Literacy: Strategies for the 21st Century
Ma. Cristina D. Padolina
International Conference on Science, Mathematics and Technology
24 November 1999
Diliman,Quezon City
No chemicals! This was a statement from a TV ad on a well-known and “revered” candy.
I was struck by this ad. And I thought how that one single, sample statement could negate everything I have taught my chemistry students. But I thought that I could turn that around and in part use that ad to drive home the very important concept of chemicals and the misconceptions that abound about that word.
Since then I have become interested in advertisements and become convinced what a powerful teaching and learning tool they can be – especially during our times. It is in the nature of a human being, as an organism, to be a consumer. Although we consume more than what we need to live. And entrepreneurs take advantage of these characteristics of humans so they entice us, persuades us, convince us to buy their products, whether we need them or not.
We are said to be living in the information age and belong to a knowledge-based society. And one characteristic of these times and our present milieu is that we are surrounded by products created by these vast amounts of information and knowledge humans’ persons have generated. When I was very young the soap I used for my body was the soap I used for my hair and constantly my face. Now I use four different soap and soap-related agents for four different parts of my body. When my family bought our first TV we only had to think about screen size and whether we were buying colored or black and white. Now, you go to the store and you have to decide on the following:
Curved or flat screen?
Do you want audio/video in and out?
Do you want RGB input so that you can connect with a PC?
Do you want digital output so that you can use it with a DVD (digital video disk) player?
Do you want CATV compatibility?
What kind of tuning system do you want – frequency synthesizer or voltage synthesizer?
Do you want a World 21-system or just a World 17-system?
And so on.
And in my very young days, when we wanted to buy rubber shoes, we bought Elpo. They all look alike, so rubber shoes were just those rubber shoes. Now shoes experts know that if you exercise your sneakers and the heel is worn more on the inside than the outside, you’re what they call a pronator which means that you roll your feet inward each time your heel strikes the ground and you need a control shoes especially built to counteract this tendency. And if you play basketball, you do frequent lateral movement and you need shoes that give good stability. You need to look for a sneaker with a high back that will keep your foot from rolling over. And again if you assume that its alright to walk in almost any shoe because walking is not a demanding activity. Shoes experts have mastered the anatomy of a sneaker and they will use that convince as that we need more than one pair of sneakers, several, in fact – all these have been invented because humans in this age know more than their forebears.
If you’re an and watcher like me, and have been for sometime, you must have noticed that ads have become more technical. Let’s take a look at these examples:
Havoline
Milk
Termite
It is my guess that the companies are trying to impress us that their product resulted from scientific studies and been subjected to tests to establish their efficacy. They are trying to make their product more credible. I like this because it means that these companies have high regard for the public. They must be saying that he public is more informal, more legible and should be addressed at a higher level. so, pa-impress sila sa technical information na isinasama sa ad.
But as a teacher, I like these ads with lots of scientific and technical information because I can use them for my teaching. By the way, there is yet another technique used in ads and that is to make the ad look like a news item. I just hope this is not a form of envelopmental journalism where people pay to get in the news. This is yet another aspect of the ads that we see these days and of which we should make our students aware.
But going back to the use of ads for teaching science, I wish to suggest that consumers’ products and specifically these ads that try to sell them are powerful tools for cultivating scientific literacy among our students.
In a paper by Nebres and Intal entitled “The Challenge of Developing Science Culture in the Philippines,” the authors enumerated a number of characteristics that describe a science culture. Among these are “an emphasis on facts rather than opinion, curiosity and observation” which can be cultivated or developed through the use of product advertisements in science teaching. Some ways that this can be done are the following:
- Use ads to introduce a topic
Examples:
- the ad of Valda Pastilles as an introduction to chemistry as a subject with study
- the ad on GI sheets to introduce the topic of corrosion
- intro to scientific method loading to a discussion/definition of terms such as observation, conclusion, hypothesis, laws (Noni juice)
- Use of ads to teach a concept or clarify meaning of concepts
Examples:
- ad on detergent; “natutunaw at nawawala”
- clarify concept of natural
- naturally decaffeinated coffee
- eight o’clock
- viva or summit mineral water
- Concept of acceleration
- Newton’s law of motion
- Saab
“An object set in motion will remain in motion.”
“In the event of a sudden stop, cargo defies inertia. It stays put.”
Can also use this to discuss the meaning of a law.
Can a law be defied?
“Of course, Saab cannot rewrite Newton’s laws of physics. But we can find loopholes.”
- Use of ads as a basis for research assignments
Examples:
- Bottled water
- Biochemistry
- G1 Sheets
- Flat Screens
- Unleaded Gasoline
Biomolecule are very complex molecules; study structure and function relations.
Ask students to get the molecular structure of compound mentioned in ads
Equal – as partane
Del Monte Tomato Ketchup – lycopene
Frisonnel (baby milk
So far we have discussed how ad can be used in science teaching. Although we need not depend on ads because there may be products which have become popular or controversial in using these in class would certainly make our students more interested and more involved. It would also indicate to them the relevance of the subject (chemistry, biology, physics) and what we are talking about in class have relevance to day to day living, that science is not something that is done only in the lab but concerns all that we see around us – at home, in school, etc.
One product that you may have read in the newspaper and which is very relevant today because of the controversial oil price hikes is the water-powered car.
It is not yet widely talked about but it’ll get there and I am referring to GMOs or genetically modified organisms. GM involves the transfer of a gene into the DNA of another organisms. For example the gene for bacterial blight resistance in rice may be transferred from a wild variety to a cultivated variety thus conferring resistance on the latter, against the pathogen.
Lest our students think that GM crops are futuristic ideas, we need to inform them that since two years ago, 48 GM crop products, involving 12 crops and six traits were approved for commercialization in at least one country. The crops include soybean (herbicide and insecticide resistant), cotton (BT-cotton: cotton bollworm), oilseed rape (higher lauric acid content), potato (virus resistant); maize (BT-corn: corn borer resistant; herbicide resistant), and tomato (delayed ripening) and the traits include insect, virus and herbicide tolerance, delayed ripening, male sterility and changes in oil composition. The total area planted to GMCs worldwide reached 27.8 million hectares in 1998.
Digital is a word we hear so frequently these days. Do our students understand what digital means and how a digital sound system works. Don’t you think they would have a better appreciation of the beautiful sound they hear from their CD players if they understood how optical digital technology works in their CD players and therefore understand why a CD is better than a phonograph record?
You may have to start explaining the groovy sounds (pardon the pun) made by a record player: how sound is imprinted on a phonograph recorded through a continuous spiral groove; how we playback the recorded sound by allowing a stylus to travel through the grooves causing the stylus to vibrate; how these vibrations are converted to electrical signals and transmitted to the amplifier and speakers.
On the other hand, in a CD, music or sound is recorded digitally. This means that the sound is represented as a series of numbers that measure the amplitude of the sound. These numbers are encoded in binary form as strings of 0s and 1s. In the binary system we don’t count
0 1 2 3 4 5 etc.
but rather like
0 1 10 11 100 101 etc.
The strings of 0s and 1s are recorded on the data surface of a disc in the form of microscopic pits and smooth areas called lands or peaks and valleys, in layman’s language.
During playback, instead of a stylus, a focused laser beam shines on the underside of the disc. The laser light reflects back from the rotating disc as varying intensities as it strikes the pits and lands. These light signals are translated back to 0s and 1s and further decoded and converted back into a variable electrical signal which is then changed back into sound waves.
Millions of peaks and valleys can be imprinted on the disc's surface so that the disk can store a large amount of data. And since nothing except the laser light touches the disc during playback then repeated playing of the CD does not wear out the peaks and valleys unlike the stylus which wears out the grooves on the record with repeated playing.
NOTE: Part 1 of this speech ends here. Remaining documents are being recovered.
