Abstract
In this chapter, I make the case that learning in the discovery sciences suggests benefits from engaging deeply in a small number of projects that allow students to become familiar with. A small number of projects exemplifies the core aspects of the STEM discipline – when we theorize such experiences in terms of the documentary method that characterizes informal learning of speaking a language or queuing. The discovery sciences also teach us that there is more to work than making money. I suggest that inquiry is authentic when it affords optimal experience that some refer to as flow.
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Notes
- 1.
Wagenschein refers to the Abitur, the final examination at the end of the academically streamed high school (i.e. Gymnasium, like the British grammar school) of the three-tiered German (Austrian, Swiss) educational system, where, at the time of his writing in the 1960s and 1970s, less than 15 % of the student population entered. (The others remained in the trades-oriented Hauptschule, which finished after eighth grade, or in the technically oriented Mittelschule, which finished after tenth grade.).
- 2.
As a high school teacher and long before knowing about Wagenschein’s writings, I used to say to my students: “Let’s have some fun. And anything you need for the final, provincially determined exams we get you ready for during the last few weeks preceding those exams. At that time your understanding will be so deep that anything new can be hung onto it.”
- 3.
I was teaching in a small, completely isolated fishing village on the southern shores of the Labrador Peninsula. The school board had purchased kits of Introductory Physical Sciences, normally a one-year course, to be taught over the course of two years. The need to have enough material for a two-year course partially may have been the mother of invention. My inclination as an experimental physicist contributed to the ease with which I made adaptations to the curriculum.
- 4.
This is the case in Piaget ’s writings generally, which focuses on what children cannot do during the different stages in their lives, as measured against the telos , the scientific rationality that Piaget posits as the highest form of thought.
- 5.
It had resulted in my first ever publication.
- 6.
Note added at the time of this writing: Mereology denotes the formal study of the relation between wholes and their parts. Mereology belongs to philosophy and mathematical logic . It finds its study and applications in logic, ontology , linguistics, engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Part–whole relations are important in cultural-historical activity theory as well, where the minimum unit of analysis manifests itself in different ways, each of which is taken, by non-dialectically thinking, as “part” or “element.”
- 7.
At the end of my Masters degree work, I “complained” to a physics professor that the studies had provided us with nothing more than a set of tools that can be blindly applied without worrying about deeper connections, understandings, and philosophical implications. He responded that this is all that a university program in physics is to do: transmit a set of knowledge and skills .
- 8.
With the right disposition , even assembly line work can lead to the flow type experiences discussed here (e.g. Csikszentmihalyi 1990).
- 9.
Many years later, Shelby would publish an article in which he reviewed the literature and discussed why different regions of the retina have different spectral sensitivities, that is, were characterized by different porphyropsin (A2) to rhodopsin (A1) ratios. In the quotation Shelby tells the first emergence of a problematic that would subsequently turn into another investigation.
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Roth, WM. (2014). Discovery Science and Authentic Learning. In: Uncertainty and Graphing in Discovery Work. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7009-6_13
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