Table Of ContentScience: Philosophy, History and Education
Sibel Erduran
Ebru Kaya
Transforming
Teacher Education
Through the
Epistemic Core
of Chemistry
Empirical Evidence and Practical
Strategies
Science: Philosophy, History and Education
Series Editor
Kostas Kampourakis, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Editorial Board
Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel
Hill, USA
María Pilar Jiménez Aleixandre, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de
Compostela, Spain
Theodore Arabatzis, University of Athens, Athens, Greece
Sibel Erduran, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Martin Kusch, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Norman G. Lederman, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA
Alan C. Love, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Minneapolis, USA
Michael Matthews, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Andreas Müller, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Ross Nehm, Stony Brook University (SUNY), Stony Brook, USA
Stathis Psillos, University of Athens, Athens, Greece
Michael Reiss, UCL Institute of Education, London, UK
Thomas Reydon, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany
Bruno J. Strasser, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Marcel Weber, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Alice Siu Ling Wong, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Scope of the Series
This book series serves as a venue for the exchange of the complementary
perspectives of science educators and HPS scholars. History and philosophy of
science (HPS) contributes a lot to science education and there is currently an
increased interest for exploring this relationship further. Science educators have
started delving into the details of HPS scholarship, often in collaboration with HPS
scholars. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, HPS scholars have come to
realize that they have a lot to contribute to science education, predominantly in two
domains: a) understanding concepts and b) understanding the nature of science. In
order to teach about central science concepts such as “force”, “adaptation”,
“electron” etc, the contribution of HPS scholars is fundamental in answering
questions such as: a) When was the concept created or coined? What was its initial
meaning and how different is it today? Accordingly, in order to teach about the
nature of science the contribution of HPS scholar is crucial in clarifying the
characteristics of scientific knowledge and in presenting exemplar cases from the
history of science that provide an authentic image of how science has been done.
The series aims to publish authoritative and comprehensive books and to establish
that HPS-informed science education should be the norm and not some special case.
This series complements the journal Science & Education http://www.springer.
com/journal/11191Book Proposals should be sent to the Publishing Editor at
[email protected]
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13387
Sibel Erduran • Ebru Kaya
Transforming Teacher
Education Through
the Epistemic Core
of Chemistry
Empirical Evidence and Practical Strategies
Sibel Erduran Ebru Kaya
Department of Education Department of Mathematics and Science
University of Oxford Education
Oxford, UK Boğaziçi University
Istanbul, Turkey
ISSN 2520-8594 ISSN 2520-8608 (electronic)
Science: Philosophy, History and Education
ISBN 978-3-030-15325-0 ISBN 978-3-030-15326-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15326-7
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
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To my mother Ayten Erduran, father Erol
Erduran and aunt Suna Erduran for instilling
in me a sense of strength through
reconciliation and humility.
To my mother Guner Kaya, my father Emrah
Kaya and my sisters Esra and Ecem for their
continued support and love and to my lovely
niece Defne.
Foreword
This book was conceived during a break at the 2015 ESERA conference in Helsinki,
when I suggested to Sibel Erduran to write a book on philosophy of science and
science education. Sibel was already thinking about such a book, so my suggestion
motivated her to start working on it. And I am very glad that you are now holding it
in your hands.
A main goal of this book series is to show not only why history and philosophy
of science can make important contributions to science education but also how this
can be done. The present book by Sibel Erduran and Ebru Kaya is a fine example of
how philosophy of science can enrich and enhance science education, focusing on
chemistry and chemistry education. The book actually makes many different contri-
butions, but the authors have chosen two of these to highlight: the importance of
teacher education and the practical aspect of using philosophy of science in science
education. Let us see why these are very important.
On the one hand, we have teachers and teacher education. Anyone who has
taught in a school classroom is aware of the multifactorial and complex nature of
teaching. There is so much going on at the same time in any classroom that teachers
need to have a wide range of skills and tools available in order to teach effectively.
I do not want to diminish the importance of the various factors that affect the quality
of education, but I strongly believe that teachers are the most critical one. Having
worked as a school teacher myself for 12 years, I know that a teacher has the power
to inspire and motivate students, as well as to turn them away of the subject taught,
no matter what educational curricula and policies suggest. It is the teacher who can
translate the educational policy to classroom practice; it is the teacher who can pres-
ent the topics of the curriculum to students; and, most importantly, it is the teacher
who can arouse students’ interest, help them express their preconceptions and guide
them to understanding. A well-prepared teacher can achieve these more easily and
can teach more effectively than an unprepared one. Therefore, focusing on teacher
education, as the present book does, is crucial.
On the other hand, we have the philosophy of science. A major criticism of
scholarship that aims at bringing philosophy of science in science education is that
this is practically impossible as teachers neither are philosophers of science nor are
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viii Foreword
they supposed to educate the new generations of philosophers of science. Science
teaching has to be down-to-earth, focused on the actual science, and not on the dis-
agreements among philosophers about what science is and how it is done; or so the
argument goes. In a nutshell, perhaps the scholarship in philosophy of science is too
philosophical and not empirical enough in order to be useful to science teaching
with real teachers and students. The present book aims to address these concerns, by
drawing on “empirical evidence” for the use of philosophy of science in science
education and by making “practical strategies” towards this end. It shows how phi-
losophy of science has indeed been used and also makes practical suggestions about
how it could be used.
By introducing the concept of “epistemic core”, the authors show that philo-
sophical considerations are both inherent in the teaching of chemistry and directly
relevant to it. I would argue that this is the case for all science topics, but we may
need to wait for other similar books to provide the empirical evidence and the prac-
tical strategies for this. On various occasions, I have been paraphrasing Theodosius
Dobzhansky who noted that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of
evolution. I might not go as far as to state that nothing in science education makes
sense except in the light of philosophy of science. However, I would wholeheartedly
argue that science education makes more sense in the light of philosophy of science,
and the present book would be one among those that I would give to colleagues who
would like to see why.
University of Geneva Kostas Kampourakis
Geneva, Switzerland Series Editor
Preface
At first glance, this book might appear not chemical enough to the chemist, not
philosophical enough to the philosopher and too philosophical to the teacher educa-
tor. One has to look closer to recognise that it occupies a very unusual space: the
intersection of theoretical themes, empirical evidence and practical approaches.
Philosophy of chemistry is, by definition, theoretical in nature. Teacher education is
both theoretical and empirical. Teacher education is also a pragmatic and practical
endeavour charged with the mission of preparing professional teachers. It has to be
responsive to educational policy and teaching practice as governed by national poli-
tics and institutional infrastructures. If it is going to be impactful at all, the import
of ideas from philosophy of chemistry into teacher education for the development
of the chemistry teachers has to consider the actual everyday context of teachers and
teacher educators. Such is the tall order of the book: the interplay of theoretical
frameworks from vastly different disciplines as well as their application in teacher
education practice, engaging teacher educators and pre-service teachers.
Who are the key audiences of this book? Part of the content directly relates to the
concerns of philosophers of chemistry, chemists, teacher educators, pre-service
teachers as well as researchers in teacher education. Chemists, in some countries,
are involved in teacher education, although they may not have had formal training
about teacher education or teacher education research. Any of these stakeholders
will most likely find that their respective interests are constrained in the content of
the book. Each stakeholder operates in a different community that does not neces-
sarily overlap with the others’. For instance, how many chemistry teachers read
academic journals dedicated to philosophy of chemistry when they are concerned
about what resources to use in their next lesson in preparation for the exams? Do
philosophers of chemistry visit university teacher education departments to observe
teacher training sessions and where, if at all, their subject matter might actually fit?
Which doctoral programmes in chemistry education include coursework on philos-
ophy of chemistry to empower future researchers and lecturers in chemistry and
teacher education with epistemological insight?
Our main purpose in writing this book was to bridge traditionally disparate areas
of work in order to understand how chemistry education can be improved. When we
ix
x Preface
first began thinking about the book and presenting related papers, some of our ideas
were met with resistance. For example, at the biennial IHPST conference in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, in 2015, one of our colleagues remarked that such an approach is
“galaxies away”, not recognising the potential of transforming theoretical and phil-
osophical ideas into empirical forms for educational researchers and practical pur-
poses of everyday teachers. At the ICCE conference in Sydney, Australia, in 2018,
we observed that chemistry lecturers were so focused on chemistry concepts and
procedures that epistemic perspectives on chemistry were considered an irrelevant
distraction in education. We wondered ourselves how we can bond philosophical
reflection with empirical evidence and practical strategies for improving teacher
education. Soon, we recognised that because we are bringing together fairly dispa-
rate areas of work, by its very definition, the work needs to be an approximation. It
is an approximation to a possible way forward in making chemistry teacher educa-
tion more epistemic than it currently is. We have to indicate that we are teacher
educators and researchers of teacher education who are guided by not only research
interests but also pragmatic necessities of the contexts where we teach future teach-
ers. We are deeply aware of the opportunities for conceptual clarification through
philosophical reflection, as much as we are aware of the constraints to how theoreti-
cal arguments might be implemented at a practical level.
Background on philosophy of chemistry provides us with a rich body of work
from which we can draw on to inform chemistry education generally. However, this
literature does not tell us how to effectively infuse ideas that will be intelligible or
relevant for teacher educators and teachers, or indeed how these ideas may fit or not
with the institutionalised teacher education policies of different countries. For the
latter, we need to appeal to the research and policy evidence in teacher education as
an academic research area as well as pragmatic endeavour of professional training.
Hence, while we review the literature on the philosophy of chemistry and illustrate
a possible destination for the education of chemistry teachers, we recognise that the
outcomes for teacher education may take years beyond pre-service teacher educa-
tion to materialise. What insight we gather from philosophy of chemistry is most
certainly not necessarily applicable to the beginning of the journey where pre-ser-
vice teachers are much more concerned about more basic demands of pedagogy
such as behaviour management. Furthermore, as teacher educators, we are ourselves
a product of a system that did not prioritise philosophical content in our own educa-
tional preparation, and hence, we need to research and learn about how we can
infuse such content in our teaching of teachers. Likewise, save a few potential
exceptions, our pre-service teachers would have had practically no exposure to epis-
temological or other meta-perspectives on chemistry to equip them with the higher-
order thinking skills about the subject they are expected to teach. Our beginning
point in the teacher education journey, thus, needs to take into account not only the
background knowledge of the pre-service teachers but also research evidence on
how best to teach pre-service teachers. The journey needs to start with an accessible
framework which can be used to initiate metacognitive awareness in pre-service
teachers. It is such a journey that we embarked on in producing this book which we
