Historical writing on science education: a view of the landscape

Abstract

This article surveys historical scholarship on science education over the last 15 years and lays out a map of the different approaches to writing about this topic found in a variety of disciplines and fields. The hope is to provide scholars interested in science education past and present a better understanding of how this enterprise has functioned in western culture, both in terms of training future scientists and managing the relationship between science and the lay public. Highlighted in this article is the compartmentalised nature of current work which, I argue, presents an obstacle to more productive thinking about the history of science education in modern society.

Keywords:

• history of science education
• scientific training, science and the lay public

Notes

1. The ‘two cultures’ debate, famously delivered at the Cambridge Senate House by C. P. Snow, comes to mind here. While Snow was concerned with comparing a scientific education to a literary one – specifically critiquing the literary traditions of British society and culture – my comparison is more pedestrian, between the specialised knowledge‐generating practices of science and common understandings of the non‐scientifically trained public (see Burnett, 1999).

2. The use of ‘internal’ here is not meant to suggest that social forces don't impinge on the institutions and pedagogical practices in question, merely that such practices are focused on training individuals within the discipline. It should not be thought of as analogous to ‘internalist’ history of science as that term is commonly understood.

3. There is of course a well‐established body of work within the history of science that has examined the many informal efforts to disseminate science to the general public. This literature falls under the general heading of science popularisation and represents a well‐defined sub‐field within the history of science (see Cooter & Pumfrey, 1994 for an overview). The amount of scholarship in this area grows even larger if one includes studies on the public understanding of science, which in many ways is the later twentieth‐century counterpart to popularisation. For the purposes of this essay, however, I intend to set aside this work and limit what follows to historical studies of science education located in formal school settings.

4. This unfortunate situation of professional isolation is more pronounced in the USA. Science education scholars in the UK have always been more attuned to the history of science education and its relation to science teaching and learning.