or at least the reason this is an image, is that they're supposed to be a dog with it's the hind end of a dog. There's the dog leaning down towards and picking something off the ground or sniffing off the ground in this area. Does anybody see the dog that didn't see it before? Because I did that? My teaching isn't so bad. Okay, so the teacher tries to get, yes, question? No? The teacher tries to get the kids to learn these things and they still, with direction, struggle to get the kids to learn certain things. So you can see the strength with which the material that's in our minds will determine how we see the world. And that applies to mixing chemicals and, you know, when you get the results, trying to make a decision about what's happening with that and so on and so on. So that's, I just really want to stress. That's why I have, one of the main reasons why, and there are others, ask me if you like later about the publication where I raised a number of concerns around inquiry based on learning. So this is why we want to teach certain things. So one of the things to teach, and again this is my orientation, is the concept of the Trojan horse as a consumer product. So consumer products are like Trojan horses to me. So this is my conception, I guess. And we have a publication, a chapter in a book coming out about this. But the idea is that a Trojan horse is beautiful on the outside and you want to have it because of its outside outer beauty. But hidden within it, in this case are soldiers, but hidden within it are dangers. And in a way the outside, the beauty of the outside distracts you from being conscious of what's harmful inside, per se. So that's the concept. Now an example is, genetically engineered salmon. And this is a particular one from a particular company, I think out of the US primarily. And the idea is that, you know, the advertising especially will say, we can feed the world. Look at the size of these genetically engineered fish compared to the natural fish that are in the ocean. And so it's wonderful. And it's not unlike stem movements where it's positive on the outside and there's compromises on the inside. But in analyses, and by the way this comes from Clayton Pierce, who wrote a book about biopolitics. You might want to look at Pierce 2013. And what he's done is he's depunctualized. So if you imagine the salmon as punctualized in actor network theory, in other words, it appears to be a black boxed or a single point or node in a network. But when you open it up and look inside or you look around and you look at the connections to which it is attached in dialectical ways, then you would see these kinds of relationships. This is not a complete map, actor network map of this GE salmon. But it's one. And some of the problems associated with this are wealth concentration because of the ownership associated with that salmon. And also, it turns out the sea lice are quite a problem for the salmon, both the wild salmon and the GE salmon. So because of their factor kept in these pens, they're causing a series of problems with the livelihood of the actual fish. So those are the kinds of hidden dangers that are associated about which we're not aware because of the wonder of the food production associated with GE salmon. Now associated with that, as I've been saying, is incredible difference between rich and poor. We need to teach the kids. So we teach them about commodification, consumption, the Trojan horse, and all these actor network things that I've described. But we associated with this needs to be the fact, which I think is a fact, that we're living in a world that's increasingly divided between the very rich and the many, many very poor. Now this is a nice little thing, this image from Brazil, but this is a bit more concrete, although the image is, anyway, there are, according to Oxfam, and this is a year ago report you may have seen, that eight white men, I have to mention they're white men, and of course I'm one of those, have the equivalent wealth of 3.6 billion people. Now that's about the population, the lower half of the world's population. Now I think a couple of months later I read a report that said it was now six that had that wealth. And my guess is, I haven't looked at a recent report, Oxfam might just come out with a new report soon. But it seems to be, I don't know if you know Thomas Piketty's book, Capitalism in the 21st Century, but he is warning us that in the past, and his study of 300 years of capitalism has suggested that we're now in a period in which we can't, we haven't got the buffer practices to distribute wealth across populations. The systems are in place now to just in a sense go crazy with concentrating wealth. And of course with that wealth concentration, as the previous graphic is intended to show, comes incredible environmental and social destruction. So, we've talked about, now this is kind of what I said before about Marx's point, that, you know, it isn't enough to talk about the problems and the nature of the world, but we need to change the world. And so in the teaching, we need to teach the kids examples of rena projects that others have conducted. Now I've just arbitrarily chosen one from a student. Now we do often show students rena projects from adults and all kinds of members of the public, but we also show them rena projects from students because it gives them the sense that, hey, I can do this too. And so this is one where a student noticed that a local drug company had been discovered to be hiding negative data from some of its tests. And so she researched this, developed an actor network map, did some primary research in terms of some local study of students' understandings of this controversy or problem, and then launched an educational program, including a video, interviewed by a CEO of a pharmaceutical company that plays on the web. And my point I'm making on the left, and this is something from my province, Ontario, is that these kind, the things that I've just discussed, the things to teach cover all parts of our curriculum, which are relationships between science, technology, society and environment, or STEM SE, skills education, how to pipette, how to design an experiment, et cetera. And then product, what I call products education, how to explain, name and explain the parts of the cell, et cetera. Whoops, I think I blew it. Okay, yeah, there we go. So as I was saying before, we need to get the students to the point where they, we've exposed them to some of these things, but that's not enough. They need to be engaged in these kinds of things more directly. We use Wenger on this, the idea of knowledge duality primarily for this, but there may be other theories that would explain why the students need to be more fully engaged, and there are. And so here's an example of a arena project in this practice phase, and it's this teacher speaking, and I think I might be in trouble in terms of time. Am I, how am I doing? Hey, tell me about this. Okay, so this is a diorama that was developed by one of the groups who studied shampoos for their research on the action of progestin chemistry. So what this group did, which was really interesting, was they took a shampoo bottle, right, and then they, on the outside, they put these little statements, so all the positive things about the shampoo, so hydrates your hair, healthy glow. They even actually read some of those claims, and I just want to mention one claim, because in our discussion around this, they thought this was interesting. On the back it says, drink on me. Let this rich conditioner indulge you from root to tip, moving moisture through your hair to quench perched strands. It's a sip of satisfaction. So the kids thought how interesting this claim was that, you know, one of the girls said, we're not going to drink this. It makes the same as though we're going to drink this. So what they thought they would do as part of their action, which we're going to display this in the library, is on the outside they want to put things, again, these claims, overly positive claims about the shampoo, and then they cut it up, and when you open it up, what you do not see are some of the negative claims, some of the things that are often hidden away from us. So things like, it may dry your hair. Some things in it are toxic. Rashes can cause rashes and skin irritant. It eliminates natural oils. So they said these are the things we don't see. They develop little models of molecules, which then they had a little legend on their poster. So this goes together, right? So the little, I guess, I don't know, the yellow here is, this yellow molecule here is the polyethylene glycol, and they wrote a little bit about what polyethylene glycol does. So strips hair of natural moisture. It contains one for dioxane, a chemical that can cause liver and kidney damage. So I thought this was a really neat idea of how they developed this. So right there's the big mind map there, so the whole requirement was to actually try to unpack all those different components, living in all living that. By the way, he never used the idea or named actor-network theory or actor-network maps. He called the mind maps for, in fact, the kids were only in grade 10, which is 15-year-old kids. Sorry. All kind of interact together to make shampoo. Maybe other kids do dioramas. This was the only one. Why was that? It was partly guided by me. I thought, you know, what are you going to do girls? And they said, well, we have all these different ideas, and I kind of thought, okay, well, if you take a shampoo and you might do something around exposing some of those things that might be hidden from us, and they used the word trojan horse analogy. So they really got this from the trojan horse. They really wanted this to be the shampoo, you know, the trojan horse. Yeah, so that's basically it. And I thought it was neat how they made it so that when you actually close it, you see the good things. Oh, by the way, there's the good things on the other side, too. So cleans and gets rid of dendro, but it's only really when you expose it that you start to see some things and you don't see. Thank you. Hey, tell me about this. Okay, so this is a diorama that was... Get rid of that. So, yeah. So that was student practice. And then, as I said, we would return to students' reflections if, well, all the time, actually. And that would vary depending on how many times the students have been through a cycle like this. And then if the teacher decides to get the kids to run their own arena projects, here would be an example of one of those students' projects. So a little bit more video time here. This is what foundation does. Hide what we don't want others to see because we're scared to get judged. And this is what advertisers do. Hide what they don't want their audience to see so they can promote their business as best as possible. Just like every person in the world, each product that's made has their own story to be told. And I'm going to tell you the story of foundation. The first step to making foundation is extraction. When hardworking miners are putting the job to mine non-renewable natural resources that we essentially end up wasting in a bottle on our skin then picking off after the day ends. And creating even more waste. Being a miner is a very hazardous job due to all the dangerous toxins being exposed to the workers. Also, a lot of pollution is created due to the machinery and technology used. Some of the main resources needed to be extracted to make foundation include magnesium, silicone, aluminum, alcohol, and many petrochemicals that are toxic to us humans and the environment. The extraction process is very dangerous and has many negative, harmful toxic effects on our planet. The second stage in foundation's life is production. During the production stage, all of the raw materials are sent off to factors where they get processed into the actual product. Some big problems with factories like these are the harmful. So I think I better stop it. Sorry about that. Time is running short and I have a little bit more to say and I think it's fairly important that I do say it. So I'm going to unfortunately stop that. Now that video is available on YouTube as you can see and there is a link to it on my website. And also I expect you can get there one way or another from that paper to which you'll get a link later at the end. So yeah, this is really what I feel I need to spend some time discussing and the time that I have. The project or the stepwise framework that I've just described to you I have to honestly say, I don't know what your guess is but it doesn't actually work that much in schools. So it's a sad thing for me. I mean, I've been at this for ten years. We have a book called Stepwise that's just come out which we've documented many, many cases of students, teachers working with students to do this and youth and so on. But it seems to only happen in particular context. You need in a sense a desirable set of variables or conditions to come together and so again I draw from Foucault's dispositive. You need to have a particular dispositive or not a particular but a desirable, useful dispositive collected. And so what I would like to do is describe for you some of the elements that seem to be important in making this happen in actual schools. First of all, my province, Ontario is to place STSE education as one of the three overall goals and has done so for the last ten years and previously for the previous ten years it was in the third position of three. So it's been in the curriculum for twenty years. So just the fact that it's there gives teachers a license to teach about these kinds of things. They wouldn't do it otherwise. I can fairly well assure you. So that's been really important. So if you want to promote this, work on your governments to get this kind of thing in the curriculum. It's going to take time. In fact I can tell you the story in Canada. It goes back even further at the national level. There were curriculum meetings that ultimately decided on a national set of curriculum recommendations where education was prioritized. And it was only after that that certain provinces started to take this up. Now the pedagogy that I just described is yet again shown in a different graphical form. This was developed by one of my student teachers seems to contribute to the success and then a body of pedagogical materials. Teaching and learning materials need to be developed and over the ten years we've managed to do that and share those. And in the workshops I will be sharing with everyone large numbers of resources. So teachers can't do this and won't do this without actually having something to work from. Not to say that they're going to copy and repeat these kinds of activities. Now this one takes a bit more time so I'm not going to elaborate it but there needs to be certain features of the teacher. Now we feel the teacher needs to have a certain view of the nature of science for example. If the teacher feels that science is a process that uses logic but is affected by politics, economics, gender, culture, race, accident, all kinds of factors and cannot necessarily lead to the truth they seem to be more likely to do these kinds of things and we actually have evidence to support that. So that's what this is all about. If they're here they're here, they can be here. And there's a paper out there of mine about that actually but not so much about the STSE or STEM SE work. So that's the end. I'm hoping that some of you might like to take up the challenge to take on these projects with students and if so there are access to resources on my on the stepwise website, stepwiser.ca This is the link to the downloadable paper about which covers what I've discussed and you can send it to me. So thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for sharing with us both the successes as well as challenges of implementing such a radical idea such as stepwise. So we have about 10 minutes and maybe we could take about 6 questions. So we have one over there. Hi, my name is Rossi. Actually I was a little bit uncomfortable with some of the examples which were used because for example, the cosmetics and all. I think it felt that it would serve to say sham young girls who want to use makeup and basically look nice and also take care of their skin. And I say I refer to them because I can afford to not use any cosmetics and still I'm not looking nice. That I did not mean that. It kind of seems to advocate for this individual solutions. That the rich are getting richer and the environment is going terrible because we are not wasting water. We are using these chemicals. We are going for these things. So I was wondering whether that may be... My response I think is two fold. Now we didn't choose that particular example around cosmetics. Those are chosen by the students. So you wouldn't... I mean I don't want to stereotype too much. We found that the boys tended to do projects that dealt with things like deodorant and the girls tended to choose to investigate cosmetics. Now we would show the students... the second part of my answer is we would show the students in the future something that previous students had done. Now remember I already said this. The example I showed you is the tip of the iceberg. It's just one of many. So if a student has done this I don't see any problem with showing it again to other students. Among many. So in a short talk like this it is impossible to give you a full representation of what examples we provide. Abhijeet. So you made a remark. Hello. Oh my goodness those microphones are... Yes. Okay. So actually this question is about when you remarked that the point is to change the word. Of course having the full thing is that the point is not to understand the word but change the word. When we focus on change I think the understanding part gets occluded to some extent. It gets what? The understanding part gets less attention from the educators. And the more important part is that to change the word to what end. So that question also remains goes out of focus. To these two parts and actually then I liked your concluding remark. So that probably works against your concluding remark. Yeah. So the idea of change is something that we feel needs to be made public in school science programs. The very first thing that came to mind around the delusion problem that you mentioned is a recent, well somewhat recent there's a history to it but there's this guy Steve Fuller who was written about science technology studies so the study of the nature of science and so on and he has identified what he calls, now these aren't necessarily the best terms high church and low church programs in STS. High church and low church. So when he says high church what he's talking about is studies where they're very academic, we're interested in how things work trying to understand knowledge flows, factors that affect these one thing or another and so on and so on. More like the way science is conducted. And so that high church is very important and I think that's what you're discussing. You would dilute that high church. But he's also saying there's a need for and there's a history of and actually he says, actually an article I read recently, excuse me, suggested that the history of STS is actually more low church which is, it arose from conflict it arose from the problems that apparently occurred in this 1960s that would seem to be associated with STEM products or science and technology products. And so there's a there has been a movement of low church STS towards a more eclectic approach more challenging and critiquing of very fields of science and technology and orientations towards change. You know pushing science and technology themselves to change. High church is less about change. Low church is more about change. And you know he wouldn't say it's a binary. And so there's an article recently, a chapter recently that recommends what he calls, this author calls an engaged program. And this is a program of STS that combines low and high church. So I think hopefully that answers your first question. And that's where we stand. That's why in fact in the model we explore we teach them very deep knowledge and skills and actually here's an interesting thing, I don't know if this is a question but it's been a question that I've had many times and that is that this test, because this takes so much time, teachers would say well I can't teach all the content. And by that they mean the knowledge. So the depth of the knowledge can be compromised. Well it turns out in our research we find the opposite. We find that the kids who do these projects develop deeper understandings of the material and a greater interest in engaging in it. And so they actually do better on test scores than kids in the same course, you know like a different section of the same course taught by a different teacher without this approach. I think it's because they're applying the knowledge and it's personalized. Now I'm bad, my memory is bad. The second question was about other questions? So one of the things possibly you may not have talked about is one of the most dangerous Trojan horses in the current society. The most dangerous Trojan horses which is around in all our pockets and all our lives is the digital Trojan horse. Because of the media part, the substantial products are a different thing. In fact, so there is also this undercurrent and a much bigger larger resistance to this is the free software movement. The free and open source software movement is actually trying to fight against the Apple, Microsoft, Facebook all these things. And the way how this movement is actually addressing the issue of education is a little different. Instead of trying to modify the curriculum they're changing the culture. In terms of more use of digital they're actually changing the culture by actually making the alternative things which are not the Trojan horses. Keeping a transparent technology and spreading the transparent technology to the whole world and trying to embed the values of freedom, democratic participation and wiki culture and creative commons culture and things like that. So that actually is playing a much bigger impact in terms of educating the people about the value of the kind of things that you talked about. So I was wondering do you think that this kind of education, which is about cultural change rather than just trying to change the curricular things inside which as you said is a very uphill task. Because trying to change the people who change the decisions of what curriculum, what kind of change etc. Instead if you actually change practices, that is the cultural practices, it might be more effective. Yes, well I mean I don't know if this is appropriate, I'm not sure I followed all the examples you provided, I don't have that background, but you know it's important to recognize and I think this goes back to the earlier question that A, we're not promoting any particular kind of change. We, you know, to be honest I guess you would actually have to say if I were the teacher my students would hear some critiques of capitalism. And so there would be some particular changes in that direction. But ultimately we still make an effort to allow students to make decisions for themselves. Now the second part of this is that what you just described I think relates to an earlier question as well in the sense that I can't possibly tell you all the ways in which, or all the examples that we would teach but what you just described sounds like something that we would very much want students to explore. So we're open to all possibilities like this. It's about looking at the world in a critical way but ultimately allowing for individuals and groups to make decisions for themselves. And I think that's an important part of the second question that I can't really forgotten. So I don't know if I'm answering the question adequately. So we could have one more question and then maybe we could close the session. Okay, there are two parts to my question. First is what would you say are the indicators that here, what would you say are the indicators which would say that STS education is happening and secondly according to you what are the desired outcomes? Well I can't do it all but with the examples I've used I think and I could go on and on, believe me. But with the example I've used which I think you can go back to in remembering what I said you know kids come in when they go to reflect on you know where's my cell phone but if you give them a cell phone to look at and ask them what do they like and dislike about it. You know they're going to say well I like a shininess and I don't like the fact that I have to buy another one in a year so they will have certain ideas about it at that stage. So an indicator of progress in STSE would be that they've started to say that product is now no longer a single entity. In their mind it's not a cell phone anymore. It's an entity that's tied into a network and that network might contain living, non-living and semiotic things. Those things may be human made or not and so on. So there would be a number of things. They may be dialectical relationships between them. The identity of your thing is problematized. In other words we don't know what the thing is. We don't know what the cell phone is because of this thinking. We now see it as a network. We now see it as distributed. Whatever it is it's not there. It's diffuse and changing and that happens. We see this with kids. So that's huge progress. Now the second question I'm so bad. Outcomes. I mean that's an outcome. But another example would be we use this dispositive concept and initially we had kids doing actions that were really local. They would put up posters around the school and they would do some PowerPoint presentations to their class and this sort of thing. But eventually we saw that in time with educating them they started to say if I put up a poster and take a picture of that poster and put it on Twitter and if I take that and copy it to Facebook and if I make a morning announcement of it and if I send a letter to the local mayor. So in other words if they develop a series of actions that are co-supportive of the same general ideas they're constructing a dispositive. That's an outcome that we would be looking for and if we saw it we would be quite happy. But again the kids have such flexibility in the choice of projects or topics that we can't just put that down on a piece of paper and say I'm looking for this and looking for that specifically. It would be these general things that I'm describing. Thank you. Thank you very much. With this we'll close the session and if there are any further questions maybe you could take it up over tea. So we'll now have the paper sessions. Thank you very much Larry. Thank you. We'd like to thank Ashwati for chairing the session. Oh yes.