Includes bibliographical references / The South African policy document of the Revised National Curriculum Statement (RNCS) for Natural Science (Department of Education, 2002), the National Curriculum Statement (NCS) for Life Science (Department of Education, 2003), and the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) for Natural Science and Life Science (Department of Education, 2011) recognises and affirms the critical role of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) in science education. These policy documents expect the science teachers to integrate indigenous knowledge in their lessons. This study strove to establish how selected high school science teachers in the Western Cape Province responded to the inclusion of indigenous knowledge in their teaching. The present study employed a multi-method approach, involving different research methods used in parallel or sequence but are not integrated until inferences are made (Johnson, Onwuegbuzie & Turner, 2007). This study took place in two main sequential data collection phases, namely, the quantitative data collection phase ((QUAN) and the qualitative data collection phase (qual). This contemporary approach was employed in order to provide credible and trustworthy answers to the following research questions, namely, 1) To what extent are the science teachers in the Western Cape Province integrating scientific and indigenous knowledge, as required by the Department of Education? If not, what are their reasons for this? 2) What are the teachers' views about and understanding of the nature of science and indigenous knowledge as well as their views on how the two worldviews can be integrated in the classroom? 3) How effective was the treatment in enhancing the teachers' ability to integrate science and indigenous knowledge in the classroom? 4) To what extent can the model of Snively and Corsiglia (2001) be useful for measuring change as the teachers implement the integration of indigenous knowledge in the science classroom? For the QUAN phase, the researcher adapted a questionnaire and a new questionnaire, the Nature of Indigenous Knowledge Questionnaire (NOIKQ), was developed. The purpose of this questionnaire was to obtain a detailed description of high schools science teachers' understanding of scientific and indigenous knowledge, as well as the problems the teachers encounter in their implementation of Learning Outcome 3 of Life Sciences and Natural Science. After the pilot study of the questionnaire and subsequent modifications to it, data were collected. Convenience sampling and purposeful sampling characterised the samples of respondents and schools. This sampling strategy ensured a total sample of 370 high school science teachers in 80 public schools, represented by urban and township schools in the Western Cape Province. The results of the QUAN phase indicated that the teachers did not receive training on how to integrate science and indigenous knowledge, and that they did not have sufficient knowledge of indigenous knowledge to teach this aspect confidently to their learners. An inquiry was embarked on in order to train the science teachers in how to integrate indigenous knowledge in the science classrooms. A workshop was chosen as an intervention to improve the teaching skills of the teachers and to develop new methods of teaching. A quasi-experimental design was chosen to establish how effective the intervention was. In this quasi-experimental design, one group of five teachers was assigned to the intervention, whilst the other group of six teachers received no intervention at all. This intervention was based on the model of Snively and Corsiglia (2001) for integrating IK in the science curriculum. These teachers had participated in the survey and were selected for their particular interest in the research study. Classroom observations and three teacher and six learner interviews were used for collecting qualitative data to establish the effectiveness of the intervention. A finding from this study is that the worldviews that the teachers bring into the classroom have implications for approaches they take to include IKS in their lessons. The results of the qualitative phase indicated that, given the teachers background (i.e., cultural, political and social), teachers interpreted and implemented IKS in different ways in the curriculum. The teachers who attended the workshop and were trained to integrate indigenous knowledge in the science curriculum were more confident than those teachers who were not trained to integrate IK in the science curriculum. This increased confidence resulted from the workshop which enhanced the teachers' IK content knowledge and made them less dependent on the learners for examples of IKS. The study offers important implications and recommendations to teachers and policy- makers regarding the implementation of the integration of IKS in the science curriculum, as well as fruitful avenues for further research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/15553 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Jacobs, Keith Ronald |
| Contributors | Rochford, Kevin, Laugksch, Rudiger C |
| Publisher | University of Cape Town, Faculty of Humanities, School of Education |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, Doctoral, PhD |
| Format | application/pdf |
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