An authoring view of education through the exploration of conceptions of nature

Abstract

One of the significant tasks of education is to enable one to learn to live a meaningful life. It will be argued that “nature” is a rich and fundamental source of meaning in this respect and yet that what is taught about nature in many conventional curricula is severely limited, resulting in an impoverishment of meaning. The central aim of this thesis is to identify and elucidate meanings of nature that have rich educational significance and to begin to explore their implications for pedagogy.

The investigation consists in three broad parts. The first is an analysis of a current set of curriculum guidelines in order to reveal some underlying ways in which limited understandings of nature are represented and promulgated. The Taiwanese Grade 1-9 Curriculum Guidelines is taken to exemplify this, and also the way in which global educational reform has resulted in the incorporation of a modern “Western” view of nature that is defective in two key respects: an underlying “homogenisation” and an underlying “disembodiment” in our understanding. It is argued that these result in the oversimplification of the content and process of learning with regard to nature.

In order to extricate our learning from the pitfall of oversimplification by inviting a richer experience of nature, this thesis explores our conceptions of nature. Five themes are identified to anchor the numerous, various, and complex conceptions of nature. Each theme with its implying polarities illuminates the significance of the human conceptualisation of nature as an on-going dynamic and dialectic process. It will be argued that the investigations invite us to reconfigure the curriculum so as to accommodate heterogeneous and plural views of nature and reveal the abundance of meaning to be had in different ways of experiencing nature in the context of one’s unique life.

Date of Award	1 Jun 2009
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Andrew Stables (Supervisor) & Michael Bonnett (Supervisor)