Jay Lemke Quotes

If you ask most teachers of science what their main goal is, they will probably say: for my students to understand the basic concepts of physics, chemistry, biology, or whatever other field is being studied. The critical words here are ‘understand’ and ‘concept’, and both of these terms assume a fundamentally psychological approach to learning... If we see the goals of science education in terms of what students will be able to do, and how they will be able to make sense of the world, rather than in terms of our speculations about what may be going on in their brains, then we need to see scientific learning as the acquisition of cultural tools and practices, as learning to participate in very specific and often specialized forms of human activity

Each community, each discourse tradition, has its own canons of intertextuality, its own principles and customs regarding which texts are most relevant to the interpretation of any one text

[Teachers] emphasize the human side of science: real activities by real human beings, both today and in specific periods of history. Personal characteristics of scientists, with which students can identify, should be emphasized rather than making scientists seem superhuman or alien.

Minds are formed by our social interactions in a community and a culture.

In terms of language, we do know what a scientific theory or conceptual system must be: it is a thematic pattern of semantic relationships in a subject, one that is reconstructed again and again in nearly the same ways by members of a community.

Scientific language that is correct and serious so far as teachers and students are concerned must follow these stylistic norms:

A genre is maintained by the conventions of a community, and in most cases serves specific functions within the system of practices of particular institutions of that community.

Many people have been taught a social habit, a discourse, for speaking about meaning, which considers only the role of the individual organism, or the individual mind, in the process of making meanings... Mentalistic discourses, by creating a separate realm and locating meanings there, are not useful for understanding the material and social aspects of meaning-making. Mentalistic discourses depend on a common sense view of the separation of mind from body, and individual from society, which has ideological functions in our society. Particular aspects of these discourses deflect attention away from the social, cultural, historical and political dimensions of the meanings we make.

Our visual discrimination is far better than our linguistic system at dealing with complex ratios and continuous variations in space, line, shape, and color.

The mystique of science is an essential tool for technocratic rule. Through it we are all taught that science, as the paradigm of all expert knowledge, has an objective, superior, and special truth that only the superintelligent few can understand. Science education, like it or not, does a great job in foisting these myths on most of us.

It is dangerous to society to have students leave school believing that science is a perfect means to absolute, objective truths, discovered by people of superhuman intelligence. Apart form the danger that scientific “findings” could be used to justify wrong social polices, an impersonal, inhuman view of science alienates many students from the subject. If we are to encourage students of all kinds to take in interest in science, and use it for their own purposes, we need to show it as it really is.

The medium of printed scientific text is first of all a visual one.

The language others speak to us, from childhood, shapes the attitudes and beliefs that ground how we use all our powers of action.

Multimodal presentations have an inherent critical potential to the extent that we learn how to use the images to deconstruct the viewpoint of the text, and the text to subvert the naturalness of the image.

All meaning is intertextual. No text is complete or autonomous in itself; it needs to be read, and it is read, in relation to other texts.