Introduction: How Science Works—and How to Teach It

Abstract

The contents of this special issue of Science & Education are the offspring of a workshop named How Science Works and How to Teach It, which was organized in collaboration with European Society for the History of Science and held at Aarhus University, Denmark, in June 2011. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together historians and philosophers of science and science education researchers to discuss how to improve teaching and learning of how science works in science education. (The term how science works was considered appropriately inclusive. For brevity we will also use the more familiar NOS). The workshop had 30 participants from 12 countries (Cyprus, USA, Brazil, France, Australia, Germany, Italy, Finland, Denmark, Colombia, Spain, and Austria) approximately equally distributed between historians and philosophers on one side, at science educators on the other. There were 21 presentations and additional workshop discussions. The rationale behind bringing the two groups of expertise together can be stated at two levels: At a pragmatic level, teaching of how science works must balance validity in the representations of science with (systemic) educational purposes and perceived meaningfulness on the side of the students. To achieve this both kinds of expertise are clearly necessary. Direct contact between groups should enable a dialogical renegotiation of the balance between elements. At a theoretical level, the workshop rationale relates to forms of knowledge and knowledge-transformations. We know that there is a large gap between academic knowledge about history and philosophy of science, and the NOS-knowledge enacted and learned in classrooms. Even in the ideal classroom situation one should expect some gap, since knowledge necessarily is transformed as it crosses institutional contexts, from the field of knowledge production (History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science) to the field of reproduction (Science Education). Basil Bernstein (1990) has used the term recontextualization to designate this transformation process, while the French mathematician Yves Chevallard talks about ‘didactical transposition’ (DT) (Chevallard 1985).