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The Body and the Production of Phenomena in the Science Laboratory

Taking Charge of a Tacit Science Content

  • SI: scientific practices
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Abstract

This article deals with science content “in the making” and in particular the role of the body in producing scientific phenomena. While accounts of scientists’ work have repeatedly demonstrated, how producing phenomena requires immense amounts of time and effort, involving tinkering and manual labor, this is a little empirically studied content in science education. Seeking to shed light on how the body is involved with materiality to produce physics phenomena, and in what terms this is learning physics content, the article first examines how bodily tinkering is a necessary part of knowing physics through reviewing major accounts of science studies and research in science education. Secondly, drawing on phenomenology and pragmatist ideas, the article examines how students’ bodies need to be educated in the transactional process with material and artifacts to produce phenomena in the context of science learning in lower secondary physics education. Demonstrating that embodied phenomena production is an inescapable part of learning scientific inquiry, and that bodies are just as much a part of the subject physics as conceptual knowledge, we suggest that the education of students’ bodies needs to be made an explicit content. This is important not only for making tacit content accessible to all, but also for addressing epistemological understandings of what science and technology is about.

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Notes

  1. By content, we here intend knowledge, skills, or values that students learn in school. We do not restrict our use of the term only to knowledge as opposed to skills or values.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Social Education, University College Absalon, Roskilde, Denmark

    Liv Kondrup Hardahl

  2. Department of Health Science and Technology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Liv Kondrup Hardahl

  3. Department of Science and Mathematics Education, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Per-Olof Wickman & Cecilia Caiman

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  1. Liv Kondrup Hardahl
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  2. Per-Olof Wickman
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  3. Cecilia Caiman
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Correspondence to Liv Kondrup Hardahl.

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Hardahl, L.K., Wickman, PO. & Caiman, C. The Body and the Production of Phenomena in the Science Laboratory. Sci & Educ 28, 865–895 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-019-00063-z

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