"The Poet of Science": how scientists read their Tennyson

Tennyson’s responses to science have been thoroughly documented and discussed, but how did scientists respond to his poetry? Through examining in detail the work of three scientists who wrote at length about Tennyson--the astronomer Norman Lockyer, the physicist Oliver Lodge, and the American geologist William North Rice--it is possible to see how Tennyson went from being respected by contemporary scientists to being feted as the Poet of Science itself after his death. As a materialist, a Spiritualist, and a Darwinian Methodist respectively, Lockyer, Lodge, and Rice had very different conceptions of how science worked and what it implied about the universe, yet each looked to Tennyson and his poetry to confirm and extend his own judgements and values.

Why Implementing History and Philosophy in School Science Education is a Challenge: An Analysis of Obstacles

Teaching and learning with history and philosophy of science (HPS) has been, and continues to be, supported by science educators. While science education standards documents in many countries also stress the importance of teaching and learning with HPS, the approach still suffers from ineffective implementation in school science teaching. In order to better understand this problem, an analysis of the obstacles of implementing HPS into classrooms was undertaken. The obstacles taken into account were structured in four groups: 1. culture of teaching physics, 2. teachers` skills, epistemological and didactical attitudes and beliefs, 3. institutional framework of science teaching, and 4. textbooks as fundamental didactical support. Implications for more effective implementation of HPS are presented, taking the social nature of educational systems into account.

Introducing Undergraduate Students to Science

Understanding the scientific method fosters the development of critical thinking and logical analysis of information. Additionally, proposing and testing a hypothesis is applicable not only to science, but also to ordinary facts of daily life. Knowing the way science is done and how its results are published is useful for all citizens and mandatory for science students. A 60-h course was created to offer undergraduate students a framework in which to learn the procedures of scientific production and publication. The course`s main focus was biochemistry, and it was comprised of two modules. Module I dealt with scientific articles, and Module II with research project writing. Module I covered the topics: 1) the difference between scientific knowledge and common sense, 2) different conceptions of science, 3) scientific methodology, 4) scientific publishing categories, 5) logical principles, 6) deductive and inductive approaches, and 7) critical reading of scientific articles. Module II dealt with 1) selection of an experimental problem for investigation, 2) bibliographic revision, 3) materials and methods, 4) project writing and presentation, 5) funding agencies, and 6) critical analysis of experimental results. The course adopted a collaborative learning strategy, and each topic was studied through activities performed by the students. Qualitative and quantitative course evaluations with Likert questionnaires were carried out at each stage, and the results showed the students` high approval of the course. The staff responsible for course planning and development also evaluated it positively. The Biochemistry Department of the Chemistry Institute of the University of Sao Paulo has offered the course four times.

Change in Managers’ Conceptions of Human Resources in Organisations : Outcomes of an Intervention

Managers’ conceptions of the importance of human resources are essential for creating ‘attractive workplaces’. This paper examines an intervention method aimed at creating insight among managers in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) concerning the potential of human resources. The intervention method is called Focus Group Attractive Work (FGAW) and was conducted at eight enterprises in Sweden. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that the intervention method seems to be thought-provoking and to facilitate changes in managers’ conceptions of the importance of human resources, albeit to different degrees. 

Upper secondary school students' gendered conceptions about mathematics

This study explores Swedish Natural Science students' conceptions about gender and mathematics. I conducted and compared the results from two questionnaires. The first questionnaire revealed a view of rather traditional feminities and masulinities, a result that did not repeat itself in the second questionnaire. There was a discrepancy between the traits the students ascribed as gender different and the traits they ascribed to themselves.

Biology Teachers'Conceptions of the Diversity of Life and the Historical Development of Evolutionary Concepts

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Pedagogical practices carried out during an in-service teachers education project: approaching history and philosophy of science to physics teaching

We report here part of a research project developed by the Science Education Research Group, titled: "Teachers’ Pedagogical Practices and formative processes in Science and Mathematics Education" which main goal is the development of coordinated research that can generate a set of subsidies for a reflection on the processes of teacher training in Sciences and Mathematics Education. One of the objectives was to develop continuing education activities with Physics teachers, using the History and Philosophy of Science as conductors of the discussions and focus of teaching experiences carried out by them in the classroom. From data collected through a survey among local Science, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics teachers in Bauru, a São Paulo State city, we developed a continuing education proposal titled “The History and Philosophy of Science in the Physics teachers’ pedagogical practice”, lasting 40 hours of lessons. We followed the performance of five teachers who participated in activities during the 2008 first semester and were teaching Physics at High School level. They designed proposals for short courses, taking into consideration aspects of History and Philosophy of Science and students’ alternative conceptions. Short courses were applied in real classrooms situations and accompanied by reflection meetings. This is a qualitative research, and treatment of data collected was based on content analysis, according to Bardin [1].

Folklore, fad, and fashion: The concept of misconduct in science redefined

This study is an analytical investigation of the nature and implications of the current conceptions of scientific misconduct, arguing that the question of what constitutes misconduct in science is significantly more complex than what conventionally has been believed. Complicating the definitions of misconduct are the differences between professional science and non-scientific professions, in their respective norms of what constitutes valid knowledge, and what counts as appropriate and inappropriate practice. While institutionalized science claims that there is clear differentiation between its standards of validity and those of the non-scientific professions, this paper argues that, when it comes to misconduct, the perceived boundaries between the scientific and non-scientific professions are breached; the practice standards that science currently employs in self-policing misconduct have come to resemble the minimal juridical standards of practice that other professions employ. This study attempts, despite erosion of these traditional boundaries, to move from legalistic standards of scientific practice to intramural standards of practice, and in so doing, to hold scientific practice to a higher standard than ordinary public conduct. The result is a clearer understanding of scientific misconduct to aid those individual scientists who are required to make onerous determinations about the appropriateness of specific practices by their peers. ^

The influence of an in-service programme on primary teachers conceptions about practical work

The purpose of this study was to investigate how an in-service programme influenced primary teachers’ conceptions about practical work. Ten elementary teachers participated in a Portuguese city in an one-year professional development programme, which aimed to promote the use of practical activities in classroom. Semi-structured interviews and classroom observations were both used to examine changes in teachers’ conceptions about science teaching and in their classroom pratices. Data also included written artefacts, such as teachers’ written reflections, lesson plans, activity sheets, assessment items and student work samples. Based on the analysis of the data, the changes in teachers’ conceptions were organized into four categories: student and learning, teacher and teaching, science teaching, and teaching context. Throughout their participation in the programme, teachers pointed out several constraints related to planning and implementing practical activities. Results indicate that most teachers were able to overcome their initial difficulties and progressively gained more confidence in using student-centered pratices. However, one year after the end of the programme, teachers reported that their actual practices did not changed significantly, particularly with regard to inquiry-based practical and collaborative activities, which remained absent or rare. Implications for professional development and further research are discussed.

Suggestions of modern science concerning education,

Lectures delivered before the "Joint committee on education," a self-organized body of Chicago citizens. Foreword signed: E.S.D. [i.e. Mrs. E. S. Dumer] for the committee.

Natural rights : a criticism of some political and ethical conceptions /

Includes some text in French.

Dissonance between conceptions of learning and ways of learning for indigenous Australian university students

This article reports on a phenomenographic investigation into conceptions of learning for 15 Indigenous Australian university students over the three years of their degree courses. The ways in which they went about learning were also investigated along with the relationship between individual students' 'core' conceptions of learning and the ways in which they learned. Results indicated that their conceptions and ways of learning were similar in some respects to those found for other university students. However, some students went about learning in ways that were incongruent with the core conception of learning they held. This can be regarded as dissonance between strategies and conceptions of learning. The implications of this for teaching and learning for such students are discussed.

Conceptions of health held by Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Papua New Guinea health care students

Health is considered to be a fundamental human right. Concurrently health is assumed to be a global social goal (Bloom, 1987) yet many third-world countries and some sub-populations within developed countries do not enjoy a healthy existence. The research reported in this paper examined the conceptions of health, conceptions of illness and health practices for a group of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and Papua New Guinea university students studying health science courses. Results found three conceptions of health and three conceptions of illness that showed these students held traditional/cultural and Western beliefs about health and health practices. These findings may contribute to the development of health care courses that are more specific to how these students understand health. This may also serve to improve the educational status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and potentially improve the health status within these communities (author abstract)

Making the Men of Tomorrow: American Science Fiction and the Politics of Masculinity, 1965 – 1974

Suggesting that the political diversity of American science fiction during the 1960s and early 1970s constitutes a response to the dominance of social liberalism throughout the 1940s and 1950s, I argue in Making the Men of Tomorrow that the development of new hegemonic masculinities in science fiction is a consequence of political speculation. Focusing on four representative and influential texts from the 1960s and early 1970s, Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, this thesis explores the relationship between different conceptions of hegemonic masculinity and three separate but related political ideologies: the social ethic, market libertarianism, and socialist libertarianism. In the first two chapters in which I discuss Dick’s novels, I argue that Dick interrogates organizational masculinity as part of a larger project that suggests the inevitable infeasibility of both the social ethic and its predecessor, social liberalism. In the next chapter, I shift my attention to Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as a way of showing how, unlike Dick, other authors of the 1960s and early 1970s sought to move beyond social liberalism by imagining how new political ideologies, in this case market libertarianism, might change the way men see themselves. Having demonstrated how the libertarian potential of Heinlein’s novel is ultimately undermined by its insistent and uncompromising biological determinism, I then discuss how Le Guin’s The Dispossessed uses the socialist libertarianism of the moon Anarres to suggest a more egalitarian form of masculinity, one that makes possible, to some extent at least, a future in which men might embrace not only the mutual aid of socialism, but also the primacy of individual rights that is at the heart of all forms of libertarianism and liberalism.

Plutarch's chemistry of stones and metals: conceptions and explanations. With an appendix on the TheSu XML annotation scheme

This dissertation presents a systematic and analytic overview of most of the information related to stones, minerals, and stone masonry which is found in the corpus of Plutarch of Chaeronea, combined with most of the information on metals and metalworking which is connected to the former. This survey is intended as a first step in the reconstruction of the full landscape of ‘chemical’ ideas occurring in Plutarch’s writings; accordingly, the exposition of the relevant passages, the assessment of their possible interpretations, the discussion on their implications, and their contextualization in the ancient traditions have been conducted with a special interest in the ‘mineralogical’ and ‘metallurgic’ themes developed in the frame of natural philosophy and meteorology. Although in this perspective physical etiology could have come to acquire central prominence, non-etiological information on Plutarch’s ideas on the nature and behaviour of stones and metals has been treated as equally relevant to reach a fuller understanding of how Plutarch conceptualized and visualized them in general, in- and outside the frame of philosophical explanation. Such extensive outline of Plutarch’s ideas on stones and metals is a prerequisite for an accurate inquiry into his use of the two in analogies, metaphors, and symbols: to predispose this kind of research was another aim of the present survey, and this aim has contributed to shape it; moreover, a special attention has been paid to the analysis of analogical and figurative speaking due to the nature itself of a large part of Plutarch’s references to stones and metals, which are either metaphorical, presented in close association with metaphors, or framed in analogies. Much of the information used for the present overview has been extracted —always with supporting argumentation— from the implications of such metaphors and analogies.