Learning by Doing: Experiments and Instruments in the History of Science Teaching ed. by Peter Heering and Roland Wittje (review)

This edited volume seeks to explore the material culture of science teaching across a wide variety of national contexts, school levels, and historical periods. In pulling this collection together, editors Peter Heering and Roland Wittje have highlighted a potentially fertile nexus of technology and social practice—manifested in the laboratory and instructional apparatus of teaching—that promises among other things to answer questions about: the changing relationship between research and teaching; the changing emphasis of teaching through texts, demonstrations, and laboratories; the development of these various approaches over time; and how institutional and national contexts mattered in science education. Although the essays are predominantly historical in form, the editors assert that as much can be learned about the present and future of science teaching from these accounts as can be learned about its past. This claim is, perhaps, not surprising given that the project began with an international conference of both historians of science and science educators convened to consider the material aspects of science teaching and learning.

The variety of participants in the conference is mirrored in the eclecticism of the volume's essays. Included among the fifteen chapters is an examination of eighteenth-century texts written to illustrate Newtonian philosophy for the masses; a discussion of how the science education of orphans in the Netherlands contributed to the building of Dutch citizens in the late 1700s; a careful tracking of state influence on the assembly of cabinets of physics and chemistry apparatus in mid-nineteenth-century Spanish secondary schools; an analysis of the changing technology of the magic-lantern projection equipment and how it was variously used for science education as well as less-scientific popular entertainment; and a look at the differing material forms of botanical specimens, from papier-mâché to the famous Blaschka glass.

The theme around which these diverse chapters are to cohere is the history of the instruments of teaching. Framing the work in this way naturally requires that any evaluation be based on the extent to which this aspiration is realized. By this metric the results are mixed. Some of the essays (those from the scientists and science educators, not surprisingly) suffer from a lack of historical nuance and contextualization. And as one moves from one chapter to the next, there is a feeling of disconnect; each chapter feels like a brief excursion into some topic or period, discovering a bit of this or that and then moving on. The editors themselves recognize this, arguing that these "partial, episodic and incomplete pictures" should be seen as a "starting point" more than anything else.

From this starting-point perspective, however, there are some successes to be found. Heering offers a thoughtful conceptual examination of the relationship between research apparatus and the various ways these have been adapted for teaching purposes. Using late-eighteenth-century exemplars such as the solar microscope, the Gauss-Weber magnetometer, the Joule paddle wheel, and the ice calorimeter, he identifies simplification, downscaling, stabilization, and iconization as key categories of research-to-teaching instrument transformation. Michelle Hoffman's chapter on the rise of laboratory teaching in Ontario high schools during the late 1800s is an excellent study in the persistence of an ideal in the face of shifting philosophies of education. And Steven Turner provides a detailed analysis of the source of reform in high school physics teaching (also in the late nineteenth century) using the inclined plane and rolling-cart apparatus to track the provenance and spread of the laboratory methods of the time. Other contributions of note include Richard Kremer's assessment of the longstanding claim that laboratory methods (again in physics) were brought back to the United States by American graduate students returning from Germany (he argues that such pedagogical practices emerged independently in the States) and Wittje's look at the influential German experimentalist Robert Pohl and his lecture-demonstration pedagogical system...