History, philosophy, and science teaching: The new engagement

HPS and Teacher Education

Many have argued that HPS should be part of the education of science teachers - the British Thomson Report in 1918 had said 'some knowledge of the history and philosophy of science should form part of the intellectual equipment of every science teacher in a secondary school' (p.3).

Michael Polanyi made the obvious point that HPS should be as much a part of science education as literary and musical criticism is part of literary and musical education (Harré 1983, p.141). It would be odd to think of a good literature teacher who has no knowledge of the elements of literary criticism: of the tradition of debate over what identifies good literature, how literature is related to social interests, the history of literary forms etc. So also it should be equally odd to think of a good science teacher who has no reasonably sophisticated knowledge of the terms of their own discipline -'cause', 'law', 'explanation', 'model', 'theory', 'fact'; no knowledge of the often conflicting objectives of their own discipline - to describe, to control, to understand; or no knowledge of the cultural and historical dimensions of their own discipline. Israel Scheffler in a largely neglected paper of 1970 argued just this point. This is part of the difference between in being educated in science and being simply trained in science: teachers ought to be educated.

To advocate the importance of the history and philosophy of science for science teachers is not novel. The opening pages of a 1929 text for science teachers describes a successful science teacher as one who:

knows his own subject ... is widely read in other branches of science ... knows how to teach ... is able to express himself lucidly ... is skilful in manipulation ... is resourceful both at the demonstration table and in the laboratory ... is a logician ... is something of a philosopher ... is so far an historian that he can sit down with a crowd of boys and talk to them about the personal equations, the lives, and the work of such geniuses as Galileo, Newton, Faraday and Darwin (Westaway 1929).

In the US, the Stanford-based, Carnegie-funded, National Teacher Assessment Project, directed by Lee Schulman, is the foremost teacher assessment programme. It is intellectualist in its criteria of teacher competence and rejects the behaviourist, managerial, measures of teacher competence so long enshrined in evaluation practice. Schulman asks about the 'missing paradigm' - the command of subject matter - and the ability to make it intelligible to students, abilities requiring the wider view provided by HPS. In one of his influential publications, Schulman has said:

To think properly about content knowledge requires going beyond knowledge of the facts or concepts of a domain. It requires understanding the structures of the subject matter ... Teachers must not only be capable of defining for students the accepted truths in a domain. They must also be able to explain why a particular proposition is deemed warranted, why it is worth knowing, and how it relates to other propositions, both within the discipline and without, both in theory and in practice. (Schulman 1986, p.9).

To explain why a particular proposition is deemed warranted - the law of inertia, the principle of conservation of energy, the theory of evolution, continental drift theory, accounts of atomic structure etc. - requires knowing something about how evidence relates to theory appraisal, this is the standard business of epistemology. Schulman's ideas are reflected in the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards assessment guidelines - What Teachers Should Know and be Able to Do (1989).