Abstract
This study explores the way the concept of temperature was presented in lower-secondary science textbooks in France, Poland and England at the end of the 1950s and in the 2000s. I draw on history of science, history of education and book history to analyze different treatments of an apparently-similar scientific concept with regard to national contexts and diachronic change. Thus I include a presentation of the contexts in which the textbooks I study are published, and I analyse textbooks content revealing different approaches to present the notion of temperature. I argue that these results show that textbooks are valuable sources to investigate public representations of science and their shift over time, and I conclude by stressing the parallel of this evolution with change in everyday relationship with science and scientific instruments.
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Notes
Choppin (1992) listed this function alongside commercial, pedagogical, and referential functions.
Gieryn focuses on episodes in which scientists defined science in order to legitimate their practice, and shows that circumstances of this definition (arenas, stakeholders, aims) changed the way science was presented.
With this approach I come close to Shapiro’s claim according to which secondary-level textbooks are a source (so far underutilized in history of science) that show how scientific authority is constructed (Shapiro 2012).
This renewed conceptualization of textbooks has been presented by Bensaude-Vincent (2006).
A more detailed historiography is given in the introduction of the recent Focus devoted by Isis to the use of textbooks in the history of science, see Vicedo (2012).
I consider pedagogical strategies as means to allocate credibility to the presented knowledge, which contributes to build it up as science. As a result, I do not distinguish pedagogy from scientific content in my presentation. My approach comes in line with other studies that stress how pedagogical strategies are closely interlinked with scientific and epistemic content, see for instance Kahn (2001).
Rudolph (2002) depicts how the argument of Cold War enabled scientists to intervene in reforms of secondary school science curricula in the United States. In France, the renewal of science education was part of the discussion of the symposium held in Caen in 1956 under Pierre Mendès France’s responsibility (Duclert 2006). This event sent the foundation of the Association d’Étude pour l’Expansion de la Recherche Scientifique; the launching of Sputnik the following year stressed the importance of the themes the Association tried to put on the political agenda. In my PhD thesis (in progress), I show how this attention on science education encompassed all its levels, beyond university education. I also show how science education in the English context was related to values of freedom and democracy, and how in the Polish case emphasis towards science can be related to communist ideology.
Sibum (1998) and Chang (2004) present various aspects of this stabilization over time. At the same time, they show that most of the knowledge regarding temperature which is taken for granted now is the result of non-trivial discussions and various approaches (theoretical and practical, macroscopic and microscopic) which had to be made coherent between them. To stress this point, Chang (2004, p. 187) notices that whereas the theoretical meaning of temperature had been forged during the 19th century, “the operationalization of Thomson’s absolute temperature was a problem that remained nontrivial” up to the mid-1960s.
Here I directly translate from the Polish “nauki ścisłe” which is used in the common language to distinguish exact sciences from social sciences. The word “nauka” itself which would be translated by “science” does not maintain such a distinction.
Trends of the change which came with the fall of communism in education in different countries are analyzed by Bajomi and Derouet (2002).
Even though such a presentation tends to caricature differences to a certain extent, I have summed up the main features of each publishing context in Table 1. This synthesis is useful to make contrasts clear and compare them with differences driven from my content analysis.
In the French case such an adequacy has even turned into a “required-by-law” mention on the cover of the books (Choppin 1992, p. 15).
Some exceptions to this rule exist in the Polish case. For instance, the 3-year course of physics is spread out in 4 books in the Zrozumieć Świat series. See Table 2.
The National Book League recorded and classified by types and levels of advancements the production of educational publishers in the Education Book Guide from 1956 to 1964.
This of course does not mean that textbooks authors are not a major agent of change regarding textbooks’ content. Besides, even though they might be considered on a first basis as a homogeneous group of scientifically trained teachers and members of educational institutions, I study in my PhD thesis (in progress) their positions in more details (and show a great range of diversity, from “ordinary” teachers to headmasters, inspectorates, and university teachers), the level of their scientific background and their commitment to scientific research, and the type of legitimacy (either scientific or pedagogical) they put forward when they write textbooks.
This is not to say that there are no differences between textbooks written by different authors when a national curriculum exists. It is actually quite the contrary, but the importance given to differences depends on the scale of the analysis. In this case study, a restricted sample becomes representative for a national context when it is compared to another national context regarding the structure of the books, the general organization of contents, and the pedagogical approach chosen by authors.
The list of titles has been compiled by sifting through the Education Book Guide (see supra footnote 15). It is provided in my PhD thesis (in progress).
As Pestre (1992) shows, such a variety can be observed in educational contexts, even when one approach brings more complexity and problems than the other: during the interwar, British and German university textbooks presented the emerging field of statistical thermodynamics, while French ones followed a historical and inductive order which tackled thermodynamics on a macroscopic level, linking temperature with the thermal expansion of bodies. In his view, the French pedagogy had to be related with a fear of theoretical renewing. It resulted from (and transmitted) a vision of science which favored experiments and continuous phenomena.
I take the phrase “literary technology” from Shapin (1984). This study and subsequent works in science studies have shown how argumentative codes changed over time and circumstances in the production and writing of scientific knowledge, thus constructing different versions of what science was about and what being a scientist meant (see for instance Shapin and Schaffer 1989; Licoppe 1996). Golinski (1990) stresses the importance of rhetorical elements in science studies and gives a synthesis of various works following this view.
Chang (2004, p. 43) describes this experiment in which an experimenter puts one hand in a bucket of hot water and the other one in a bucket of cold water before putting them both in a bucket of lukewarm water, and cites its discussion by Ernst Mach in 1900.
For science writings, the difference of styles used by Boyle and Pascal is studied by Licoppe (1996). For school writings, the style used in textbooks echo the stress put on the active participation of pupils in science lessons, especially through personal experimentation, which was expressed in various ways since the at least the early twentieth century. In France, it was a key point of the 1902 education reform (Blondel 2007).
The variation in the type of illustration involves a higher degree of interpretation, but when drawings are used to represent an experiment, they are usually careful to reproduce the same apparatus as photographs. Two types of thermometers represented side by side are thus remarkable. It can be related to a solution found to save space on a page. Thus a material problem (the space allocated in a book page for an illustration) creates a meaning (temperature does not depend on the instrument used to measure it).
This explanation is briefly presented in the second textbook of the Modern Everyday Science series (p. 29), not in the first one where temperature and thermometers were introduced, which is why I did not deal at length with this exception in part 2.1 of this article.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dominique Pestre, Josep Simon, Thomas Veyrenc and the reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this article.
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Radtka, C. Temperature in Science Textbooks: Changes and Trends in Cross-National Perspective (1950–2000). Sci & Educ 22, 847–866 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9533-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9533-x