Second Chance Schools in Greece: A Critical Analysis of Science Teachers’ Views and Practices on Designing Scientific Literacy Curricula

Abstract

Second Chance Schools (SCSs) were established in Greece as an effort to reintegrate into society adult school dropouts who have not completed their compulsory education. Scientific literacy is an integral part of the education of the SCSs’ students, and science teachers who work in SCSs face the challenge of developing science curricula according to the needs of their students. The present study aims to investigate Greek science teachers’ views on the meaning of the notion of students’ scientific literacy for the specific target population they refer to and further focuses on science teachers’ practices when developing a curriculum to achieve the goal of reintegrating their students in society through scientific literacy. For this purpose, eleven semi-structured interviews of science teachers (who are also designers of science curricula) were conducted. The analysis shows that science teachers who are inexperienced in adult education consider scientific literacy to be an introduction to the content of science, knowledge of which enables students to continue their studies in formal upper secondary education. On the other hand, experienced science teachers quite often recognize their students’ need to use science to explain situations they encounter in their daily life and claim that this is the reason they design context-based curricula. However, the contexts they design do not in any way incorporate socioscientific issues related to the specific social and cultural context of their students’ lives. Clearly, science teachers’ ability to design scientific literacy curricula which meet their students’ needs is not related only to the factor of teaching experience. Rather, it requires the science teachers’ enculturation into their students’ worlds and a paradigm shift in science teachers’ own ideology of science teaching.