Jay Lemke Quotes

A discourse, a way of speaking, is considered less scientific, or even rendered ‘unscientific’ exactly to the extent that it includes elements either of the language of feeling or of the language of action and values.

Science teachers have a special responsibility to study the nature of science as a discipline, how it works, how it is described by sociologists, historians, and philosophers from different points of view…. Science education cannot just be about learning science: Its foundation must be learning about the nature of science as a human activity.

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.

The basic point-of-view is that science is a social process.

Science does not speak of the world in the language of words alone, and in many cases it simply cannot do so. The natural language of science is a synergistic integration of words, diagrams, pictures, graphs, maps, equations, tables, charts, and other forms of visual and mathematical expression... [Science thus consists of] the languages of visual representation, the languages of mathematical symbolism, and the languages of experimental operations.

We are constantly reading and listening to, writing and speaking, this text in the context of and against the background of other texts and other discourses.

Meaning is a much more fundamental notion than truth, indeed more fundamental even than the notion of "reality" itself. The basic argument [of the essay] was that claims about truth or reality are meanings made by people according to patterns that they have learned, and that trying to understand how and why people make the meanings they do is more useful than fighting over the truth of their claims.

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.

Instead of talking about meaning making as something that is done by minds, I prefer to talk about it as a social practice in a community. It is a kind of doing that is done in ways that are characteristic of a community, and its occurrence is part of what binds the community together and helps to constitute it as a community.

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

Learning science means learning to talk science... Talking science means observing, describing, comparing, classifying, analysing, discussing, hypothesizing, theorizing, questioning, challenging, arguing, designing experiments, following procedures, judging, evaluating, deciding, concluding, generalizing, reporting ... in and through the language of science.

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.

Science has often presented itself, intentionally or unintentionally as a "truer" or even the true way of talking about the world. In science classrooms, except for rare occasions, this is the way science is taught and presented. Not as a way of talking about the world, but as the way the world is.

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.

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.