ORIGINS OF NATURAL SCIENCES: A TECHNOLOGICAL QUEST AS THE FIRST STEP

Abstract

The general idea of an educational design is to deliver basic concepts (and pre-concepts) of future sciences to students, thus they will become students’ actual thinking instruments. According to Davydov, for this purpose we have to reconstruct the situation of the concept's origin and provide students’ work within this context with special modelling means (which can be, sometimes, extracted from the history of concept’s actual development). In this paper we present an overview of the introductory module of natural sciences developed according to the principles of Developmental Instruction. According to our analysis, “Nature laws” were introduced as the requirements towards human purposeful operations with “reluctant” natural material, which was transformed to special “things” (instruments, materials, supplies…) to suit human needs. As we remove the “contemporary coating” from well-known modern technologies and techniques, we will find traits of their ancient origins. Hence, we have made testing ancient technologies the foundation of our course. The whole discourse was changed: from the history of nature to the history of culture, from the actions of observing, describing and classifying to purposeful transformation and verification of hypotheses. Students’ work within the educational module includes: working over special texts, testing some fragments of technologies in hands-on experiments and constructing models. We will provide examples of students’ work over texts and labs, mediated by a special modelling tool – the technological chart.