Sci & Educ (2015) 24:339–341

DOI 10.1007/s11191-014-9729-3

BOOK REVIEW

Peter Heering, Stephen Klassen and Don Metz (eds):

Enabling Scientific Understanding Through Historical
Instruments and Experiments in Formal and Non-formal
Learning Environments. Flensburg Studies in the History
and Philosophy of Science in Science Education
(Volume 2)
Flensburg University Press, Flensburg, 2013,
ISBN: 978-3-939858-29-4, 383 pp, € 29.50

Katharine Anderson

Published online: 31 October 2014

Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

These proceedings of the International Conference for the History of Science in Science
Education (ICHSSE) 2012 offer a snapshot of the work and conversations at an increas-
ingly busy intersection: history of science, museum and science center staff, and science
educators. The backgrounds of the editors reflect this mixture. Peter Heering, of the
University of Flensburg, where the 2012 conference was held, is a historian and a leading
figure in the field of replication studies, in which researchers and students re-build appa-
ratus and re-enact scientific experiments in order to recover historical perspectives lost to
view in the documentary sources. His is a scholarly labour that is both impressively rich
and impressively time-consuming. Stephen Klassen and Don Metz are specialists in
physics education from Winnipeg, Canada, developing techniques of story-telling and
biography to energize science curriculum. Both the editors and conference participants
shared an interest in bringing scientific instruments and contextualist approaches to the
foreground in the classroom and, also, more informal spaces like the museum or science
centre.
The 25 chapters in this volume fall into four sometimes overlapping categories. The first
section contains papers on historical episodes such as critical experiments. The second
focuses on different methods of using historical records in teaching situations, at levels
from teacher training to late elementary students. The third section explores projects
developed in science museums or science centres, with contributions drawn from the work
of leading institutions like the Deutsches Museum, the Smithsonian Museum, University of
Pavia, and with a welcome South American example from São Carlos, Brazil. A section
representing formal studies of science pedagogy closes the volume. The collection as a
whole is dominated by case studies involving the physical sciences, but there are also
valuable studies which turn to the life sciences.

K. Anderson (&)
Science and Technology Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada
e-mail: kateya@yorku.ca

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The energy and excitement in many of the classrooms and projects described in the case
studies in this volume is impressive. Many readers will approach this collection prag-
matically. If this volume can be considered as a toolkit, which tools are most versatile? Or,
to change the metaphor to a more horticultural one, what methods can be most easily be
transplanted? The technical support and most of all the extended time required for repli-
cation studies is a well known barrier in many settings, and this volume gives interesting
examples of the efforts to overcome the barrier. Peter Heering’s contribution to the vol-
ume, ‘‘Make—Keep—Use’’, gives an account of a project called the ‘‘Project Galilei’’,
which trained teachers to lead secondary students in the construction and use of replicas
that then became part of the school’s equipment. The project had mixed success—the kinds
of instrument that could be made in the short time available in the curriculum was limited;
and the teacher training portion was critical. Another version of a solution to the barriers of
replication was the Danish project, Geomat.dk, which loaned a collection of replica nav-
igational instruments to high schools for a few weeks at a time. Several other chapters in
the volume stress the importance of doing as well as reading or listening. Elizabeth
Cavicchi’s eloquent account of her work at the Egerton Center at MIT training teachers
cover a variety of hands-on learning projects, from working with Euclidean geometry to
Galilean relative motion. The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, building on a similar
teacher-training summer institute, extended its work with replicas to school-age children at
short field-trips to the museum. Here the engagement with replicas is much more super-
ficial than is possible with more extended work, and so may offer little more, perhaps, than
the ‘science theatre’ tradition. Yet the numbers of students it can reach is huge. Another
more in-depth approaches that remain quite widely accessible, however, is digging for the
identity and provenance of an unknown object. An example is recorded in a very
straightforward manner by Maximilian Wottrich, a gymnasium student from Augsburg,
who investigated an unidentified magnetic–electrical apparatus by a Vienna instrument
maker. Remarkable here is the sense that closing the story—finding the answer to the
instrument’s identity—is almost irrelevant. Instead, the ongoing process of understanding
the functions of the device, or recovering scattered clues to the maker, builds both scientific
and historical literacy.
That ‘open conclusion’ is clearly one of the most valuable features of the general
intellectual project represented in the volume. The descriptions of how to incorporate
historical narrative in the classroom, however, vary quite widely in how they treat this
quality. In some projects, the intention of the historical background is coloration and
inspiration, bringing the human dimensions of scientific practice alive through biography
and historical context. Evidently, as in the model cases here, this can be done expertly
indeed, but it remains a deceptively difficult technique. Here the theoretical reflections on
the turn to the ‘science story’ in science pedagogy by Cathrine Froese Klassen seem
significant. If the formal definition of the ‘science story’ promotes the idea of denouement
as closure, it seems to me we risk losing more than we have gained in bringing history into
the classroom. We are back on the path that leads to the tidy old stories, or to tired-
sounding rebuttals of C. P. Snow’s description of the sciences and humanities as two
cultures with no common ground. Yet in other work described here, including history is a
jumping-off point for truly open-ended inquiry and productions. A case in point here is
Claus Michelsen’s chapter describing his students’ explorations of the connections
between poet and author Hans Christian Andersen and natural philosopher Hans Christian
Oersted in the Danish Golden Age. The example from this project that stood out to me was
the student video that captured a re-enactment of an image in Oersted’s poetry. These are
best described as ‘hors catégorie’ rather than interdisciplinary, but they embody what is at

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stake in promoting different ways to teach science. Michelsen’s chapter is also valuable in
outlining the pedagogical philosophies at the heart of the collaboration he describes, both
in historical terms and in present-day.
The intersection of historians, curators, scientists and science educators can be a fruitful
one. This volume suggests not only the extent to which the conversation has already begun,
but also the need to go beyond simply celebrating the fact that diverse groups of scholars
and educators are now actively engaged with each other’s worlds. Sharing some guidelines
of best practices would go a long way, and the goal is what we might call functional
literacy as opposed to mastery of a different set of disciplinary practices. For historians of
science, this might mean needing to know something more about how to collect and
preserve, or simply what a good material record looks like. (Several of the contributions
from museum professionals in the third section of this volume begin to provide these
guidelines, but in a manner that requires considerable excavation.) Similarly, as the late
historian of science John Pickstone has argued, scientists and others involved in public
science communication could be held to more critical standards of historical evidence and
argument.1 In the early twenty-first century, there are many forces at work reshaping our
‘formal and informal learning environments’ ranging from financial challenges, new digital
environments, and the politics of educational reform. Many of these forces are bringing
museums and universities closer together. To focus on developments that embody intel-
lectual energy and spirit, as a reader can do in this wide-ranging volume, will be a welcome
opportunity for many.

1
‘‘Selling Science: Science Britannica, tribal tales or historical research?’’ http://www.theguardian.com/
science/the-h-word/2013/oct/22/science-britannica-history-science-television.

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