Science for Street Children – Results of a Longterm Developmental Project in Science Education

Summary

Since 2002 we are part of an international collaboration project called “Patio 13-school for street children” in Colombia. The aim of this project is to find ways to educate children who are used to live in the street, disconnected from the official school system and without any regular life and future. The existence of so called “street children” is an increasing problem, worldwide. According to the UN Convention of 1989 on the Rights of the Child the society has the responsibility to find ways to offer them adequate contexts and possibilities for learning – also in science. Within our project, we are co-operating with a teacher education institution in Colombia and linking cultural aspects of education with previous experiences in pedagogy for street children and modern ways of teaching science. Together with advanced pre-service teacher students we could develop, implement and investigate different ways to teach science issues as part of a curriculum for street children using an inquiry based science education (IBSE) approach, simple experiments and material. One major challenge was to enable the Colombian teacher students to apply the methods of inquiry based learning. The whole project was evaluated using design based research methods (DBR) and specific analyses of video-recordings. The main research question has been: How to enable advanced teacher students to motivate street children to do science learning activities? Within this paper we will report on three different approaches we developed, the results we could achieve and the conclusions we could draw.