Responding to a Relevance Imperative in School Science and Mathematics: Humanising the Curriculum Through Story Linda Darby-Hobbs # Springer Science+Business Media B.V . 2011 Abstract There has been a recent push to reframe curriculum and pedagogy in ways that make school more meaningful and relevant to students’ lives and perceived needs. This ‘relevance imperative’ is evident in contemporary rhetoric surrounding quality education, and particularly in relation to the junior secondary years where student disengagement with schooling continues to abate. This paper explores how teachers translate this imperative into their mathematics and science teaching. Interview data and critical incidents from classroom practice are used to explore how six teachers attempted to make the subject matter meaningful for their students. Four ‘Categories of Meaning Making’ emerged, highlighting key differences in how the nature of science and mathematics content constrained or enabled linkages between content and students’ lifeworlds. While the teachers demonstrated a commitment to humanising the subject at some level, this analysis has shown that expecting teachers to make the curriculum relevant is not unproblematic because the meaning of relevance as a construct is complex, subject-specific, and embedded in understanding the human dimensions of learning, using, and identifying with, content. Through an examination of the construct of relevance and a humanistic turn in mathematics and science literature I argue for an expanded notion of relevance. Keywords Science teaching . Mathematics teaching . Relevance . Humanistic education . Meaning making . Stories . Narrative . Video stimulated recall . Teacher identity . Teacher passion A Rhetoric of Relevance in School Relevance, according to Newton (1988, p. 8) ‘requires a relationship in the presence of some need, aspiration or expectation’. This paper explores how relevance, as an imperative, or recognised need, coming from the wider educational setting, is translated into subject teaching, focusing specifically on comparing science and mathematics teaching. Through this juxtaposition, I intend to bring to the fore the subject-specific nature of the way teachers perceive of and translate a seemingly generic goal to make science and Res Sci Educ DOI 10.1007/s11165-011-9244-3 L. Darby-Hobbs (*) RMIT University, PO Box 71, Bundoora, VIC 3083, Australia e-mail: linda.darby@rmit.edu.au