On
Dishonesty
In
gathering my thoughts for this workshop that has descended on me with
what feels like the force of a particularly impatient freight train,
I forced myself to think about the various reasons why science bored
me in school and why it fascinates me now. Unfortunately, this
fascination emerged during the course of a degree in philosophy with
practically no scientific background, so sadly too late to pursue
this in any kind of formal setting, at least until after I finish
what I'm working on now. Despite this, I find myself reading
scientific articles in my recreational time, rather than all of those
great works that, as an aspiring English teacher, some would expect
me to know cover to cover (first edition if possible). As I have
meditated on this issue, it has become apparent to me that it may not
actually be the science itself that interests me, rather the concept
of it. Man, do I ever sound like a philosophy major now, huh? It's
true though. The story of science is not one merely of discovery or
fact or the natural, observable world. The story of science is one of
turmoil; one of constant upheaval and debate. People have died for
their beliefs. Some, with lacklustre safety habits, have died from
them. It is this passion, this fervour, and this constant struggle to
be more right than the other guy that fascinates me. It just so
happens that in reading up on all of this stuff, you learn all sorts
of things about what they were more right about.
How then, do I expect myself to (as the thought experiment that
brought me into this project asked) teach science to a class of ninth
grade students? After a great deal of thought and no small amount of
soul searching, I hit on a simple idea that I think could really get
people interested: lie to your students.
Now, I don't mean a big lie. Any small one will do.
What is important here is that they feel the flow of science; the
debate that makes the whole thing so interesting. I was asked to
prepare an activity for this that would demonstrate this plan to you
people, but realized quite quickly that this was a fool's errand. I
have a lesson plan that I could (and will) give you, but it is more
proof-of-concept than anything else. Besides, it's a lesson plan for
what you could do over the course of, say, a week. It's not the
subject matter of the lesson that is really important though, and I
want to stress that up front. What is important is the structure of
the lesson. We start with a small lie on Monday, and hopefully by the
end of the week we have a class impatient to debate and with a
renewed (or even brand new) interest in science. I looked over the
ninth grade Alberta science curriculum and chose a unit nearly at
random. I only needed to find something that I could create a
small-ish (but important) plausible lie around. I chose a lesson from
Chemistry. By the end of the unit, students are expected to have
tested out all sorts of things about solutions. One of these is that
as a solvent heats up, more solute is (in the vast majority of cases)
able to be dissolved in it. A simple fact, one that I'm sure you all
remember from back in the day, but also one that is not readily
apparent to most people before being told this. So why not twist it a
little bit?
MONDAY
On Monday we have our first lesson. The unit is
beginning and, like most teachers, we tell our class a few basic
points about what we'll be studying over the next few classes. Simple
stuff, like what solutes and solvents are, the effect that stirring
(of course, being proper scientists, we will call it “agitation”)
has on the amount of solute that can be dissolved in a solvent, and
the well known fact that as a solvent cools, more solute can be added
to it (and vice-versa for warming and less). We can give examples for
these. As you put sugar into a cup of water and stir it, the sugar
dissolves. Water is, after all, the universal solvent. We can also
say that as water cools it takes up more space. This is why you
should not put a completely full bottle of water in the freezer; it
will crack it. Naturally, as water expands as it cools, there is more
room for a solute to fit in it, so we explain that as water cools it
can hold more. I assume I don't need to point out the lie here.
Hopefully, having an explanation for why this “fact” is true is
enough to convince your students. I am honestly not sure if I'd
explain the why at this point if not questioned on it or just let the
“fact” stand on its own. These are things that can only really be
worked out by trying it in the field. It is, of course, hard to tell
exactly how something like this will unfold in a hypothetical.
Ideally, the phony explanation will only need to be used if students
are (rightly) sceptical of what you're telling them. Otherwise, they
will just take notes and, as has become habit in science classes,
either accept or ignore what we tell them. Towards the end of the
lesson, we announce that there will be a lab the next day on the
subject of solutions.
TUESDAY
Tuesday we will have our lab, demonstrating different
ways to speed the dissolving of different substances in water and
testing which of our range of solutes are actually water-soluble.
Students will be attempting to dissolve various solutes in water. As
they do so, they will adjust variables such as agitation and
temperature and record the differences in the speed of dissolution
and amount of solute that can be added before saturation. While doing
so, those that bought into Monday's lesson may be confused as to why
the heated water is able to hold more solute and dissolves it faster.
They may come up to you and question you on it. This would be the
first sign that the lesson is going well. For now though, we'll fall
back on our explanation from before and ask them if they're sure they
properly controlled all of their variables. Lab write-ups will be due
on the Thursday, and as Wednesday and Thursday's classes will just be
taken up with whatever else you've been studying until the students
have had a chance to process their information and figure things out
for their write up, we'll skip ahead to Friday's class after we've
had a chance to see what the students wrote.
FRIDAY:
Either way, today is the day of the reveal. If the
students caught on, writing about how all of their evidence disproves
what we've told them and telling us that we were wrong, we
congratulate them and let them know that we were leading them on to
make a point. If they didn't catch on, producing lab reports that
attempt to explain why their experiments are not fitting in with
scientific facts due to some failing on their part, we can reveal to
them that they in fact do fit in with the established knowledge.
Either way, we now have a very vivid way to begin the conversation on
what science really is. That is, to paraphrase Karl Popper, to
attempt to disprove what is known rather than explain and confirm
what we think we know. Today's lesson then is still on the topic of
chemistry but is also an involved discussion with your students on
what science is, stemming from the initial effort to deceive them.
While in doing this experiment the students are certainly learning
what it is intended they learn, and depending on how much they
struggled with this they may have learned it in a much more memorable
way, they have also learned a very important part of science.
CONCLUSIVE
THOUGHTS:
Science, as I said earlier, from my perspective is all
about argumentation, with fact as a sidenote to the intellectual
fighting that defines popular knowledge. In getting your students to
question what you are giving to them as established knowledge and
work out arguments for themselves, you are providing them with a
window into this. You would also, in at least a few of your students
hopefully, planting a seed for them to get into this field.
Admittedly, this is all in the hypothetical, but it is something
which I believe would be incredibly valuable for students. What will
hopefully happen as a result of this is that your students will be
questioning much more of what they are told in school. In order to
really get students engaged in all aspects of the educational
process, they need to be not just interested in the subject matter
but challenging it as well. The lessons learned from this experiment
are pan-subject, but still include a specific lesson from the ninth
grade science curriculum. From here, we can talk about problems in
science, questions that are hotly debated (for example, is taxonomy a
legitimate practice when what we are naming is still in a constant
process of evolution?) by the scientific community, and branch into
things that the students may already be interested in. In coming at
science from philosophy. The debate is what matters. Even being aware
of that debate though sparks an interest in matters of science that
was not there before. So I want to open it up a bit for the rest of
the time we have: Would you intentionally deceive your students like
this? If so, what would you use to psych them out? How would you
modify or improve something like this?
