HSS 2011

History of Science Society Joint conference with SHOT and SSSS.

November, 2011

Sessions

Linking the past and the present:

Piers Hale, U OK

Reflecting on the context in which we teach the history of science. Most students are science and engineering majors. They provide diff challenges than students from other fields. Respect from science and engineering faculty. NSF funding for betterment of STEM education may be served by history integration. E.g., see NSF 10-544 Program Solicitation.

Study abroad is an opportunity to address student expectations and foster collaboration between instructors. Experience in the field, at least in this case in Ecuador, led instructor to steer away from the pre-planned syllabus. There were social issues like the relationship between locals and a site of oil extraction at Tiputini. Unpredicted local issues in science and society arose, for example the story of Lonesome George, the Galapagos sea turtle who supposedly has no mate, whose true story may be hidden by those who don't want to lose the sense that local fauna are so endangered that they need intense financial support.

Zoology at U Oklahoma requires history of science course. Faculty debating whether the longstanding requirement should stand. Pre-med and recently engineering have added a requirement.

Benefits of history of science:Questions that vex polity are not completely new, conditions can be identified, mistakes can be identified, there are multiple ways to frame inquiries.

Used pre and post evaluations.

Shawn

Respect from faculty expressed in curriculum integration? History of science abroad—Primary or secondary?

Mark Borrello, U Minnesota, ex Michigan State

Taught history of science in Tropical Biodiversity and Conservation in Panama. Learned about genealogy of scientists in situ. Modified ecology's pedagogical method of generating inquiries based on individual field experience—e.g. what do students think scientists from earlier times were thinking at this site?

The historian helps provide the conceptual framework and story to a scientific inquiry in class. E.g., what is an individual, what is speciation, these are concepts for labs in biology courses that are historically relevant and significant.

James Elwick, York U, CA

Elwick makes a case for lab work in the class, even the 80-student lecture hall. Students should be exposed to novel work with tools, not just redundant, reenacting work. Taught this course three times. Made a lab, students design/make/test timekeeping devices in teams and judged each other. Imitations were encouraged, as long as citations were kept. A second trial occurred more than a month after the first. "High source, Stillman Drake's work figuring out how Galileo kept time; low source, TV show." "The class looked like a science fair, timekeeping devices spread out around the lecture hall." "Students discovered how common good ideas were, but how hard they were to implement." Elwick learned how hard it was to negotiate his rules with wily students. Some students just wanted lectures, essays, exams, no lab work. Elwick stopped teaching about creativity and innovation, and too-large classes, so stopped doing device lab work in class. He also thought he was teaching more about engineering than science.

One member of the audience suggested SCALE UP and NCSU as a way to work with large enrollment courses.

David Sepkoski, UNC Wilmington

Ways historians of science could integrate history ed into science curriculum, undergrads or grads.

One way, offering courses in foundational literature in particular fields. Science students, even scientists, haven't read classic papers in their disciplines.

• Reading classic papers:
  • Students give an interested response.
  • Gives a new view of contemporary work.
  • Just one way to integrate with science instruction.

Institutional limitation:If it's coming from a history department, there may be much resistance from the science department.

Science students attended Sepkoski's history courses and stated they'd prefer a place where there were less non-science students. Sepkoski recently started a seminar where they assembled private readings since there was no course for science majors in the history of science.

Older ideas get sanitized by presentation in newer textbooks/lectures, original contexts are forgotten, students aren't presented with challenges original thinkers faced. It's even true that new ideas can come from reading old texts.

Sepkoski says that ideally this kind of course should be team-taught.

Sepkoski questions whether some disciplines could be served by reading classic papers, e.g. physics.

Shawn

Perhaps an impediment to physics students signing up for history isn't always that that physics education doesn't feel it needs history, but that the society of historians doesn't always seem quite welcoming/open to physics students who want to do more history but not commit 100% to history at the expense of their study of physics.

Shawn

Are there readings/studies I can read to learn about efforts to integrate history into STEM ed?

Possible Studies:Can/need we rewrite classic papers for pre-college readers? Can we make texts, modules, study units?

Scientific Periodicals in Great Britain, 1785-1914

Iain Watts, Princeton U

We can see how, despite snobbery, people in late Georgian England turned to new journals for consumption of scientific publishing, when there were so many limits and rules involved in publishing through the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which by that time was printed only twice a year, papers (exclusively) vetted up to a year before.

Cameron Murray, York U

Journalism historians have overlooked Egerton Smith's Kaleidoscope and Mercury of Liverpool, England as a filling new, semi-political niche for technical and human ecological knowledge in this important port city

Geoff Belknap, U of Cambridge

The differing utilities of photographs and rapidly developing print technology in Nature and Knowledge in the late 19th century show the differing editorial intents and circumstances of the two journals. E.g., Knowledge uses photographs for description, while Nature uses them as authoritative data.

Melinda Baldwin, York U

Ernest Rutherford uses letters to the editor in the 1900s to avoid the scoop that embarrassed him in his earlier work on roentgen rays, as well as for other reasons. Baldwin contrasts the resulting internationalism with the lack thereof in the arguably internationalist field of Mendelian genetics.