The TIES Approach

The primary aim of the TIES program is to translate science from laboratory to classroom.  The translation challenge has three components: science content, research methodology and social context.  Understanding scientific progress without taking account of these three dimensions paints a flat picture of authentic inquiry and ignores how rationality, itself a culturally-determined paradigm, contributes to the advancement of science.

Therefore, teachers in TIES have to:

• Examine their curricula for connections between the science content they teach and actual investigations in the scientific community
• Consider, using real world examples, how to introduce students to the design of inquiry
• Engage the class in exercises that examine the value, legal and ethical contexts of scientific research

Attention to the social context of scientific inquiry connects research to people’s personal and social lives.   And understanding the culture of research itself may help students make a “cultural border crossing” into science.  For some students, this border crossing can be so difficult that science becomes an unachievable territory for them.  Facilitating and easing the border crossing may result in students remaining engaged with science and in those students seeing science as being of relevance to their every day lives.

For science teachers, coming to grips with the social context of science research is facilitated by two components of the TIES program: firstly, science teachers work with non-science teacher partners, who may be more familiar with navigating social and cultural issues in the classroom.  The pair of teachers makes their lab visits together, and is encouraged to collaborate on their profile-writing, and on their classroom activity. Secondly, teachers approach the lab experiences more as anthropologists than as lab workers.  In this paradigm, they work as teacher-researchers, asking questions, making observations and drawing out patterns and themes from the lab experience. For more detail about the teacher as anthropologist, please see "Teacher Researchers in a Culture of Science" (PDF; 1.23 MB).