Abstract
Energy, particularly in introductory physics at primary school level, is often taught in terms of list of different “forms of energy” and seldom as a unifying concept underlying many aspects of the world. However, the “substance” ontology for energy seems to be particularly productive in developing understanding of energy and energy transfers. From a methodological point of view, narratives and forms of “playing” are valuable and significant representations that allow learning scientific concepts. Through a physical experience, in the form of role play, we help developing the concept of energy flow/current and storage. In this contribution, we propose a laboratory activity in which future primary school teachers represent the process of energy exchange among energy carriers. The participants are required to study a simple toy, finding the energy carriers, and the role of each of them; additionally, they have to write a story, with as many characters as the energy carriers, telling how they exchange energy in the parts of the toy. Energy conservation and heat production are perceivable in the act of exchanging confetti which represent energy. The Energy Play helps the participants to visualize the energy as a substance, even though it is imperceptible. The analysis of the students’ role plays and the information collected from questionnaires give feedback about students’ conceptualization of some of the most significant aspects of energy.
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Notes
- 1.
The duration of the laboratory was dictated by organizational needs of the university to which the research group adapted this very first experimentation. Following the experimentation, which gave encouraging results, the laboratory was proposed in a training course for pre-service teachers in the third year of their Masters degree with a total duration of 16 h.
- 2.
The energy flow in the toy can be outlined as follows: First Carrier: Free Air/Wind—Exchanger: Rotor—Second Carrier: Angular Momentum—Exchanger: Gears—Third Carrier: Angular Momentum—Exchanger: Dynamo—Fourth Carrier: Electricity—Exchanger: Lamp—Fifth Carrier: Light.
- 3.
Kovecses says: “I suggest that image schemas, domains, and frames are all conceptual structures that can be found at what, in previous work, I called the supraindividual level. This is the realm that informs the basic ontology of conceptual systems. These are the structures that we have in long-term memory and that provide the conceptual substrate of meaning in general and meaning in language in particular”.
When we embed these structures in an embodied narration, in a “communicative” representation of a phenomenon, we think to perceive another level of structure; Kövecses adds “we put this huge amount of tacit knowledge to use in order to achieve particular goals (social, expressive, rhetorical, etc.). The job is performed online by individual speakers in specific contexts who manipulate and modify the conceptual structures in long-term memory according to their communicative goals. The conceptualization process and the language that is used are, in this case, fully contextualized. It is at this level that we utilize mental spaces, or, equivalently, scenes or scenarios, as suggested by Musolff, that are not part of our routinely used cognitive and linguistic repertoire”.
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Landini, A., Giliberti, E., Corni, F. (2019). The Role of Playing in the Representation of the Concept of Energy: A Lab Experience for Future Primary School Teachers. In: McLoughlin, E., van Kampen, P. (eds) Concepts, Strategies and Models to Enhance Physics Teaching and Learning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18137-6_11
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