Abstract
To improve on the classic school trip to the museum and the traditional distinctions between formal and informal learning, every year we run a project where the schools (first the teachers and then the pupils) are actively involved right from the very first stages of planning. The various projects realised so far involve schools with children of different age levels, from kindergarten to high school, and aim to provide a rewarding museum experience for each level. The various phases of each project follow a timeline where the specific roles of each group of actors is set out. All our projects rely extensively on history of science, but in a number of ways: using primary and secondary sources, museum exhibitions, multimedia and hands-on reconstructions of historical experiments. We mix all these resources together to offer a historical route suitable to the various age groups. Creative analogical thinking, iconographic similarities and coincidences between the scientific and artistic domains are encouraged especially with children from 3 to 13 years old. These comparisons become pretexts for analysis, reflection and creative production also at the graphic level. In this paper we outline our methodology in the specific case of a laboratory and exhibition experience built around the person and work of Galileo. One of the results has been the involvement of the pupils in a new, unexpected emotional experience.
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Notes
Our History of Science group in the Physics Department of Pavia University played an active part in setting up in 2005 the University’s museum system, consisting of various museums: the Museum for the History of the University, the Natural History Museum, the Electrical Technology Museum, the Botanic Gardens, the Archaeology Museum, the Physics Museum, the Chemistry Museum, and numerous collections covering from Anatomy to Physiology, Pharmacy to Mathematics. Apart from the usual university museum deficiencies, amongst which over-weighty bureaucracy, lack of personnel and funds, the museum system provides various opportunities: to plunge into scientific historical places, to show how the sciences developed in an interrelated way in recent centuries (our University is 650 years old). Moreover the University allows to count on archives, libraries, modern laboratories, scholars and students of different disciplines.
The term "post-modern" became common usage in the late seventies of the last century, after it was published in The postmodern condition (1979), by J. Francois Lyotard, in a context of general criticism, whose boundaries are not always well defined, of the culture of the time. It identifies a school of thought that has left deep traces in the culture of the end of the millennium and is still an opportunity for not sporadic reflections. Lyotard (followed by other scholars such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and in Italy, the philosopher Gianni Vattimo, and for the relations with the world of art and literature in general, Umberto Eco) noted that with the decline of major world views, science, politics, literature, art… no longer had the value of "great truths", but only of heterogeneous conceptions limited to a specific sector, often only useful for an essentially pragmatic point of view. The post-modern has been, and to a certain extent still is, a way of looking at reality that is open to differences, to everything that is not attributable to a single legitimizing element. The responsibility for the diffusion of the consequences of these assessments, this "fragmentation of culture," has been attributed to the globalized media and today to the on-line dimension of life. The resulting forms of culture and thought are such that the eclecticism, the quote, the casual reference to the past have played a very significant role. For example in the case of the visual arts, architecture, design and urban planning in general much attention was given to the interplay of different and overlapping quotes, of easy metaphors, of subtle differences, of combinations apparently incongruous, as a response to the avant-garde of the early century.
It must be noted, however, that this wealth of denotations that lets unexpected figures be glimpsed in contexts devoid of naturalistic references (stains on walls, empty spaces, games with relations between figures and backgrounds) is a characteristic of human experience. It comes from the strength of our visual perception, urged, unconsciously, to configure (Arnheim 1966), that is to glimpse, to confront the shapes among each other in one visual field and to allow the images themselves to be defined. Analogy plays a very important part in this process.
For the occasion the History Group of the Physics Department acquired the “Laboratorio di Galileo” from Roberto Vergara Caffarelli. In the exhibition other apparatus made in the Department were added to show the splitting up of parabolic motion into two independent motions, horizontal and vertical, and to show Galileo’s principle of relativity.
The method based on a series of bells is not part of Galileo’s published works. It is based on a reinterpretation of a manuscript by Stillman Drake (1995, pp. 89–90) and is educationally highly successful.
The hypothesis that the Moon’s surface was similar to the Earth’s, dotted with mountains and depressions had been put forward by many philosophers, from antiquity till the 16th century, and even before his observations with the telescope, Galileo was convinced of it (Camerota 2004, pp. 164–168). “What was new, however, were not speculations about the similarity between the Earth and the Moon, but the interpretation of the Moon’s spots as regularly changing shadows of mountains” (Spranzi 2004, p. 454).
Galileo “must have decided in any case to communicate his experience of this crater as a kind of kinesthetic expression rather than as a cartographic fact, and so bade his engraver to draw it larger as a dramatic indication of how the moon is covered all over with such concavities” (Edgerton 1984, p. 229); “the moon was reinvested with the platonic dignity in the medium which had destroyed it: the irregularity of its surface” (Bredekamp 2001, p. 183); “a sort of in-your-face anti-Aristotelian exaggeration of the prominences and depressions” (Holton 1996, p. 187); “The exaggeration of the dimensions of the crater today called Albategnius … is but the most evident clue of the didactic purpose underlying Galileo’s drawings” (Spranzi 2004, p. 469 note 18); we should not exclude a charming reinterpretative approach, as was usual in the figurative cult of Manneristic art, the artistic context in which Galileo grew up, though he did not share it; a certain “Michelangelo-like” forcing of anatomy in Vasari, certain perspective excesses in Giulio Romano or in Parmigianino, in general widespread taste in Manneristic painting for disarticulation of composition to narrative ends and a forced intellectual taste, all speak of carelessness in representing forms and proportions, which Galileo, a man of figurative culture, could have had recourse to.
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Falomo Bernarduzzi, L., Albanesi, G. & Bevilacqua, F. Museum Heroes All: The Pavia Approach to School-Science Museum Interactions. Sci & Educ 23, 761–780 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9541-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9541-x