Learning Science: The Very Idea
The title of a paper I’m currently writing with Liam Rourke. Here’s the abstract as it stands so far:
Attempts to frame the study of teaching and learning in explicitly scientific terms are not new, but they have recently been growing prominence. Journals, conferences and centers of “learning science” have been appearing with remarkable frequency. Implicit in these invocations of an educational “science,” is an understanding of science in emphatically progressivist, positivistic terms. A range of 20th century developments in theory and practice of science appear to be ignored in favour of appeals to apparently idealized scientific rigour and efficiency. This paper begins by considering a number of examples of prominent scholarship that calls into question this idealized notion of science –e.g. by Popper, Kuhn, Latour and Woolgar. It then argues that learning and education are inescapably interpretive activities –and that they can only be described rhetorically rather than substantially as a scientific. The paper concludes by arguing for the relevance of a broader and self-consciously rhetorical/metaphorical conception of science –one that would include the possibility of interpretive human sciences as well as the insights of the sciences of nature.
A full draft of this paper is also now available (15.03.06).
