Historical Controversy as an Educational Tool: Evaluating elements of a teaching–learning sequence conducted with the text “Dialogue on the Ways that Vision Operates”

Abstract

This paper describes the development, use, and analysis, of an educational tool inspired by the history of the optical mechanism of vision. We investigated 12‐year‐old students’ reasoning about vision. Most of them explain it as the result of something coming either from the object or from the eye. Moreover, some of them think that light penetrates the eye only when they are dazzled. Such ideas can be found in the ancient and medieval history of science. In particular, the Ancients disagreed about the direction of vision until Alhazen opened the way to a consensus, arguing in the 11th century that light could be a stimulus for the eye. Our tool, a short drama entitled “Dialogue on the Ways that Vision Operates”, refers to those historical elements, especially to the controversy over the direction of vision and Alhazen’s ideas about light. This text was integrated in a teaching–learning sequence and experimented with six pairs of students aged 12–13. The analysis of this teaching–learning sequence shows that the learning process can take advantage of the opportunity offered to the students to identify themselves with the scientists portrayed in the drama.

Keywords:

• Historical Controversy
• Optics
• Vision