Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science to Features of Science

Abstract

There has been a long tradition advocating the cultural, educational, personal and scientific benefits of infusing the history and philosophy of science, into science programmes and curriculum; or in current terms, of teaching about the nature of science (NOS) while teaching science. In the nineteenth century, the central figures were William Whewell (1854), Thomas Huxley (1885/1964) and Ernst Mach (1886/1986). In the early decades of the twentieth century John Dewey (1910, 1916) in the US and Fredrick Westaway (1919, 1929) in the UK were central figures. In the Anglo-American world, the tradition was continued by Joseph Schwab in the 1940s and 1950s (Schwab 1949, 1958); by Leo Klopfer (1969) and James Robinson (1968) in the 1960s; by Jim Rutherford (1972), Gerald Holton (1975, 1978), Robert Cohen (1975) and Michael Martin (1972, 1974) in the 1970s. In the past three decades a number of science educators have extended this tradition. Perhaps the most prominent have been Derek Hodson (1986, 1988, 2008, 2009), Richard Duschl (1985, 1990, 1994), and Michael Matthews (Matthews 1992, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2009). The International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group, through its conferences held biennially since 1989 and associated journal Science & Education, have contributed a great deal to this research tradition. As well as advocacy there has been a mushrooming of empirical studies relating to NOS matters determining NOS views held by scientists, teachers, and representative historians and philosophers; determining the optimal teacher and classroom conditions for most effective NOS teaching; ascertaining the connections between learning NOS and learning science content; developing valid, reliable and efficient tests to measure NOS learning; and so on. Here the work of Norman Lederman and his students have had a particular impact. Science is a human and thus historically-embedded truth-seeking enterprise that has many features: cognitive, social, commercial, cultural, political, structural, ethical, psychological etc. All of these features are worthy of study by science students as well as by disciplinary specialists; and different of them come into clearer focus when considering different sciences, and when considering different aspects of the history, achievements and practice of the different sciences. Some of the features are shared to a large degree with other knowledge-acquiring enterprises, some are shared to a limited degree, and some are not shared at all. Given these characteristics of science, it is useful to understand NOS not as some list of necessary and sufficient conditions for a practice to be scientific, but rather as something that, following Wittgenstein s terminology, identifies a family resemblance of features that warrant different enterprises being called scientific. This essay will recommend a change of terminology and research focus from the essentialist and epistemologically focussed Nature of Science (NOS) to a more relaxed, contextual and heterogeneous Features of Science (FOS). Such a change of terminology

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