Peter Heering and Roland Wittje (eds): Learning by Doing: Experiments and Instruments in the History of Science Teaching [book review]

Abstract

Essays in this volume address how instruments and experimenting were manifested in science teaching in the nineteenth century, with extensions by a half-century earlier or later. Both science and education underwent broad-reaching changes in identity and practice during this era: from interpretive ways of natural philosophy to systematic researches in professionalizing disciplines of sciences; from classical languages and texts read by an elite few to scientific and technical training that were taken up by the burgeoning numbers of those who became students at the beginnings of mass education. Within these large-scale trends, authors of the book’s fourteen papers develop trenchant accounts of the materials of science instruction and the institutional and cultural environments of their use.