Teaching+Science

This page is devoted to an exploration of teaching science in a Steiner School. The Nature Institute is an invaluable resource for science teachers or really anyone interested in examining natural phenomena around them or finding out more about how different Steiner Schools address contemporary issues in Science and Technology. //The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to WONDER and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed....To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms-this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.// - Albert Einstein A good place to start for an overview of Science in the Curriculum is the article by David Mitchell on the Waldorf Research Institute site: THE TEACHING OF SCIENCE - Stimulation of the Senses, Astute Observation, Rigorous Training in Thinking, Phenomenological Thinking. http://www.waldorfresearchinstitute.org/pdf/BASciMitchell ********************************************************************************************** Below is the first posting with links to some interesting research at **The Nature Institute**:

//At The Nature Institute we work to develop a science that is infused with a spirit that Francis Bacon, as a founding father of modern science, expresses when he writes, "man is but the servant and interpreter of nature: what he knows and what he does is only what he has observed of nature's order in fact or in thought; beyond this he knows nothing and can do nothing."

Science education needs to begin with immersion in the phenomenal world and out of this immersion questions arise that guide further inquiry. Science education should be discovery-based and open ended. It's not about memorizing facts or theories. In this approach, nature is the expert, the teacher is the guide and students are the apprentices helped by the guide to learn from the expert. The knowledge that arises is not knowledge disconnected from human experience; rather, it enhances our ability to understand the world we live in.// http://www.natureinstitute.org/scied/index.htm WIT: But when one connects the little to the large, what enables that to take place is an imaginative "hypertext" space in which they can come together. You create around the little an imaginary or visionary space, and then in that visionary space you access other higher-dimensional spaces that enable you to see homologous patterns. This is, I think, a characteristic of the poetic imagination that can border on lunacy in the way that Shakespeare said, that "the poet, the lunatic and the lover are of imagination all compact." For example, I remember once getting a little too far out for Gregory when I took Edgerton's photograph, the milk drop makes a splash in the form of a crown, but at the top of the crown are like drops that themselves are about to fall off and become lime drops. So the whole thing is "self-similar" and fractal. When Edgerton made the photograph at MIT, we didn't have the Mandelbrot Set and the imagery of fractals yet. But when I looked at the four-fold structure of drop, crown, spike, and smaller drop, I began raving about fourfold Carnot cycles in thermodynamics, and about the stylistic progression of the development of Maya pyramids—of Archaic, Classic, Baroque, and Archaistic. You know, the form of the Mayan pyramid goes from a simple peasant's hut on top a mound, which is the Archaic, to a higher stepped pyramid, which is the Classic, and then to an extremely high pyramid in which the hut is unusable and is simply a decorative roof-comb—this is the Baroque—and then in a romantic reaction to get back to its roots, the roof comb drops back to Earth again and becomes a peasant hut again. This is the Archaistic, the conscious civilized return to the archaic, a form of Romantic Revival. I would claim that this is how imagination works. Margulis looks at a spirochete attached to a protist and sees an axon attached to a neuron. I look at Edgerton's photograph of the milkdrop and I see the development of Mayan architecture. People who do this we call imaginative, or nuts, or both. Anyway, all this was just too wiggy for Gregory. And he got very huffy. And he said, "Now, look, Bill, you just can't do this. These are separate domains. A milk drop is a' impact and is a physical subsystem, and a pyramid is a' expression of consciousness. The physical system work. through impacts, but the other works through triggerings of "difference." Although Bateson always wanted to over come Cartesian dualism, he always kept falling back into it, with his split between "the Creatura and the Pleroma," the split between the world of physical impacts and mental differences. I was being more of a Pythagorean and seeing patterns as "ideas in the mind of God" which could express themselves in milk drops, snowflakes, cathedrals, or Mayan pyramids. But this kind of accessing hidden connections in a hypertext space does border on a kind of paranoia, so to make it work responsibly in society takes a lot of sorting out the noise from the noia, which is just what the Lovelocks and Margulises can do. I think a characteristic of the imagination is the ability to move up into another, imaginative fourth dimension—another level of category formation or metanoia—in which discrete cognitive domains are cross-referenced. Everytime I look as a cultural historian at paradigm breakthroughs, I see a pattern in which the scientist takes something that's over here in a different field—bacteriology—and applies it to a field where it hasn't been used before—neurology. And when that happens someone says, "Wow, I never thought of that before." They didn't think of that before because they were thinking within the restrictive cognitive domain in which they had been trained. To break out of it, or shift unconsciously, sometimes they need to dream. This was the case of Kekule and the benzene ring. Or sleep on it and forget about it for a while. As when Poincare stepped up on the tram and the solution to the theorem flashed into his head. Or just forget about physics and go have a beer. And then when Glaser is staring at the bubbles in his glass of beer, he sees the bubble chamber for particle physics he is going to invent. The scientists who are able to do this haven't been overtrained. Generally, training—as opposed to education —grinds imagination out of you. Imagination is considered sloppy, irrational, irresponsible, or poetic bullshit. The scientists who are great have good training, so they aren't just bullshitting, but they also are able to hold onto this innocence of imagination in which they can flip out of that training mode, scan a very wide field, scan a hyperspace and reach into something over there that seems irrelevant to this here. So it's a union of opposites, the old Alchemical Wedding of the "conjunctio oppositorum." Since I have no training in science, I can't do it by myself. I have to link up with scientists in a sort of symbiotic friendship. I have imagination but no training, so I am always out there at the edge of lunacy. Most often, scientists—even poets or professors of Eng Lit—are excessively trained. Some people somehow survive their education. Jim Lovelock is a good example. They're able to keep their imaginations intact so when the come to particular problems, they become quiet and still in a very contemplative way; they shift to this other hype space, this "hypertext"—whatever you want to call it. Those people who have been overtrained just don't trust themselves, or they have bought too deeply into the scientific materialistic culture to access this meta-level. Some times ordinary scientists who aren't card-carrying contemplatives will stumble into this meta-level by accident, by going to sleep so that the next morning they wake US and the new knowledge is there. I think if someone is more yogically sensitive they can go into that reverie without having to go to sleep. So I think what you're trying to get at in terms of asking about the nature of scientific creativity is that it has this in common. It's not just the shifting from the little to the large, and it's not just imagination. We have to ask ourselves what do we mean when we use that term, "imagination." http://www.williamirwinthompson.nstemp.com/Interviews/witazint.htm
 * SCIENCE AND THE IMAGINATION**William Irwin Thomson - The Lindisfarne Institute