“Only Some Facts Matter for My Given Pattern”: The Fact of Stories in School Science. A Response to Whitaker
✍ Scribed by Catherine Milne
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 10 KB
- Volume
- 36
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-4308
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Stories, Facts, and Myths
In preparing to respond to Whitaker's comments I find that in many ways I am in agreement with much of what he has to say. However, I think our notions of the relationship between science, facts, and stories might be at odds. It seems to me that one of Whitaker's major concerns is whether all the events or statements presented in the stories that I used to illustrate my argument were facts. I feel a little sorry for Murphy and Smoot (1982) because my selection of their story to illustrate my argument was based purely on convenience. Although I might have thought that some of the events they used were of questionable provenance, my interest in the story from Murphy and Smoot was in the big picture of science that this story promoted. I do not think that I ever argued that the science stories that I presented or examined (Milne, 1998) were myths; rather, that they sometimes promoted a notion of science that I would describe as mythical. Nor do I see the notion of stories in science as pejorative. Instead, it is recognition that in the process of selection of events for the telling, stories are presented that support a particular notion of science. The focus of my argument is that an author's values and meanings can be inferred from the selection of events for the telling and in the rhetoric used to present those events. My interest was in the implications of these meanings and values for the teaching and learning that take place in school science.
Science, School Science, and Science Stories
My interest in writing the original article (Milne, 1998) stems from my lengthy involvement in the teaching of school science and in the difficulties that I and other teachers experienced looking for resources to use in the development of teaching/learning activities that examined the construction of scientific concepts. It was not until I had been teaching for a number of years and had developed a range of classroom skills that I felt confident enough to actually think about the nature of what I was teaching in the classroom. I started to ask questions such as, What is the science that we are teaching these students? Have scientific concepts and theo-