teaching - Earth Science Teachers' Association

TEACHING EARTH SCIENCES ● Volume 26 ● Number 3, 2001
Editorial
The Key Stage 3 National Strategy has now hit UK
secondary schools, with new and highly-structured
approaches to teaching and learning advocated
(and required?) for all schools. First to be
implemented are literacy and numeracy, not only within
English/maths lessons but also across the whole
school curriculum. Literacy is the most advanced in its
introduction in schools, apparently because its documentation
has been produced slightly earlier than the
maths materials! For Key Stage 3 teachers, other than
English specialists, the key document is a large leverarch
file called Literacy Across the Curriculum (DFEE
2001) which was published in April 2001 for implementation
during the current academic year. This
INSET file is full of suggestions for enhancing children’s
literacy across the KS3 curriculum. There is
much that is not new but nevertheless the document
provides a comprehensive source of material.
Although the KS3 Literacy Strategy is obviously
intended for children in Years 7, 8 and 9 (aged 11-14
years), there is much that can be adapted for use in Key
Stage 4 and post-16. For example the section on
“Spelling and Vocabulary” includes, among other
things, a checklist of 25 different strategies for improving
students’ grasp of specialist words. Most of these are
appropriate for post-16 teaching: hands up all post-16
teachers whose students always spell “environment”
correctly, with the middle “n” intact!
The section called “Writing Non-fiction” is likely to
be one of the most relevant sections for TES readers.
Many of the issues addressed in this section relate not
only to writing but also to reading, although later sections
in the file deal with reading more explicitly.
Analysing texts is one of these issues. Students are
encouraged to examine texts (either written or read by
them) at three levels: text; sentence; and word. Different
questions need to be asked at each level and,
through evaluation and re-drafting, written texts can be
improved. By employing the same analyses students
can enhance their understanding of their reading texts.
This leads me conveniently to the use of narrative in
teaching geoscience: an issue which is, unsurprisingly,
not thoroughly covered in the KS3 strategy.
Many readers will know of the so-called Deprat
Affair. Roger Osborne (1999) provides a crisp account.
The book is written rather as a thriller, with deliberate
withholding of the final outcome till late in the book. It
is a good read and not a lengthy book. I won’t spoil it for
you now: well, not much anyway.
Briefly, and for the uninitiated, during the first
decade of the Twentieth Century Jaques Deprat (born
1880) rose to become one of the most highly-regarded
young geologists in France, with an international
reputation. In fact his rise within the profession was
meteoric. After obtaining a doctorate at the Sorbonne,
he set off with his wife and two children in 1909 to
French Indo-China as Head of the Geological Service
of Indo-China. French Indo-China comprised present-day
Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Deprat was
based in Hanoi.
Deprat was an active climber and explorer and much
of his work in Indo-China involved fieldwork in
remote and inhospitable localities. The narrator paints
a vivid picture of a glamorous life . Deprat published his
work regularly, although this was often a long-drawnout
process because of the ship travel time to France.
Specimens and documents were constantly and routinely
moving between colony and mother country.
Deprat’s international standing continued to strengthen,
largely as a result of his pioneer work in structural
geology: the reputation of the French Indo-China Geological
Service rose accordingly. Then in 1917 the first
bombshell struck: he was accused of fraud. To be precise,
he was accused of placing some European trilobite
specimens alongside some obtained in Indo-China.
Trinucleus and Dalmanites spp. were involved. Clearly
this was a most serious accusation and the story really
starts here: I won’t go on.
The Deprat story has all the key ingredients of a
successful whodunnit: several suspects, strong personalities,
envy, conspiracy, ambition, nepotism and so
forth. For TES readers it has the extra ingredient of
geology. Added to these are the twists in the tale itself:
it is definitely not a straightforward story and the
extent to which we have achieved “closure” remains
highly debatable.
How can we use rich narrative material such as this
(Osborne 1999) in our geoscience teaching? First, we
should recognise that many students, post-16 or otherwise,
take well to such stories so we might ensure they
engage with them. The reading simply enriches the
experiences of some, but obviously not of all.
Second, and more systematically, we might be able to
use the narrative as stimulus material: a “way in” to the
study of trilobites, investigations, structural geology,
plate movements or whatever. This is particularly
important for those learners who relate more readily to
tales of human interaction than they do to scientific
accounts (which they often perceive as cold)
Third, as all teachers are teachers of literacy, we
might be able to use sections of the text, or material
written by ourselves covering the same ground, as the
basis for analysis at text, sentence or word levels. At the
word level, for example, the Deprat story involves not
only the two trilobite genera named above but also several
other fossil species, nappes, Tethys, various lithologies,
Palaeozoic geographies, fieldwork procedures and
conventions and so forth. At the sentence level the fol-
www.esta-uk.org
86