Ralph Levinson
Summary:
The importance of contemporary developments in biotechnology and biomedicine raise ethical concerns which, arguably, should be addressed in the school curriculum. An empirical study of teachers’ views from across the curriculum suggests that science teachers address the substantive science concepts whereas humanities teachers discuss the moral and ethical issues. However, this compartmentalised approach has substantial drawbacks. Focused training on teaching ethical issues is suggested, highlighting the teaching of ethical concepts.
Key Words: Ethics, curriculum, science, humanities, biomedicine, biotechnology.
Ralph Levinson
Science and Technology Group
The Institute of Education
University of London
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
E_mail: r.levinson@ioe.ac.uk
Introduction
If headlines in the press are a reflection of public concerns then developments in the biomedical sciences are having a major impact on western society at the turn of the millennium. Hardly a day goes by in the British press without an editorial or headline highlighting controversies, or reporting on debates in parliamentary committees, about the current implications of the new genetic, reproductive and biomedical technologies. These issues are aired beyond the broadsheets: One of Britain’s best selling tabloids, the Daily Mail, ran a series of feature articles springing from Prince Charles’ intervention in the debate over genetically-modified (GM) foods, ‘Charles: My Fears Over the Safety of GM Foods’1 Other long-running issues during 1999 and 2000 have covered the cloning of human tissue, genetic testing, pre-implantation diagnosis, xeno-transplantation and the artificial creation of new life. Shortly the Human Genome Project will have achieved its primary objective of sequencing the human genome providing an enormous amount of new genetic information and new opportunities.
These developments raise major questions about rights and responsibilities such as the rights of employers or insurance companies to have access to genetic data about individuals. Genetic testing can have implications for insurance policies although there is little evidence at present to show that insurance companies are systematically discriminating against people with genetic conditions.2 Pre-implantation diagnostic techniques open up the possibility of prospective parents selecting embryos with enhanced physical characteristics such as height. In vitro fertilisation treatment can influence perceptions on forms of family life and parenthood with consequent implications for legal judgements.3 Traditional family orientations can be maintained but new possibilities are opened up. These issues are complex both in the underpinning science and technology and in developing moral and ethical perspectives; indeed, the rate of development of research is such that even these perspectives are shifting with bewildering rapidity. Given the dominance of the popular press there is a need for students to appreciate the complexity of simplistic positions. Young people, at present in schools or further education, will encounter these new technologies in some form and will need to be equipped with the necessary skills, and an awareness of the social and ethical impacts, to contribute to the emerging dialogue between policy-makers and citizens4, as well as the skills and knowledge to make personal choices that become available to them. These are major challenges for the school curriculum.
The teaching of social and ethical issues arising from biotechnology and the biomedical sciences will not however have an impact only on the science curriculum and on science teaching. Issues of broad social concern are covered in sociology, human geography and history. Ethical issues are addressed by teachers of Religious Education, English and psychology. Acknowledging the complex interrelationship of science with social policy, Jenkins points to the need for science teachers to develop skills more commonly associated with English or History teachers, ‘in which debate and controversy constitute more familiar territory5’., a point reinforced by a comparative study of history and science teachers6. Scientific issues could be addressed from a variety of non-science perspectives7. It may then be appropriate to find out how the broader curriculum can be used as a resource for teaching controversial issues in science.
While the science curriculum undoubtedly provides an important site to discuss ethical issues it does not follow that science teachers have, or ought to have, the expertise to address them. There are many discussions of the relationship between science and ethics and the implications for science education, condensed, for example, by Michael Reiss8, focusing on the distinction between the empirical what is and the ethical what ought to be. Arguments certainly proliferate on the need to humanise the science curriculum but this is distinct from any conceptualisation of epistemological coherence in ethical and scientific enquiries. Others argue that the study of science is inherently value-laden9, 10and therefore ethical discourse may form a part of what science teaching should look like.
Teaching aspects of ethical enquiry may find a more natural home in, say, religious education, political science or psychology and the humanities in general; on the other hand humanities teachers may lack knowledge of the substantive science to formulate the appropriate ethical questions that arise from the new technologies. While there have been accounts of the problems that teachers are likely to encounter when teaching ethical issues in a science context 11there needs to be an empirical account of teachers’ perceptions of these problems. This article explores the different ways in which science and humanities teachers approach the teaching of ethical aspects of biotechnological and biomedical issues.
The project
1. to identify the perceived importance amongst teachers (especially science teachers) of social and ethical issues in the curriculum arising from developments in biomedical research;
2. to identify strategies currently employed in teaching issues with a social, moral or ethical dimension across the curriculum;
3. to indicate the successes and impediments to success in delivering issues based education;
4. to highlight the experience of teachers in approaching the social, moral, ethical and legal impacts of genetic research;
622 questionnaires were returned. 214 from headteachers, 156
from heads of science, 111 humanities specialists and 141 PSE
co-ordinators. The response rate for schools was 30.5% and for
teachers, 15.5%. In twenty of the schools who had returned the
questionnaires, and who had consented to a visit, semi-structured
interviews were carried out with headteachers and teachers across
the curriculum, both in groups and individually. Sample transcripts
were analysed blind by members of the project team, according
to an agreed set of headers, and transcript analyses compared.
There were no significant differences.
Subject perceptions
This comment reveals a dichotomy expressed by science teachers between the ‘knowledge’, i.e. the prevalent, academic-based discourse of science examination syllabuses, and the ethics. Expressing an opinion, discussion and debate are seen to subvert fact-based teaching. The knowledge or ‘mechanisms’ termed by the physics teacher in school D (below) clearly dominates teaching. Discussion of social and ethical issues tends to dilute the strong conceptual basis associated with school science, acknowledged by teachers and students alike.
Science teachers will have specific knowledge . . . but not necessarily any particular input on the ethical side . . . only concerned with the mechanisms of things like that. Science teachers are not perceived as having an ethical viewpoint (Physics teacher, School D)
A predominant perception of science, represented by the statement above, is one of an objective, value-free, realist discipline, and this is a marked trait of national curriculum science in England13. Young people are therefore naturally disaffected by this view of the world, which appears to explain a lack of interest in science. Work on young peoples’ views of science, including the social context of science, suggests that the implicit epistemology of science teachers is one that presents science as shorn of socio-political dilemmas14 such as the implications of genetic screening. Few of the twenty eight science teachers we interviewed suggested otherwise. Twelve of the teachers suggested explicitly that their teaching of science was about ‘facts’ and that it was up to students to ‘make up their own minds from a knowledge of the facts’.each the biological facts and on Those
Those science teachers who expressed a concept of the science curriculum as value-loaded included statements such as:
You can’t teach a topic like cloning without stressing that this is something people feel very strongly about.(Physics teacher, School D)
We do not deliberately find out what is bubbling at the moment. And there is a genuine problem here because we have a fixed syllabus. I can tell the pupils what they’re doing for every lesson for the next two years but there’s not the scope to deal with something. (Head of Science, School A).
In other words the science curriculum inhibits creativity. This suggests that some science teachers may address ethical and social issues in their teaching with a more flexible curriculum. It is equally possible, however, that science teachers conform to a curriculum approach that suits their implicit epistemology.
Humanities teachers saw themselves as complementing the teaching of socio-scientific issues. While science teachers taught the facts humanities teachers brought out the ‘moral and ethical issues’ (Head of Humanities, School J) thereby corroborating the views science teachers appeared to have of the curriculum. A minority of humanities teachers expressed doubts about their own level of science knowledge in dealing with social and ethical issues in a science context, this mainly related to teachers’ concerns about students using accurate information in discussion.
Humanities teachers did not, on the whole, use substantive science concepts in their teaching. English teachers explored the interest positions behind headlines, politics teachers focused, for example, on how lobby groups operated not on the content of the issues and in sociology
my teaching, the way it would come out would be the notion of control, power and the decision making in our society and relationships between this and the media and democracy and so on. (Head of Humanities, School A)
It was better in some cases to keep the science and ethical issues apart according to a small proportion of the humanities teachers we interviewed.
and if you talk about Hitler’s policy of eugenics, I don’t necessarily need a full genetic breakdown to be able to explain what we are looking at.(Head of Humanities, School O)
But a careful interpretation of the relationship between natural selection and evolution, and an understanding of the principles of genetics could help students to appreciate the questionable scientific validity of eugenics and the ways in which science can be distorted for ideological purposes. However, this is a deeply problematic area: what level of knowledge of genetics would be appropriate to address eugenics? And what level of understanding of the nature of science would be sufficient to distinguish between what is scientifically valid and what is not? It is therefore understandable, if not justifiable, that teachers resort to a pedagogy and content knowledge in which they feel secure.
Science practitioners were concerned about non-scientists
teaching issues-based science topics. Ability to deal with questions
was perceived as a clear difference, science teachers arguing
that they could deal more adeptly than humanities teachers with
issues if the technical information quoted by students was clearly
wrong. Doubts were expressed about non-scientists teaching the
social and ethical aspects of scientific issues because this
may encourage misconceptions to persist.
.. . .one does worry as a science teacher that when issues
like cloning are being dealt with that people dealing with it
are clear about the science of it and are not . . . . presenting
the view which we sometimes get through the media. Cloning is
a brilliant example because it seems to me that at least half
the population think a clone is a fully formed adult. . . . .people
are trying to deal with ethical issues concerned with this but
they’re not necessarily getting the science right. (Physics
teacher, School D)
The extract below is taken from an English essay written by a Year 10 student on the topic of Modern Monsters which contains views on cloning.
. . what if some eccentric multi-millionaire gave a team of scientists enough money to make a clone of him and keep quiet about it? This thing would be born already middle aged, who knows what the danger to the mother might be, and then released into normal society. Do we want mutants walking around, capable of anything? (submitted by an English teacher)
The teacher’s comments on the essay addressed aspects
of style and imagination but there was no comment on the accuracy
of the incorrect scientific ideas that the student discussed.
Humanities teachers, therefore, may be more interested in the
persuasiveness of an argument and pay less attention to the technical
information than science teachers. If the humanities, and English
in particular, are more fertile grounds for students to debate
and to articulate controversial ideas then the inability of teachers
without a science background to challenge these ideas would fail
to staunch important misconceptions.
Discussion points
It is a tall order for teachers to address the ethical aspects of contemporary science issues: few teachers, whatever their specialism, can handle this area with much confidence or experience. This is not due to any inadequacy on the part of the teachers but to the complexity of the issues. These new technologies are loaded with imponderables: assessing risk as in the debate over transgenics, the complex nature of the scientific process (how much can teachers know whether experiments have been carried out with proper controls in place; the different assessments of the developing technology); changes in both the nature of the ethical and legal processes as the technology develops. These are complex tasks for government appointed committees staffed by experts, let alone teachers who have pastoral, administrative and academic duties, and a varied curriculum over which they cannot possibly have full up-to-date knowledge all the time.
Nonetheless this should not necessarily lead to omission of
teaching ethical issues arising from developments in biotechnology
and biomedical science. What are needed are exemplars of what
teaching ethical issues in biomedical sciences might look like
and criteria which guide effective teaching of bioethics. For
science teachers the problem is particularly acute because controversy,
debate and the tentative nature of knowledge do not constitute
a significant part of their pedagogy. While humanities teachers
are more used to debate and discussion about contemporary issues
they often lack the substantive knowledge to address inaccuracies.
Even then it is unlikely that most humanities practitioners teach
issues from an ethical perspective, that is, weighing arguments
using ethical concepts, for example personalistic or consequentialist
models. Focused training in using ethical concepts for teaching
about a range of issues is essential if the ethical issues are
to be addressed in science.
Acknowledgements
Members of the research team at the Institute of Education
included Pavlos Koulouris, Sheila Turner, Anna Douglas, Jane
Evans and Alison Kirton. We would like to thank Peter Finegold
and Caroline Hurren of the Wellcome Trust for their support during
the study.
Footnotes
1 Daily Mail, 1st June 1999
2 Lawrence Low et al, "Genetic discrimination in life insurance: empirical evidence from a cross sectional survey of genetic support groups in the United Kingdom". British Medical Journal, vol. 317, 1998 pp. 1632-35
3 Marilyn Strathern "Enabling Identity? Biology, Choice and the New Reproductive Technologies" in Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity, London - Thousand Oaks - New Delhi, Sage Publications, 1996, pp37-52
4 Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Genetically modified crops: the ethical and social issues, London, Nuffield Council on Bioethics, May 1999
Edgar.Jenkins, "School science, citizenship and the public understanding of science", Int.J.Sci.Ed., vol 21 (7), 1999, pp. 703-10
5 Jim Donnelly, "Interpreting differences: the educational aims of teachers of science and history, and their implications". J. Curriculum Studies, vol 31, no 1, 1999, pp.17-41.
6 Paul Black, "The purposes of Science Education" in Richard Hull, (ed) ASE Science Teachers Handbook (Secondary), Hemel Hempstead: Simon and Schuster, 1992, pp 6-22.
7 Michael Reiss, Teaching Ethics in Science, Studies in Science Education, Volume 34, 1999, pp115-140.
8 Mary Midgely, Science as Salvation, London, Routledge, 1996
9 Michael Poole, Beliefs and values in science education, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995
10 Michael Reiss, op cit
11. PSE was thought to be a promising area to deal with ethical issues in a science context because it ostensibly brings together different areas of the curriculum in one lesson. However, findings from the project suggested that PSE has low status in English schools. Very little time is dedicated to it, PSE is not examined and both teachers and students see it as somewhat peripheral to the curriculum. Few bioethical issues were addressed in PSE and then only marginally.
12 Guy Claxton. "Science of the times: a 2020 vision of education", in Ralph Levinson and Jeff Thomas (eds) Science Today, Problem or Crisis? London: Routledge, 1997, pp 71-86
13 Rosalind Driver, John Leach, Robin Millar and Phil Scott. Young People's Images of Science, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996