HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW? HOW ACKNOWLEDGING CULTURAL DIVERSITY PROVIDES A PATH TO RESOLVING THE STANDOFF BETWEEN SCIENCE AND CREATIONISM IN A PRE-SERVICE TEACHER PREPARATION PROGRAM

The scientific and education communities find themselves in the midst of a culture war surrounding the nature of humanity and the earth system. This battle is most frequently depicted as a conflict between religious creationists and a secular scientific community with its beliefs in evolution, the geologic time scale and Big Bang theory. While the debate rages somewhat abstractly in academia and the press, the direction of the war will ultimately be decided by actions taken at a far more fundamental level. Teachers of science in the K-12 schools are the troops in the trenches of this war over belief systems, and it is their actions in conjunction with local school administrations, parents and students which will ultimately decide how this generation resolves the battle between scientific and creationist ideologies. In this presentation, a method for preparing pre-service teachers for this conflict is addressed. Insights gained from efforts to create an inclusive multicultural perspective within classrooms are combined with the ability of science to explain why we are here. We recognize that science's ability to address this question must be predicated on acceptance of its standing as being ABLE to answer this question with authority. To achieve this, teachers and students address the question; how do we know what we know? The pre-service teachers study classic outcrops from the conventional scientific point of view with the geologic time scale, evolution and all uniformitarian principles intact. As they investigate these outcrops, they explore other cultural perspectives and explanations for the geologic features observed. This might include a Native American or aboriginal point of view or the perspective of a monotheistic world religion with a creationist tradition. The underlying assumptions for each worldview must be stated, its ability to explain observable phenomenon must be tested, and the consequences of failures in its basic assumptions must be predicted and analyzed. This approach is applied both to the scientific interpretation of the geologic features and those of competing worldviews. The resulting lesson plans developed by the pre-service teachers give students a context and sense of the limits of uncertainty provided by each explanation. Successes with this approach will be discussed.