Contemporary Issues In African Sciences And Science Education

In this careful articulation of science, the editors provide an intellectual marriage of Indigenous science and science education in the African context as a way of revising schooling and education. They define science broadly to include both the science of the natural/physical/biological and the ‘science of the social’. It is noted that the current policy direction of African education continues to be a subject of intense intellectual discussion. Science education is very much at the heart of much current debates about reforming African schooling. Among the ways to counter-vision contemporary African education this book points to how we promote Indigenous science education to improve upon African science and technology development in general. The book also notes a long-standing push to re-examine local cultural resource knowings in order to appreciate and understand the nature, content and context of Indigenous knowledge science as a starting foundation for promoting African science and technology studies in general. It is argued that these interests and concerns are not mutually exclusive of each other but as a matter of fact interwoven and interdependent. The breadth of coverage of the collection reflect papers in science, Indigeneity, identity and knowledge production and the possibilities of creating a truly African-centred education. It is argued that such extensive coverage will engage and excite readers on the path of what has been termed ‘African educational recovery’. While the book is careful in avoiding stale debates about the ‘Eurocentricity of Western scientific knowledge’ and the positing of ‘Eurocentric science’ as the only science worthy of engagement, it nonetheless caution against constructing a binary between Indigenous/local science and knowledges and Western ‘scientific’ knowledge. After all, Western scientific knowledge is itself a form of local knowledge, born out of a particular social and historical context. Engaging science in a more global context will bring to the fore critical questions of how we create spaces for the study of Indigenous science knowledge in our schools. How is Indigenous science to be read, understood and theorized? And, how do educators gather/collect and interpret Indigenous science knowledges for the purposes of teaching young learners. These are critical questions for contemporary African education?

There is no term so heavily contested in social science literature/nomenclature than ‘Development’. This book brings Indigenous perspectives to African develop¬ment. It is argued that contrary to development as we know it not working, a greater part of the problem is that conventional development approaches that work have in fact not truly been followed to the letter and hence the quagmire. All this is ironic since everything we do about our world is development. So, how come there is “difficult knowledge” when it comes to learning from what we know, i.e., what local peoples do and have done for centuries as a starting point to recon¬structing and reframing ‘development’? In getting our heads around this paradox, we are tempted to ask more questions. How do we as African scholars and research¬ers begin to develop “home-grown solutions” to our problems? How do we pioneer new analytical systems for understanding our communities and offer a pathway to genuine African development, i.e., Indigenist African development? (see also Yankah, 2004). How do we speak of Indigenist development mindful of global developments and entanglements around us? Can we afford to pursue development still mired in a “catch up” scenario? Are we in a race with the development world and where do we see this race ending or where do we define as the ‘finishing line’? A Publication of the Centre for School and Community Science and Technology Studies [SACOST], University of Education, Winneba, Ghana

Each volume in the 7-volume series The World of Science Education reviews research in a key region of the world. These regions include North America, South and Latin America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe and Israel, North Africa and the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The focus of this Handbook is on research in science education in mostly former British colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa and the scholarship that most closely support this program. The reviews of the research situate what has been accomplished within a given field in Sub-Saharan Africa rather than an international context. The purpose therefore is to articulate and exhibit regional networks and trends that produced specific forms of science education. The thrust lies in identifying the roots of research programs and sketching trajectories – focusing the changing façade of problems and solutions within regional contexts. The approach allows readers to review what has been done and accomplished, what is missing and what might be done next.

Based on interrogation and review of historical and current cultural and indigenous knowledge combined with extensive curriculum and classroom analysis, this book identifies how indigenous science gender roles may be utilized to provide a more gender balanced and indigenous centered learning experience. The book argues for the integration of African indigenous science into the secondary school curriculum as a way to strengthen students’ science comprehension by affirming their society’s science contributions, making clear connections between Indigenous and Western science, and also as a way to promote female representation in the sciences. This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of science education, African education, and indigenous knowledge.

AIJCSHSS Journals are special-focus book editions that challenge scholars to address current issues in Africa in new innovative ways. In this edition entitled "Gender and Governance," the journal boasts of two subsections "Gender" and "Governance" where many scholarly papers from Humanities and Social Sciences address contemporary issues in Africa from this foci. Thus all the selected essays in this edition interrogate ideas, issues and practices that address issues of "Gender" and "Governance" in Africa and African Diaspora from various field of scholarship especially the Humanities and Social Sciences.

This book is an intellectual journey into epistemology, pedagogy, physics, architecture, medicine and metallurgy. The focus is on various dimensions of African Indigenous Knowledge (AIK) with an emphasis on the sciences, an area that has been neglected in AIK discourse. The authors provide diverse views and perspectives on African indigenous scientific and technological knowledge that can benefit a wide spectrum of academics, scholars, students, development agents, and policy makers, in both governmental and non-governmental organizations, and enable critical and alternative analyses and possibilities for understanding science and technology in an African historical and contemporary context.

This book arises from the author’s experience of the South African science curriculum development and teaching since 1994, exploring definitions of science and approaches to science education appropriate to a newly liberated developing country. Each of the 50 chapters is borne out of Cliff Malcolm’s close relationships with communities in SA where he obtained deep insights into their attitudes to science teaching and learning, providing him with an empirical basis to challenge tertiary institutions to transform their curriculum offerings to embrace the culture and world views of African students.

This handbook gathers in one volume the major research and scholarship related to multicultural science education that has developed since the field was named and established by Atwater in 1993. Culture is defined in this handbook as an integrated pattern of shared values, beliefs, languages, worldviews, behaviors, artifacts, knowledge, and social and political relationships of a group of people in a particular place or time that the people use to understand or make meaning of their world, each other, and other groups of people and to transmit these to succeeding generations. The research studies include both different kinds of qualitative and quantitative studies. The chapters in this volume reflect differing ideas about culture and its impact on science learning and teaching in different K-14 contexts and policy issues. Research findings about groups that are underrepresented in STEM in the United States, and in other countries related to language issues and indigenous knowledge are included in this volume.