Ernst Mach and George Sarton’s Successors: The Implicit Role Model of Teaching Science in USA and Elsewhere, Part II

George Sarton had a strong influence on modern history of science. The method he pursued throughout his life was the method he had discovered in Ernst Mach’s Mechanics when he was a student in Ghent. Sarton was in fact throughout his life implementing a research program inspired by the epistemology of Mach. Sarton in turn inspired many others in several generations (James Conant, Thomas Kuhn, Gerald Holton, etc.). What were the origins of these ideas in Mach and what can this origin tell us about the history of science and science education nowadays? Which ideas proved to be successful and which ones need to be improved upon? The following article will elaborate the epistemological questions, which Charles Darwin’s “Origin” raised concerning human knowledge and scientific knowledge and which led Mach to adapt the concept of what is “empirical” in contrast to metaphysical a priori assumptions a second time after Galileo. On this basis Sarton proposed “genesis and development” as the major goal of his journal Isis. Mach had elaborated this epistemology in La Connaissance et l’Erreur (Knowledge and Error), which Sarton read in 1911 (Hiebert in Knowledge and error. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1976; de Mey in George Sarton centennial. Communication & Cognition, Ghent, pp. 3–6, 1984). Accordingly for Sarton, history becomes not only a subject of science, but a method of science education. Culture—and science as part of culture—is a result of a genetic process. History of science shapes and is shaped by science and science education in a reciprocal process. Its epistemology needs to be adapted to scientific facts and the philosophy of science. Sarton was well aware of the need to develop the history of science and the philosophy of science along the lines of this reciprocal process. It was a very fruitful basis, but a specific part of it Sarton did not elaborate further, namely the erkenntnis-theory and psychology of science education. This proved to be a crucial missing element for all of science education in Sarton’s succession, especially in the US. Looking again at the origins of the central questions in the thinking of Mach, which provided the basis and gave rise to Sarton’s research program, will help in resolving current epistemic and methodological difficulties, contradictions and impasses in science education influenced by Sarton. The difficulties in science education will prevail as long as the omissions from their Machian origins are not systematically recovered and reintegrated.     

Mexican immigrant transnational social capital and class transformation: examining the role of peer mediation in insurgent science

In this article, I return to the interactions of Augusto and his teacher in an “English Learner Science” classroom in a demographically-transitioning US Midwest community (Richardson Bruna and Vann in Cult Stud Sci Educ 2:19–59, 2007) and further engage a class-first perspective to achieve two main conceptual objectives. First, I examine Augusto’s science education experience as a way of understanding processes Rouse (Towards a transnational perspective on migration: Race, class, ethnicity, and nationalism reconsidered. The New York Academy of Sciences, New York, 1992) refers to as “the disciplinary production of class-specific subjects” (p. 31). Coming from a subsistence farming community in rural Mexico to an industrialized meatpacking community in semi-rural Iowa, I describe how Augusto undergoes a change in his class identity (experiences a Class Transformation) that is not just reflected but, in fact, produced in his science class. Second, I examine the work Augusto does to resist these processes of disciplinary production as he reshapes his teacher’s instruction (promotes a class transformation) through specific transnational social capital he leverages as peer mediation. My overall goals in the article are to demonstrate the immediate relevance of a socio-historical, situated perspective to science teaching and learning and to outline domains of action for an insurgent, class-cognizant, science education practice informed by transnational social capital, like Augusto’s.     

Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds

In today’s increasingly “flat” world of globalization (Friedman 2005), the need for a scientifically literate citizenry has grown more urgent. Yet, by some measures, we have done a poor job at fostering scientific habits of mind in schools. Recent research on informal games-based learning indicates that such technologies and the communities they evoke may be one viable alternative—not as a substitute for teachers and classrooms, but as an alternative to textbooks and science labs. This paper presents empirical evidence about the potential of games for fostering scientific habits of mind. In particular, we examine the scientific habits of mind and dispositions that characterize online discussion forums of the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Eighty-six percent of the forum discussions were posts engaged in “social knowledge construction” rather than social banter. Over half of the posts evidenced systems based reasoning, one in ten evidenced model-based reasoning, and 65% displayed an evaluative epistemology in which knowledge is treated as an open-ended process of evaluation and argument.     

Emerging beliefs frustrate ecological literacy and meaning-making for students

In their treatise, Mitchell and Mueller extend David Orr’s notions of ecological literacy (2005) to include biophilia (Wilson 1984) and ecojustice (Mueller 2009). In his writings, David Orr claims that the US is in an “ecological crisis” and that this stems from a crisis of education. The authors outline Orr’s theory of ecological literacy as a lens to understand Earth’s ecology in view of long-term survival. In their philosophical analysis of Orr’s theory, Mitchell and Mueller argue that we move beyond the “shock doctrine” perspective of environmental crisis. By extending Orr’s concept of ecological literacy to include biophilia and ecojustice, and by recognizing the importance of experience-in-learning, the authors envision science education as a means to incorporate values and morals within a sustainable ideology of educational reform. Through this forum, I reflect on the doxastic logic and certain moral and social epistemological concepts that may subsequently impact student understanding of ecojustice, biophilia, and moral education. In addition, I assert the need to examine myriad complexities of assisting learners to become ecologically literate at the conceptual and procedural level (Bybee in Achieving scientific literacy: from purposes to practices, Heinemann Educational Books, Portsmouth, 1997), including what Kegan (In over our heads: the mental demands of modern life, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1994) refers to as “Third Order” and “Fourth Order” thinking: notions of meaning-construction or meaning-organizational capacity to understand good stewardship of the Earth’s environment. Learners who are still in the process of developing reflective and metacognitive skills “cannot have internal conversation about what is actual versus what is possible, because no ‘self’ is yet organized that can put these two categories together” (p. 34). Mitchell and Mueller indicate that middle school learners should undergo a transformation in order to reflect critically about the environment with a view toward determining critical truths about the world. However, if this audience lacks “selective, interpretive, executive, construing capacities” (Kegan in In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life, 1994, p. 29), assimilating the notions of ecojustice and biophia may be problematic.     

Navigating Worlds of “Trouble and Woe and Worse” in Children’s Literature: An Exploration into the Double Text of Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak’s Brundibar

In this article, the author explores the richly layered double text of Kushner and Sendak’s picturebook, Brundibar (2003)—the historical context of Brundibár as a Holocaust-era children’s operetta by Hans Krása and Adolf Hoffmeister, and the present day manifestation of Brundibar as a children’s picturebook. In order to contextualize the discussion of Kushner and Sendak’s text, Brundibar’s historical origins in Nazi-annexed Czechoslovakia and its transition to the stage in the Nazi “model” concentration camp, Terezín, is presented. An extensive semiotic analysis of Kushner and Sendak’s illustrations and text is also provided within the framework of what Kushner (The art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the present, 2003) terms “a world of trouble and woe and worse” (p. 210). Furthermore, the author discusses the development of Sendak’s Hitlerian Brundibar and the struggles that both Kushner and Sendak faced as they considered how to portray the story’s antagonist, given their somewhat differing conceptions of which difficult themes and topics children should be exposed to during childhood. To round out this discussion, the author explores pedagogical implications for teachers as they read difficult texts, particularly Holocaust texts, with children.     

Religion, nature, science education and the epistemology of dialectics

In his article Scientists at Play in a Field of the Lord, David Long (2010) rightly challenges our presumptions of what science is and brings forth some of the disjunctures between science and deeply held American religious beliefs. Reading his narrative of the conflicts that he experienced on the opening day of the Creation Museum, I cannot help but reconsider what the epistemology of science is and science learning ought to be. Rather than science being taught as a prescribed, deterministic system of beliefs and procedures as it is often done, I suggest instead that it would be more appropriate to teach science as a way of thinking and making sense of dialectical processes in nature. Not as set of ultimate “truths”, but as understandings of processes themselves in the process of simultaneously becoming and being transformed.     

Class, Identity, and Teacher Education

This paper explores the possibilities of working with White, working-class teacher education students to explore the “complex social trajectory” (Reay in Women’s Stud Int Forum 20(2):225–233, 1997a, p. 19) of class border crossing as they progress through college. Through analysis of a course that I have developed, Education and the American Dream, I explore political and pedagogical issues in teaching the thousands of teacher education students who are the first in their families to attend college about social class. Arguing that faculty in teacher education too often disregard the significance of deep class differences between themselves and many of their students, I propose that teacher education include coursework in which upwardly-mobile students (a) draw upon their distinctive perspectives as class border-crossers to elucidate their “complex social positioning as a complicated amalgam of current privilege interlaced with historic disadvantage” (Reay in Women’s Stud Int Forum 20(2):225–233, 1997a, p. 25) and (b) complicate what Adair and Dahlberg (Pedagogy 1:173–175, 2001, p. 174) have termed a cultural “impulse to frame class mobility as a narrative of moral progress”. Such coursework, I suggest, has implications for the development of teacher leaders in stratified schools. The paper draws upon the literatures on social class and educational attainment, on the construction of classed identities in spite of silence about class in public and academic discourse, and on pedagogies for teaching across class differences.     

Why Compulsory Science Education Should <Emphasis Type="Italic">Not</Emphasis> Include Philosophy of Science

Like many readers of this journal, I have long been an advocate of having science students introduced to philosophy of science. In particular, influenced by the Philosophy for Children movement founded by Matthew Lipman, I have advocated such an introduction as early as possible and have championed early secondary school as an appropriate place. Further, mainstream science curricula in a number of countries have, for some time now, supported such introductions (albeit of a more limited sort) under the banner of introducing students to the “Nature of Science”. In this paper, I explore a case against such introductions, partly in role as “Devil’s Advocate” and partly exploring genuine qualms that have come to disturb me. Generally speaking, my judgement is that no justification is available in terms of benefit to the individual or to society of sufficient weight to outweigh the loss of freedom of choice involved in such forced learning. One possible exception is a minimalist and intellectually passive “Nature of Science” introduction to some uncontroversial philosophical views about science. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Seventh International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science and Science Teaching, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg and subsequently published in its proceedings (see my 2003). I am grateful to those who engaged in discussion of the paper upon its presentation. I am also grateful to the advice of this journal’s anonymous referees.     

On negotiating White science: a call for cultural relevance and critical reflexivity

This article is a response to Randy Yerrick and Joseph Johnson’s article “Negotiating White Science in Rural Black America: A Case for Navigating the Landscape of Teacher Knowledge Domains”. They write about research conducted by Yerrick in which videos of his teaching practice as a White educator in a predominately Black rural classroom were examined. Their analysis is framed through Shulman’s (1986) work on “domains of teacher knowledge” and Ladson-Billings’ (1999) critical race theory (CRT). Although we appreciate a framework that attends to issues of power, such as CRT, we see a heavier emphasis on Shulman’s work in their analysis. We argue that a culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) framework has the potential to provide a more nuanced analysis of what occurred in Yerrick’s classroom from a critical lens. Thus we examine Yerrick and Johnson’s work through the five main CRP components (as defined by Brown-Jeffy and Cooper 2011) and ultimately argue that science educators who want to promote equity in their classrooms should engage in continuous critical reflexivity, aid students in claiming voice, and encourage students to become not only producers of scientific knowledge but also users and critics of such knowledge.     

Web site credibility: Why do people believe what they believe?

This research investigates university students’ determinations of credibility of information on Web sites, confidence in their determinations, and perceptions of Web site authors’ vested interests. In Study 1, university-level computer science and education students selected Web sites determined to be credible and Web sites that exemplified misrepresentations. Categorization of Web site credibility determinations indicated that the most frequently provided reasons associated with high credibility included information focus or relevance, educational focus, and name recognition. Reasons for knowing a Web site’s content is wrong included lack of corroboration with other information, information focus and bias. Vested interests associated with commercial Web sites were regarded with distrust and vested interests of educational Web sites were not. In Study 2, credibility determinations of university students enrolled in computer science courses were examined for 3 provided Web sites dealing with the same computer science topic. Reasons for determining Web site inaccuracy included own expertise, information corroboration, information design and bias. As in Study 1, commercial vested interests were negatively regarded in contrast to educational interests. Instructional implications and suggestions for further research are discussed. Preliminary results from Study 1 were presented as a poster entitled “Users’ Confidence Levels and Strategies for Determining Web Site Veracity” (Iding et al. 2002a) and appeared in associated proceedings for The WWW 2002: The Eleventh International World Wide Web Conference, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Preliminary results from Study 2 were presented as a paper entitled, “Judging the Veracity of Web Sites” (Crosby et al. 2002) and appeared in associated proceedings for the International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2002) in Auckland, New Zealand.     

‘Science to the Glory of God’. The Popular Science Magazine Ibérica and its Coverage of Radioactivity, 1914–1936

This paper provides a first approach to the history of Ibérica, one of the most important popular science magazines published in Spain before the Civil War. Founded in 1914 by members of the Society of Jesus based at the Ebro Observatory, Ibérica reached a weekly circulation of about 10,000 in the mid 1920s, and was instrumental in extending science education in Jesuit education facilities and in developing a “reactionary modernist” culture that embraced Catholicism and modernisation. By focusing on its coverage of radioactivity and the radium industry, the article aims to examine the magazine’s popularising style and ideology, and to determine its role in the debates regarding the cultural value of science in the first decades of twentieth century Spain.     

Social constructivism and the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Believing Game</Emphasis>: a mathematics teacher’s practice and its implications

The study reported here is the third in a series of research articles (Harkness, S. S., D’Ambrosio, B., & Morrone, A. S.,in Educational Studies in Mathematics 65:235–254, 2007; Morrone, A. S., Harkness, S. S., D’Ambrosio, B., & Caulfield, R. in Educational Studies in Mathematics 56:19–38, 2004) about the teaching practices of the same university professor and the mathematics course, Problem Solving, she taught for preservice elementary teachers. The preservice teachers in Problem Solving reported that they were motivated and that Sheila made learning goals salient. For the present study, additional data were collected and analyzed within a qualitative methodology and emergent conceptual framework, not within a motivation goal theory framework as in the two previous studies. This paper explores how Sheila’s “trying to believe,” rather than a focus on “doubting” (Elbow, P., Embracing contraries, Oxford University Press, New York, 1986), played out in her practice and the implications it had for both classroom conversations about mathematics and her own mathematical thinking.     

A Comparative Study of Problem-Based and Lecture-Based Learning in Junior Secondary School Science

The purpose of the study is to compare problem based learning (PBL) and lecture-based learning (LBL) in Hong Kong secondary students’ science achievement. Secondary One students were divided into two groups: group A (n = 37), was taught two topics: “Human Reproduction” and “Density” through PBL; group B (n = 38) was taught the same topics by LBL. Multiple choice questions and short structured response items were used to assess students’ academic performance. Pre and post tests were categorized into three domains: knowledge, comprehension and application according to Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom 1956). The results of this study suggest first that PBL is at least as effective as LBL in gaining the knowledge required to achieve the syllabus’ learning objectives; secondly, the PBL group shows a significant improvement in students’ comprehension and application of knowledge over an extended time. Seemingly, PBL is favored for knowledge retention compared to a more conventional teaching approach, by these early adolescent children in Hong Kong. An ongoing longitudinal study on students’ interactions will further determine whether students taught through PBL develop improved learning in relation to high order skills, in a local situation which still tends to focus on factual recall but where higher skills are being demanded by systemic reform.     

Exploring how globalization shapes education: methodology and theoretical framework

This is a commentary on some major issues raised in Carter and Dediwalage’s “Globalisation and science education: The case of Sustainability by the bay” (this issue), particularly their methodology and theoretical framework for understanding how globalisation shapes education (including science education). While acknowledging the authors’ contribution to the literature on globalisation and education, it questions the degree to which their analysis captures and explains how globalisation shapes science education, and examines how the research can be complemented by altering its methodology and expanding its theoretical framework.     

Troubling the proletarianization of Mexican immigrant students in an era of neoliberal immigration

In response to Richardson Bruna’s “Mexican immigrant transnational social capital and class transformation: examining the role of peer mediation in insurgent science”, this paper draws on the author’s research on organizing, mobilization and knowledge production among adult im/migrant workers in Canada. While appreciative of the content and concerns of Richardson Bruna’s argument, the paper argues for a clearer position on tensions between agency and structure, and class and capitalist social relations in which to contextualize the schooling of immigrant children in today’s US classrooms. In addition, it explores some implications of Mignolo’s (2000) work on the geohistory of knowledge, notably his concept of ‘border thinking’ for teachers, teacher education, and curricula. Finally, the article suggests the potential of methodological frameworks and approaches of institutional ethnography (Smith 1987), political activist ethnography (Frampton et al. 2006) and global ethnography (Burawoy 2000) to inform research into this field.     

Teaching Physics to In-Service Primary School Teachers in the Context of the History of Science: The Case of Falling Bodies

Our paper presents an in-service primary school teachers’ training program which is based on the idea that the history of science can play a vital role in promoting the learning of physics. This training program has been developed in the context of Comenius 2.1 which is a European Union program. This program that we have developed in the University of Athens is based on socioconstructivist and sociocultural learning principles with the intention of helping teachers to appropriate the basic knowledge on the issue of falling bodies. Moreover, it has the aim to make explicit through the exploitation of authentic historical science events, on the above topic (Aristotle’s, Galileo’s and Newton’s theories on falling bodies) the Nature of Science (NoS), the Nature of Learning (NoL) and the Nature of Teaching (NoT). During the implementation of the program we have used a variety of teaching strategies (e.g. group work, making of posters, making of concept maps, simulations) that utilize historical scientific materials on the issue of falling bodies.

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Reading pedagogy, “Evidence” and education policy: learning from history?

This paper examines the report of the Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (Department of Education, Science & Training (DEST) 2005) and explores the claims it makes about reading pedagogy and the centrality of particular “methods” or “approaches” to teaching backed by “scientific” evidence. Discourse analysis of the report shows that its logics allow only certain kinds of evidence to count in policy, and that it reduces difficult social and political issues to questions of technique. This allows the report to recommend an approach whereby qualitative insights and practitioners’ experience can be bypassed through valorising methods developed and verified by scientific researchers. The report’s claims are considered genealogically in the light of historical cases from the early nineteenth century, where educational reformers struggled with the issue of how to educate the children of the poor. In one, the monitorial system promoted by Lancaster in England, there was a focus on reading which made teachers or monitors artefacts of a standardised method. By way of contrast, in Scotland, a classroom approach developed by Stow (1854) made the teacher central to the process, as someone who sensitively interpreted and extended students’ experiences with texts. Stow’s approach would form the model for the modern classroom in compulsory state schooling, while the monitorial system would eventually be abandoned as ineffective. The historical cases demonstrate the dangers of approaches to policy that fail to account for the complex interplay between teacher, student and text in the reading lesson.     

What Does Distributed Cognition Tell Us about Student Learning of Science?

This paper reports multi-layered analyses of student learning in a science classroom using the theoretical lens of Distributed Cognition (Hollan et al. 1999; Hutchins 1995). Building on the insights generated from previous research employing Distributed Cognition, the particular focus of this study has been placed on the “public space of interaction” (Alac and Hutchins 2004, p. 639) that includes both participants’ interaction with each other and their interaction with artefacts in their environment. In this paper, a lesson from an Australian science classroom was examined in detail, in which a class of grade-seven students were investigating the scientific theme of gravity by designing pendulums. The video-stimulated post-lesson interviews with both the teacher and the student groups offered complementary accounts (Clarke 2001a) that assisted the interpretation of the classroom data. The findings of this study provide supporting evidence to demonstrate the capacity of Distributed Cognition for advancing our understanding of the nature of learning in science classrooms.     

Disciplinary Categories, Majors, and Undergraduate Academic Experiences: Rethinking Bok’s “Underachieving Colleges” Thesis

Using data from the 2008 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey, we show that study time and academic conscientiousness were lower among students in humanities and social science majors than among students in science and engineering majors. Analytical and critical thinking experiences were no more evident among humanities and social sciences majors than among science and engineering majors. All three academically beneficial experiences were, however, strongly related to participation in class and interaction with instructors, and participation was more common among humanities and social sciences students than among science and engineering students. Bok’s (Our underachieving colleges: A candid look at how much students learn and why they should be learning more. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006) influential discussion of “underachievement’ in undergraduate education focused on institutional performance. Our findings indicate that future discussions should take into account differences among disciplinary categories and majors as well.