Teaching the Nature of Science with Scientific Narratives

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the use of short science stories based on the history of science for science teacher education. Such stories are implemented to acquaint prospective and practicing science teachers in all educational levels with a conceptualisation of the nature of science (NOS) drawing from recent and contemporary developments in the philosophy of science (namely, the lines of new experimentalism and semantic conception of scientific theories). Science stories are here understood as narratives combining different ‘rationalities’, i.e. ways of presenting the scientific content in different stages of production and under different syntactic formats. In our work with teachers, the scientific enterprise is depicted as an aim-driven, value-laden transformation of the natural world mediated by conceptual and material tools; in such depiction, theoretical models are given a central role. The paper presents a didactical (i.e. instructional) unit with such conceptualisation of NOS; this conceptualisation is set against the backdrop of some scientific narratives on the history of the atomic theory that are embedded in the unit.