One of the most beneficial content courses I have taken is the Nature of Science.

I had

never learned about the nature of science in any of my other coursework. It underlies all the

previous coursework in science I had done but was never explicitly discussed. Learning about

the nature of science has changed the way I view teaching science.

The way that science is currently presented is inaccessible to our students, in fact to

everyone. Science is presented as an endless number of facts. No person could ever know all the

facts. In reality, this is not what science is. In reality, it is accessible to everyone. Firestein (2012)

writes that, Science is not exclusionary; it does not belong to a small coteries of egg-heads

speaking a secret language, (p.124). I think many of our students immediately see language as a

barrier to their entrance into the science world. Teaching the nature of science may help students

to focus more on what science is and less on the difficult language. A nature of science activity,

like a black box, can engage students with science in a way they are comfortable with and create

an opportunity for them to see themselves as scientists.

We should teach nature of science to our students so that they are well informed about the

world. Firestein (2012) argues that, What is critical is not that everyone in America becomes a

scientist. Rather it is that everyone can understand what is going on, what the stakes are, what the

game is about, (p.124). Popper teaches that science must be falsifiable. Our students are

bombarded with fake sciences. They are told "facts" from fake doctors that aren't falsifiable. Our

students are told "facts" that are not empirical. It is important that our students can recognize

what science is so that they can be informed citizens.

We should teach nature of science to our students so that they will become critical

thinkers. Science is an embracing of ignorance. Our students are surrounded by the unknown. It
is a part of being human. It is natural though to be afraid of the unknown. In my class, we

celebrate questions, in the hopes that students will become more comfortable with them.

One nature of science concept I have frequently taught in my own class is the nature of

observations. Chalmers discusses the nature of observations. Two people do not always make the

same observation of a scene, as Chalmers writes, It would seem that there is a sense in which

what an observer see is affected by his or her past experience, (2013, p.7). Observations are

often considered the foundation of science, as observations lead to facts, facts to laws and

theories and laws and theories to scientific knowledge. Chalmers argues that this is not the case,

since observations are dictated by the knowledge of the observer. In essence, the theories and

laws which the observer already holds to be true will change his or her observation. In the

classroom, I think this further emphasizes the need for teachers to be aware of their students

culture. Chalmers shows a picture of stairs on page 6, noting however that not all cultures draw

stairs in 3D and would not recognize the picture as one of stairs. In the same way, our students

may not make the observations that we expect because they hold different theories to be true. In

order to avoid isolating our students, we as teachers must recognize that observations indeed

depend on the observer and that is a part of the nature of science. I explicitly teach this as a part

of my class so that my students feel comfortable sharing observations and disagreeing with one

another constructively.
 Works Cited

Chalmers, A. F. (2013). What is this thing called science? (4th ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett

Publishing Company.

Firestein, S. (2012). Ignorance: How it drives science. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.