INNOVATION IN A SCIENCE CURRICULUM - A SIERRA-LEONE CASE-STUDY

This paper was designed to investigate an educational change process by introducing science teachers in Sierra Leone to an innovative approach to teaching science at the junior secondary school level. The aim was to help teachers develop a science curriculum that could relate to the everyday lives of students in their traditional setting. The study involved ten months of field work with selected science teachers developing, trialling and evaluating a junior secondary school general science curriculum patterned on constructivist science. The main thrust was to investigate the effects of the teachers' interaction with the new curriculum on their professional development. The implications of the new curriculum brought home to the participating teachers just how isolated school science was from the learner's everyday experiences. As a consequence of their action research experiences, the teachers showed evidence of appreciating recent constructivist views about the nature of science and the ways of acquiring scientific knowledge. They came to support new aims, objectives and methods of teaching General Science, recognizing the importance of building the teaching-learning process on students' real-life experiences.