Methodology and Politics: A Proposal to Teach the Structuring Ideas of the Philosophy of Science through the Pendulum

This article refers to a framework to teach the philosophy of science to prospective and in-service science teachers. This framework includes two components: a list of the main schools of twentieth-century philosophy of science (called stages) and a list of their main theoretical ideas (called strands). In this paper, I show that two of these strands, labelled intervention/method and context/values, can be taught to science teachers using some of the instructional activities sketched in Michael Matthews’s Time for Science Education. I first explain the meaning of the two selected strands. Then I show how the pendulum can be used as a powerful organiser to address specific issues within the nature of science, as suggested by Matthews.