Hey guys, sorry this took so long to get to. Life has been rather crazy. Switching jobs, babysitting a hyperactive Scottish Terrier, and all the regular stuff on top of that. That said, hopefully this post makes up for it. While I did not use this script exactly in my chunk of my group's WestCAST presentation, it is mostly what I went from. I used it more like cue cards than anything else, but it does contain the points that I wanted to hit while talking, so it's all there. What you're missing is the visual component of the talk, as I had a bunch of slides to go with this as well. Some funny, some serious, but whatever. That's what you get for not being at WestCAST. I'm just going to post this whole script now, so hopefully you don't mind (what is in OpenOffice, anyway) a 5 page read. Enjoy!

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?