Abstract:

This work concerns the phenomenon of out-of-field biology teachers in Ireland, an under-reported cadre of teachers. Much has been said of poorly experienced - regardless of qualification - teachers of upper high school experimental science especially in the physical sciences and mathematics and often placing causal linkages between such lack of formative experience and confidence in teaching which leads to poor in-class instruction. Poor in-class instruction in biology is exhibited as textbook reliance, avoidance of practical work, and rushing through unfamiliar parts of the syllabus. However, this situation is not new. Biology in Ireland faced a similar situation in the 1960s when zoology and botany were amalgamated into the new subject ‘of biology’ and schools - or rather teachers - struggled with the new provision.

Graduates of biology were strongly aligned to zoology or botany, and a form of each based on taxonomic surveys of each major group in the respective kingdoms. The emergence of ecology, microbiology, and molecular biology in the 20th century put an intolerable strain on the simplistic dichotomy of biology so that school syllabi could no longer ignore the reality of the mushrooming subject of biology. Thus school biology is an entity of itself not like the formal biology of the university since every sub-discipline is touched on in school biology and the biology teacher must therefore be a generalist - something a biology graduate is not. In the case of universities being in charge of biology teacher formation, since many universities do not offer all the sub-disciplines of biology, this is problematic, to say the least. With respect to teachers in formation who teach opt for biology as their second subject (a requirement of the Irish ministry of education), there is from the start a perception that biology is the lesser of the two subjects.

Trainee teachers in Physical Education with Biology (PEB) - physical education is the first choice subject - were probed for their biology topic preferences. Unsurprisingly, they opt for human biology which only accounts for one-third of the revised leaving certificate syllabus. Part of the problem of poor formative experience in biology is the inability to view plants as experimental models for understanding human biology and having no concern for wider issues of health such as causative issues, i.e., diseases. This paper examines some of the main likes and dislikes of out-of-field teachers as evidenced by the PEB cohort using analytical mathematical tools such as multidimensional scaling. It was found that such a large portion of biology was actively disliked by the cohort that it places a strong question as to whether PE should be put into the same programme as biology, and whether the students should be studying to teach biology at all. This author provides some solutions concerning the negative by examining their origins, interrelating and coordinating areas of the syllabus not normally connected, exploring the concepts of plant blindness, and through the encouragement of biophilia in non-biologists. The results indicate a shift in the position of the teacher education students.

Keywords:

Biology teachers, biology education, out-of-field.