Contextualization is a process of embedding knowledge in history, culture, philosophical inquiry, and personal experiences. In education, it is defined as the process of making the curriculum relevant to certain settings, situations, or real-life applications in which learning will be meaningful and useful to all students. The promotion and integration of agriculture concepts can be strengthened by teaching physics in the context of agriculture, such as in the Philippines, with a majority of farming, livestock, and fishing communities.
This is a study of the literature on contextualization of physics
education on agriculture and related fields conducted to determine the
agriculture and related fields used to contextualize physics instruction, to
determine the parts of physics instruction were contextualized to agriculture
and related fields, and to determine the areas of physics in which instruction
is contextualized to agriculture and related fields.
After reviewing published research articles from ScienceDirect,
PubMed, ISI Web of Science, Google Scholar publications, ResearchGate, and
other online research repositories used for scholarly literature, results
showed that very few studies were conducted that contextualised physics
instruction using agriculture and related fields.
In the available literature, 5.26% used farming as context of
their physics instruction, another 5.26% used fishing practices as context,
31.58% used environmental context, 15.79% used Indigenous/Cultural Practices as
context, and 42.11% used other contexts such as household chores, biking, and
other recreational activities. Of the different fields of physics, mechanics is
the most contextualised to agriculture with 52.63% of the available studies,
while no study contextualised Modern Physics to agriculture and related fields.
The study emphasises that educators can use concepts and practices from
agriculture to make science learning more meaningful, practical, and
responsive. Contextualising science activity should be an important aspect of
this scientific sense-making of concepts.
Based on the literature reviewed, physics can be contextualised in a
manner that talks about the related experiences of the students while it fits
the parts and instructional cycle of lesson development. There is a vast amount
of science and technology embedded in agricultural processes and practices that
educators can harness to enhance the relevance and effectiveness of science
education.
The study concluded that the teaching-learning/instruction and
learning activities are part of a lesson often contextualised to agriculture,
and no available study has contextualised the motivation part of the lesson.
Most publicly available scholarly works contextualising physics lessons to
agriculture are foreign; thus, efforts in this area should be pushed forward in
the Philippines.
Author(s)
Details
Rey-Mark
G. Basagre
College of Development Education, Central Bicol State University
of Agriculture, Philippines.
Please see the book here:- https://doi.org/10.9734/bpi/nhstc/v2/5642
