Author:

Keywords:

nature of science, philosophical dialogue, reflective science education

Abstract:

To enhance scientific literacy among primary and secondary school students, educating about the nature of science (NoS) plays a pivotal role. NoS entails the epistemological underpinnings of science such as its realm and limits or the reasons for its reliability. Whereas decontextualized NoS approaches draw the attention of students to specific NoS issues through analogies or metaphors, highly contextualized approaches focus on the NoS through historical and contemporary science examples. Though these approaches provide metaphors, examples or laboratory activities enabling to pinpoint key aspects of NoS, they often elaborate less on (follow-up) strategies to elicit reflection about general NoS-insights. However, explicit reflection about the NoS is considered necessary for successfully understanding it. To overcome this problem we explore the role a philosophical dialogue may play. The philosophical dialogue, aimed at eliciting critical and creative thinking through argumentation, can prove a useful method to elicit reflection about science as it (i) helps students to clarify abstract concepts, (ii) allows students to couple abstract epistemological knowledge about science with their own experiences and (iii) facilitates conceptual change by monitoring one’s thinking processes. Combining classic NoS-learning material and the philosophical dialogue allows to create a new approach where students collectively explore general scientific or epistemological problems. The teacher does not provide answers, but only facilitates the dialogue by using different kinds of questions leading to hypothesis-formation, explication, argumentation and investigation of NoS-related concepts. This way, reflection in NoS-activities is not only approached as a process of clarification and metacognition, but also as a process of argumentation. Thus, reflection is not reduced to an instrument to impregnate the teacher’s views on the NoS, but reflection rather functions as a more complex intellectual act that could help students to interpret and discuss autonomously the nature of science.