Overview
- Provides clear ethnographic insight into the hopes, fears, and rationales of Creationist students as they contemplate evolution amidst their peers
- Analyzes the existential anxiety expressed by Creationists when they are asked to consider "what if evolution had happened—how would that affect their lives"
- Illustrates and theorizes the socio-cultural complexity of student interaction with science, and how it is weighed amongst competing interests in their lives
- Describes vignettes where Creationist teachers and school administrators control whether evolution is or is not taught in schools, in some cases braking federal law
Part of the book series: Cultural Studies of Science Education (CSSE, volume 4)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Evolution and Religion in American Education shines a light into one of America’s dark educational corners, exposing the regressive pedagogy that can invade science classrooms when school boards and state overseers take their eyes off the ball. It sets out to examine the development of college students’ attitudes towards biological evolution through their lives. The fascinating insights provided by interviewing students about their world views adds up to a compelling case for additional scrutiny of the way young people’s educational experiences unfold as they consider—and indeed in some cases reject—one of science’s strongest and most cogent theoretical constructs. Inevitably, open discussion and consideration of the theory of evolution can chip away at the mental framework constructed by Creationists, eroding the foundations of their faith. The conceptual battleground is so fraught with logical challenges to Creationist dogma that in a number of cases students’ exposure to such dangerous ideas is actively prevented. This book provides a detailed map of this astonishing struggle in today’s America—a struggle many had thought was done and dusted with the onset of the Enlightenment.
Reviews
From the reviews:
“Long’s volume is an account of a single research project: an ethnographic study that looks in some detail at the teaching of, and reception to, a key scientific topic. … There are chapters and passages that will largely be of interest to the scholar or graduate student … . it has resonance for anyone teaching science in communities where some students may object to evolution … . This is a good read on a complex and important topic.” (Keith S. Taber, Teacher Development, February, 2014)
“As those who teach evolution in public schools or at secular universities are well aware, it is a sharply polarizing topic. David E Long conducted ethnographic research as to why such polarization occurs, and in his Evolution and Religion in American Education he addresses a set of underlying challenges for those who teach evolution. … strength of this book is Long’s identification of a conceptual clash between competing epistemologies (systems of knowledge).” (Steve Watkins, Reports of the National Center for Science Education, September-October, 2012)Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Evolution and Religion in American Education
Book Subtitle: An Ethnography
Authors: David E. Long
Series Title: Cultural Studies of Science Education
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1808-1
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Education (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Netherlands 2011
Hardcover ISBN: 978-94-007-1807-4Published: 03 August 2011
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-007-3809-6Published: 27 November 2013
eBook ISBN: 978-94-007-1808-1Published: 03 August 2011
Series ISSN: 1879-7229
Series E-ISSN: 1879-7237
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 190
Topics: Science Education, Religion and Education, Evolutionary Biology