Contribution
Description: While it long has been accepted that the study of beliefs is important in understanding teacher's practices and their decision-making in the classroom, there is a growing body of research which argues that teachers' beliefs should be studied within a framework that recognises the influence of culture. Within the socially constituted nature of culture, experiences play an integral role in producing, filtering, prioritising and interpreting information, therefore, in creating knowledge and in shaping teachers' beliefs, which are knowledge, experience, and environment-based. Moreover, researchers explain that classroom practices are, in part, the result of beliefs being filtered by experiences. The role of experience in shaping beliefs and the practical impact of those beliefs is therefore clear.
Religion is a major element of culture, and so, religious influences on contemporary teachers' life should be considered when building an understanding of their experiences, and their related beliefs and practices. The influence of religion on the development any teacher's beliefs and practices will be significant, but the influence may be especially important in the area of science, technology and society (STS) because of the topics handled.
Most of the studies of beliefs in general, and STS in particular, have been carried out in western cultures, not in Islamic culture. A new study, in this different context, may give new insights into the dynamics of the relationship between experiences, beliefs and practices.
Many topics included in STS education are acknowledged as controversial issues, for example, evolution, cloning, abortion, and genetic engineering. These issues pose problems for science teachers, especially in Islamic countries, because of the nature of the conflict between the implications of a scientific study of some these issues, and Islamic religion. Some other issues may not formally conflict with Islam but, teachers' experiences or the way they interpret the Islamic view regarding these STS issues can create a false contradiction. Therefore, there is a need to understand teachers' experiences, beliefs, and practices about STS issues within socio-Islamic culture. This paper describes a study conducted to address these needs.
The main research question is "what influences have affected or shaped science teachers' beliefs and practices about STS education?" To answer this question, the study poses these sub-questions;
1. What is the variety of experiences that might influence teachers' beliefs and practices?
2. What is the role of experiences in shaping teachers' beliefs and practices?
3. What is the role of the Islamic-context on shaping teachers' experiences, beliefs and practices?
Methodology: The study adopted a constructivist perspective using an interpretive approach. The research was guided by teachers' interpretations of their experiences related to teaching science through STS issues, which I regarded as their socially constructed realities. These interpretations are re-interpreted to find meaningful conceptual categories (grounded in the data) from which to build a model to understand the influence of experiences within socio-Islamic culture on teachers' beliefs and practices.
162 Egyptian science teachers responded to a questionnaire to assess their beliefs about teaching/learning science within STS education. After analyzing the questionnaire data, the maximum variation strategy was used to select 10 teachers from the 162 teachers. Data were collected from these 10 teachers using interviews, memos and observations.
Conclusions: The findings of this study suggest that teachers' beliefs were shaped mainly by some sources acting together: pre- service experiences, teachers' life-in-school experiences, teachers' life-out-of-school experiences, Islamic religion and in-service experience. Another important finding suggests that the inconsistency between teachers' beliefs and practices can be explained by using the model which emerged based on the data analysis.
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