Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (review)

The eleven essays in this book explore pedagogy, training, and education within the histories of physics, chemistry, and engineering. Editor David Kaiser and the authors reinvigorate interest in the ways in which novitiates are trained and socialized into the practices of science. Kaiser argues that this intellectual terrain has been neglected by the science-studies community as controversy and attention to the material culture of the laboratory, mostly involving established scientists, captured the collective conscience. The essays in Pedagogy and the Practice of Science examine aspects of the transfer of skills and values via textbooks, laboratory practices, individual teaching strategies, and group social norms across national and cultural boundaries and among generations of scientists. Although grouped under four themes—teaching practices and transferring skills, pedagogical cultures in collision, the action of textbooks, and generational reproduction—the essays may be easily regrouped and selectively read to reflect and expand on these ideas.

Five of the eleven authors focus on the diverse roles of textbooks in science. Texts may consolidate and add meta-structure to information that becomes instrumental to multiple communities (Michael D. Gordin on Beilstein's Handbook of Organic Chemistry). They may embody normative ideals that appeal beyond national boundaries and survive over several generations (Karl Hall on Landau and Lifshitz's Course of Theoretical Physics). Texts may play a persuasive role in the acceptance of new theories (Buhm Soon Park on Charles Coulson and molecular orbital theory). They may codify sets of skills for students that empower them to the practices of science (Kathryn M. Olesko on Kohlrausch's Practical Physics). They may reveal a diversity of views and controversy on basic concepts reinforcing their role as mediators in discipline building (Antonio Garcia-Belmar et al. on nineteenth-century French chemistry texts). All of these arguments treat textbooks as dynamic artifacts, far from stereotypical repositories of settled knowledge.

Historians of technology will find the essays in which other tools and technology shape scientific training of particular interest. Kaiser shows how groups of emerging young physicists in the postwar era used multiple approaches to Feynman diagrams that demarcate their intellectual pedigrees. Graeme Gooday shows how controversy among Victorian-era engineers over the adequacy of Cambridge mathematics to theorize on the performance of the alternating-current generator asserted the need for translating and grounding theory for practical uses. Cyrus C. M. Mody shows how the replication and transmission of laboratory techniques in the development of scanning-probe microscopy propagated different camps of practitioners with different theoretical perspectives on the uses of the technology. Hugh Gusterson highlights the demise of nuclear-weapons testing, historically integral to the training of nuclear-weapons scientists, and argues that an ironic consequence is that scientists of an early era may not be able to adequately pass along their knowledge and skills to the next generation. The intergenerational and value-system issues that Gusterson raises fit well with the essays by Kenji Ito and Sharon Traweek on other aspects of physics. Ito ponders the influence of the Copenhagen community's open structure on Japanese development of quantum physics during the 1930s, and Traweek analyzes contemporary high-energy physics in Japan, its generational stresses and changes that play out in interaction with new technologies and international others.

The lucid conclusion by Kaiser and Andrew Warwick expounds a "Foukuhnian" theory of pedagogy for science that melds the necessity of routine problem-solving described by Thomas Kuhn with the potential for generating new capabilities and change central to Michel Foucault's ideas. Yet, pulling science and pedagogy back from the peripheries of science studies may require a larger net. None of the essays address the issues of training and inculcation of values that have been at the root of historical, sociological, and anthropological literature on how women or minorities become scientists when social and educational processes weigh against them or why they may be attracted to certain fields and not others. How engineering students are acculturated and come to...