Historical Instruments and Experiments in Science Education - Peter Heering

Thursday 17 Mar 2016, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Copenhagen

K262 (Fysiska institutionen-Physics Department)

The modern understanding of science education goes beyond the mere communication and learning of facts; other relevant aspects are procedural and can be related to the fields of epistemology, communication, and evaluation. As a result of this development, the fields where the history of science can be implemented in science education have broadened significantly: it is no longer the information of scientific developments, theory developments, experiments, and actors that offer abilities to implement the history of science in science education.

A particular approach can be related to the implementation if historical experiments in science education. Here, the above mentioned aspects can play a role in contextualizing experimental activities. Moreover, historical experiments can also address aspects such as the materiality or the performance that is related to scientific experimentation. In doing so, experimentation can not only be understood as a procedure of knowledge production (on various levels), but also aspects such as communication of knowledge, authority and the cultural embeddedness of scientific experimentation can enter the classroom.

In my presentation, I am going to show some examples how historical experiments and their re-enactment can be used in science education. In this respect, I am also going to discuss how different purposes of experiments in research context can also be made fruitful to science education.