The Disappearance of Natural History, Fieldwork, and Live Organism Study from American Biology Teacher Education.

Biology teachers hope to teach their students more than, say, the steps of aerobic respiration. They want to help students see the living world around them in new and deeper ways. Unfortunately, the living world students encounter every day—in schoolyards and forest preserves, pets and potted plants, soil fungus and sourdough bread—is too rarely brought into productive contact with the core concepts of the biology curriculum. It might be otherwise, however, if biology teachers learned to teach using natural history, field biology, and live organism study. The marginalization of natural history and fieldwork within disciplinary biology—the courses that serve as content studies for preservice teachers—has been documented. In this paper, I review evidence that biology teacher education has undergone a quiet, parallel evolution. This paper presents two suggestive case studies that explore how biology teacher education coursework and science methods textbooks have diverted attention away from direct encounters with living things and toward abstract, molecular models of life devoid of pedagogically helpful context. I suggest some reasons for this change, and finally, I argue that a renewed attention by biology teacher educators (and, of course, biology teachers) to local field study, natural history, and even investigations using model organisms may aid school biology in unlocking the transformative potential of biology education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]