Vol. 39, No. 1, April 2010
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Teaching Tricks
While much time and effort has been spent on curricula in the history of science, less effort has been devoted to how to draw students into the history of science and keep that fascination going after graduation. Five teachers here describe their approaches to teaching history of science.
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The history of science at the center of education
Peter Pesic, St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico
At St. John's College, all students study the history of science, which comprises almost half of our all-required, four-year curriculum based on the "great books." We look at nature, through observation, and at ways of looking at nature, through seminal texts. Our students read the original writings of Aristotle, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein, with all the difficulties, challenges, and rewards involved. We work in tutorials in which about fifteen students, guided by a faculty member, undertake the work of presenting mathematical demonstrations at the board, discussing the texts and their implications, doing laboratory experiments, and engaging in field work. All our faculty are involved in leading these classes, regardless of our previous specialties; we consider ourselves "tutors"—experienced learners, not experts or professors—and often our most exciting classes involve faculty who are learning the material along with their students, creating an environment in which teacher and pupil are freshly struck with what is strange or deserving of question. Questioning is our primary activity, even more than assimilating or articulating the arguments of our texts, each of which may be an answer whose underlying question needs to be sought and pondered.
We coordinate our work between parallel tutorials in laboratory and mathematics, which also includes mathematical astronomy and physics. We maintain a long-standing conviction that all students can do math—even those who had previously professed themselves averse or even unable—if approached in the way we do, as one of the primary symbolic forms of human expression, rather than as a body of technicalities considered as beyond question. Euclid's Elements provides the perfect starting point for freshmen to learn as they demonstrate his propositions at the board, which leads many who thought they "hated math" to see its depth and beauty. We continue with Ptolemy into sophomore math; close study of the details of his theory helps students read Copernicus and Kepler with real surprise; this transition is a centerpiece of our consideration of the subtle relation of "ancient" to "modern" thought. Apollonius's Conic Sections returns the students to geometry with ever-growing richness, leading to the transition to algebraic mathematics when we study Viète and Descartes. Junior Mathematics considers the development of the calculus from Galileo to Leibniz and Newton (the mathematical lemmas and astronomical propositions from Books I and III of the Principia), before reconsidering the continuum via Euler and Dedekind. Senior Mathematics centers on a close reading of Einstein's 1905 special relativity paper, followed by a return to plane geometry via Lobachevsky, whose contrast with Euclid is richly thought-provoking.
Our Laboratory tutorials study how modern science came to be and whence comes its claims to authority, especially in relation to the claims of ancient Greek science, which we take very seriously in itself, rather than merely as a precursor or outmoded rival. Freshman Laboratory begins with observational biology: students observe a square meter of meadow as closely as possible; later they consider how to classify the various species of conifers in our mountains. Returning to the classroom, we read Aristotle's delineation of what constitutes a species and consider how he approaches the question we had just confronted among the trees. We go on to follow the development of observational biology, beginning with chicken eggs and sea urchin embryos and finishing by dissecting cats. The whole project is crucial to understanding Aristotle's approach, his careful, respectful contemplation of the natural world, which we extend through reading related works by Goethe, Thoreau, and Linnaeus.
Here and throughout, the Laboratory constantly turns to bench work that requires hands-on experience. Archimedes' text comes to greater life when we watch the crown immerse and feel for ourselves what "Eureka!" may have meant. A series of chemical experiments and readings open up the question: do atoms really exist? We suspend what we thought we "knew" about atoms, in order to confront these elemental questions without prejudice, rather than as the fait accompli most textbooks present. Thus, we do not study the "results" of science as much as participate in the process of scientific inquiry itself.
Junior Laboratory begins with mechanics following Galileo's Two New Sciences, Huyghens, Leibniz, and Newton's Principia (the Laws and mechanical propositions in Book I), followed by optics (Fermat, Leibniz, Newton), and electricity and magnetism. There, Faraday is the ideal guide, accompanied with many experiments, leading to the challenging project of studying sections of Maxwell's Treatise (with extensive notes), keeping in mind his claim to set forth in mathematical notation the physical insights of Faraday and leading to Maxwell's equations and electromagnetic waves. The first semester of Senior Lab considers the development of atomic and quantum theory through classic experiments and readings from Faraday, Rutherford, Bohr, Planck, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg. In the second semester, after close discussions of Darwin's Origin of Species, we follow the development of genetics from Mendel through Avery and the structure of DNA, ending with Jacob and Monod on gene regulation. These readings are accompanied by experiments in pea and fruit fly genetics, along with a sequence of classic bacterial experiments.
This historical approach via original texts helps our students develop a deeper appreciation for mathematics and science through discussing fundamental questions and experiments. In response, our students' questions reach out in philosophical, literary, and artistic directions: How can a single vibrating string produce many overtones at once? If all is relative, does the earth really go around the sun, vice versa, both, neither? What does it mean to understand nature via forces, fields, atoms, if those entities defy visualization and hence comprehension? Can life be understood through the "language" of the genetic code? What happens when science renounces all vestiges of anthropomorphic thinking? Once such deep questions are really broached, they resonate in the mind, initiating a life-long journey of reflection and dialogue.
The history of science for science students
Frederick Gregory
Professor Emeritus, University of Florida
The easiest students to attract to the history of science for me have always been science students, whether undergraduate or graduate. An unofficial tabulation of where our majors in history of science have come from would, I believe, show a healthy number come from the sciences, often students who have started out as a science major but then switched to history of science. But even those science students who remain in their majors present the instructor with a natural means by which to entice them to cultivate an interest in our field—their specific discipline. The question becomes how to make use of their already existing interest in science.
One way is to enlist the aid of science majors in presenting material touching on their discipline in the form of an individual lecture. Although the student's presentation may be based on a longer written assignment for the class, it is important that the student's time before the class be special, not part of a required series of presentations that all students in the class must make. This means that you as professor have to inform yourself about the majors of the students in the class and then seek out two or three who are advanced and who are performing well. In an individual meeting, explain why you are requesting that they take on the particular assignment. Of course, you could also solicit from a student an alternative topic should the one you suggest not prove of interest.
So far there has not been anything all that different from what many might already do. But an additional step can make a big difference in bringing attention to history of science. If the presentation is not to be too long, or if it could be given in a shortened form, volunteer to contact a colleague who is teaching a science class the student is currently taking to see if the professor might also permit the presentation be made in that class. In this way you have not only cast the student in your class as an ambassador for history of science, but you also bring the subject (and your course) to the attention of a whole different group of science students.
The challenge of selecting appropriate topics more or less solves itself for courses whose subject matter is narrowly focused. A class on the history of electricity, for example, presents physics students with a host of possibilities to investigate. For courses on the history of zoology, botany, geology, astronomy, or even more specialized scientific disciplines there are also any number of standard topics one would naturally cover that could be used to entice students to become spokespersons for our field.
In the survey class the challenge becomes a bit greater since there is less flexibility, but in general the same approach can be used. The above tactic can, of course, be adapted easily to majors in disciplines from the humanities and social sciences as well.
Use things!
Joe Cain, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London
Object biography is proving an effective technique for developing history of science interests among novices at the undergraduate level.
The basic method is simple. Select an object. Pose a theme, question, or point-of-view. Then, set students to work investigating. As the tutor, my role is to keep supplying fuel: directive questions, pointers to new sources, contacts with expertise, and a sounding board for those moving through the problem-solving process. Sometimes students stumble. That's when I step in to pick them up. Sometimes, they digress into useless tangents. That's when I impose some navigation.
As an example, this year I have students investigating intellectual, material, and social/cultural associations links to natural history objects found in my university's zoological museum. One student wanted to find out more about some dodo bones on display; another, a mid-19th-century embryological model showing chick development. And so on. (I offer suggestions, but ultimately, they choose.) For museum staff, not much is known about many of the specific items on display, though they usually have several threads at the start. That the curators want to know more always proves important. It means they make time in their overloaded schedules to help, and it means their interest in the work shines through to the students. This is research with a real audience.
Research normally follows several lines of inquiry:
- provenance and context of display — What precisely do we have? Where did it come from? How did it come to be here? Describe its display both narrowly (pose and interpretation) and broadly (what ideas are on display here; has this display always been as it is now?). Properly draw, describe, or photograph it. Retrieve/revise existing catalogue information and accession records.
- construction — Follow translation from raw original to curated object. What did preparation entail? What did construction entail? What ideas are embedded in the constructed display? Who undertook this work?
What relations exist between producer and consumer?
- intellectual history — Follow literary and illustrative traces for these objects both in print and in archives. How is it used? Identify differences in interpretation. Follow knowledge webs both about the object and about the interpretations built upon these objects. Start with naming and classifying.
- communal dimensions — What can we learn about the people producing and consuming the object? Follow relevant social, political, gender threads in these questions. Follow changing interests and fetishes.
- cultural life — Place the object in wider social/cultural contexts, especially in use. Investigate changing value, symbolism, and associations. Relate to parallel themes in other subjects
These projects work best on year-long, rather than single term, scales simply because they exploit an "investment paying dividends" model of work. Hard descriptive effort and sustained archival digging can be done well in one term. But confidence building takes time. So does reworking and digestion along multiple tracks. If a term is all that's available, focus investigation along a single track, such as demonstrating embedded theory or following gender/class/rank dimensions concerning who's doing the work.
Object biography is useful for some pedagogical goals, but it's not an all-purpose tool. If the aim is to develop comprehensive knowledge of a subject or to develop critical skills in argument and reasoning, then object biography will prove a poor tool. In contrast, it offers an effective means for developing research skills and integrative thinking. Handling objects and artefacts (including archive materials) taps into memory and cognitive pathways otherwise poorly served by typical essay assignments asking for the compression of a few academic papers. It doesn't seem to matter if students are novices in history of science or have prior experience in the subject. My own preference is not to cherry-pick high achievers for this work. I find object biography quite useful for skill development in otherwise average performers. The common denominator seems to be an appeal to students bored by (or not particularly good at) memorizing and other low-level cognitive chores. It also appeals to risk-takers and those eager to center the content of their learning around their own sense of relevance. Importantly, object biography concentrates on skill deployment as much as skill development. For those focused on portfolio and cv building, the creation of useful finished projects, showing them at their independent best, can serve as a key endpoint justifying their time and dedication.
The long term effect of object biography seems to be instilling confidence in students' analytical capabilities and their own critical interpretative voices. It helps them understand at a deep level (and demonstrate) how facts in the world around us come only through processes of construction and intervention.
Object biography is not new. Alberti (2005, Isis 96:559—571) is the tip of the iceberg. It certainly offers promise as one tool in our pedagogical arsenal. It's especially useful when the goal is integrative and penetrating thinking.
Magic, Science, and Religion
Margaret J. Osler, University of Calgary
When I first arrived in Calgary in 1975, two of my colleagues were offering a one-term, second-year course on Magic, Science, and Religion in Europe developed in response to the popular culture and widening scholarship of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Within a couple of years, one of these colleagues had moved on and his part of the course fell to me. Eventually, I took over the entire course. As I developed lectures, I felt overwhelmed with the volume of relevant material, and in the early 1980s I expanded the course to a two-term sequence. Demand grew, and I now cap enrolment at 125 students per term.
The first term of the course covers the period from Augustine to Galileo; the second from 1600 through 20th-century debates about scientific creationism. While it is no substitute for the history of science survey, it is now the entry-level course in my history of science sequence that includes the survey and a variety of more specialized, seminar courses.
My version of this course focuses on the development of ideas and intellectual issues. The guiding principle is the notion of conceptual frameworks. Rather than providing essentialist and anachronistic definitions of—"magic," "science," and "religion"—I try to make the point that different ways of understanding the world rest on different assumptions about what kinds of entities exist in the world, how these entities interact, and how we can know about them. For each topic, I analyze the assumptions underlying different views of the world and the broader reasons why thinkers have adopted one set of assumptions or another in particular historical contexts. I also make the point that the relationships among these conceptual frameworks is far more complicated and diverse than that of conflict, and that the history is not a Manichean story of the light of reason triumphing over the forces of darkness and superstition. Instead, I focus on examples of interaction and interpenetration, and I examine ostensible conflicts carefully to see exactly what was at stake between the conflicting parties.
As background to the first term, I spend two weeks of lecture describing the major themes of the Judaeo-Christian and Greek background to Western intellectual history—the basis for considering the sometimes-uneasy marriage between Athens and Jerusalem. Topics discussed, however briefly, include various schools of pre-Socratic philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Epicureanism, and Stoicism, as well as basic ideas in Old and New Testament religion, including the concepts of God, creation, providence, salvation, and the Apocalypse. (Surprisingly for conservative Albertans, many students have no notion either of the main tenets of Christianity or of the Bible.)
The first substantive unit deals with the development of the concept of witchcraft from Augustine's opinion that witchcraft belief is illusory to the full blown concept of witchcraft as a pact with the Devil articulated in the Malleus Maleficarum in the late 15th century. The thesis of this part of the course is that witchcraft involves magical practices (or accusations of such) but that witchcraft itself, in the medieval Christian context, is not magic but perverted religion.
The second term, running from 1600 through the late 20th century, is organized around the changing relationships between science and religion. The 17th century is a time when theological considerations play a major role in the choice of a new philosophy of nature. During the 18th century, the positions of reason and religion become reversed, and reason emerges as the universal criterion. During the 19th and 20th centuries—especially after Darwin—science displaces theology as the starting point for discussions of human nature.
Because the course draws students from all over the university, I cannot assume any relevant background or a willingness to read overly technical material. Because class size is so large, I lecture. If one could teach this course with smaller sections or at a more advanced level, it would lend itself well to a discussion format and the use of primary sources.
Many different kinds of students are attracted to this course. Over the years I have encountered covens of witches, practicing Hermeticists, New Age feminists, positivist scientists, and fundamentalist Christians.
This is extracted from an article that first appeared in the HSS Newsletter, April 2002. For the full article, please go to http://www.hssonline.org/publications/ Newsletter_Archives/2002/HSSNewsletterApril2002.pdf, pp. 4-5
Teaching Disagreements in Science and Math
Alberto A. Martínez
University of Texas at Austin
At the University of Texas at Austin, the UTeach program trains students majoring in science or mathematics to become teachers. It requires one historical course titled: "Perspectives on Science and Math." The version that I have taught to nine groups over the past four years is now being replicated in 13 other universities, with more underway; and additional course materials are being prepared by Abigail Lustig. The replication labors are directed by the UTeach Institute, thanks greatly to a grant of $125 million from The Exxon Mobile Foundation, plus support from the National Math and Science Initiative, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the Texas Instruments Foundation, and several other state and national agencies.
The Perspectives course is one of nine courses in this teaching certification program. Nearly none of our students have taken other courses in the history of science. At first, many seniors resent having to take yet another requirement and they doubt that there is any real way in which history might help their future work as teachers of science or math. Moreover, many math students presuppose no connection between their field and the sciences: "Why should I have to study biology and physics? I'm a math major." Nevertheless, my most successful strategy to gain their interest has been to portray the elements of science and math as interdependent and unfinished, open to critical analysis, by tracing historical episodes in which scientists have intensely debated topics we now take for granted. The same holds for mathematicians, as our incoming students know no example of mathematicians ever disagreeing about anything.
Among the topics that trigger most debate and discussion are the following: rules on negative numbers, division by zero, the Monty Hall game show problem, definitions of species, eugenics and Belyaev's foxes, 1 = .999..., Platonism versus formalism, the prisoner's dilemma, and myths about the Golden Ratio. My main goal is to spark curiosity that will lead students to pursue history on their own. To trigger discussion I carry out preliminary surveys on what students think, to later get them to argue their perspectives, and to connect with viewpoints of past scientists and mathematicians.
If not strictly required, many students will postpone reading until just before an exam. Therefore, I give brief reading quizzes for every single reading. But finding suitable readings has been a struggle. Primary sources, such as by Galileo or Darwin, lack appeal for these students. Solid historical works lack the entertainment value of popular science books, which lack reliability. I've increasingly assigned excerpts of books, along with historically informed yet popular essays, and I have written articles to hand out. Rather than assign exhaustive works, I find it better to assign lively readings and to expose defects in class. By highlighting critical and progressive dimensions, students enjoy the sense that history involves inquiry. Finding variations in historical accounts, students become compelled to turn to primary sources.
We also analyze schoolbooks on science and math, looking for historical elements, to pinpoint myths and shortcomings. As future teachers, students appreciate the growing sense that they can be "above the textbook"—able to correct passages that are wrong. These students lack interest in scientific societies or institutions, but they enjoy stories about interesting individuals: such as Pascal, Wegener, and Galton. Thus, one way to capture students' attention is to study aspects of popular books, even bestsellers, and to seek in history factual elements that resonate with the captivating forms of popular stories.
By the end of the course, students' views on history have improved greatly. They write: "I've never taken a course like this before. I love that everything that we've learned as the 'foundation' of math or science in the past has a more interesting back story," and also, "This is by far my favorite class of college. It was so interesting and taught in a completely different way than I've ever experienced. It changed the way I view the impact of teaching."
In July 2009, President Obama praised the UTeach program in a White House press release on education, and now again, in January 2010 the President commended its national expansion in his "Educate to Innovate" Campaign. Six new UTeach replication sites have now been announced, bringing the total to nineteen: University of California at Berkeley (Cal Teach), University of California at Irvine (Cal Teach), University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Teach), University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, University of Florida (FloridaTeach), Florida State University (FSUTeach), University of Houston (TeachHOUSTON), University of Kansas (UKanTeach), Louisiana State University (Geaux Teach), University of North Texas (TNT), Northern Arizona University, (NAUTeach), Temple University (TUteach), University of Texas at Dallas (UTeach Dallas), University of Western Kentucky (SKyTeach), University of Tennessee Knoxville (VolsTeach), Middle Tennessee State University, University of Texas at Arlington (UTeach Arlington), University of Texas at Tyler, Cleveland State University. Each of these universities needs (or already has appointed) qualified instructors to teach the Perspectives on Science and Math course. A problem, however, is that some of the schools might hire instructors from education, philosophy, or the sciences who lack the specialized knowledge of our field. To that end, job candidates should directly contact programs of interest to inquire about possible opportunities, or, you may write to info@UTeach-institute.org, addressing your email to Kim Hughes, who will refer you to the appropriate site coordinator.
Web Links:
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2010/01/07/uteach_expansion/
http://www.uteach.utexas.edu/
http://www.uteach-institute.org/