Representing Science in Words and Images

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Everyone lives in a Watershed. Judith Odom's lesson about the direction of watersheds. All water goes through a water cycle and along its route pollutants collect and eventually end up in rivers and oceans. Creating a Watershed Model was a great activity that gives students visuals about their watersheds. I recalled how difficult it was to get my fourth graders to comprehend what GROUNDWATER is and the role it plays in the water cycle.

What do we do with this information now? I taught a Water unit with FOSS kits where students pour water into filters containing various earth materials. But they cannot relate to the sample materials we use to simulate these earth materials. By making the watershed model, using sand and rocks and actual earth students may be able to make the connections. I have a grant from the PA DEP to create a Storm Water Rain Garden that shows where rainwater goes when it reaches the ground on its way to the street sewers. This garden, when made, may help students understand their watershed along with the model.

“Science for kids is like buried treasure….sometimes forgotten.” ME

Giving students the “pay off” (the contrived answers) and when to give that “pay-off” are both relative. Lower levels of education (elementary school as well as introductory courses) need to include more “pay-off” to build the student’s initial repertoire of factual knowledge/common sense/problem solving skills/etc. It’s crucial to pull out the scaffolding at the right time, which has to be at an early time.
So as students get older, the “pay-off” can be more philosophical, more open-ended, and give less “answers.” In a lot of educational situations, we are doing a disservice to students if we act like “god” and assure them that their conclusion is “correct” when providing them an absolute answer. Teachers (and less common but just as important, students) feedback is meant to make the students aware of how close their understanding is to being less wrong and still revisable.

I wonder how scientific figures fit into our discussion about using pictures and words to represent stories?  They are visual representations containing a combination of pictures and words.  Especially important to interpretation is the figure legend.  Figures and their legends are considered a more concise manner of conveying results than merely words. 

We expect students to interpret figures that we generate or present from the literature.  We try to teach students how to create clear and concise figures for summarizing data and lab reports.

Figures require interpretation by the audience/reader of the article.  However, I am not sure where they fall in terms of the observation/story spectrum.  Figures might be a lower level analysis of the results to be used in a higher level or meta-analysis of the results.    

Anne had us work with similes (science is like...) to to begin a discussion of what science means to us as teachers and then what science means to our students. At first, it seemed that the words we used did not interconnect enough with the words we used to describe what science means to the students. Anne then had us translate the similes into metaphors (science is...) to refine the thought process. The surprise was that it took the next activity of translating the similes we used into drawings to bring out the separate stories behind the terms and then reveal the connections. Let me explain.

My quick response was that science is like a switchboard. I was imagining wires going in all directions and connecting many different pairs of entities with the connections constantly breaking and new ones forming. I had more difficulty with a quick word to describe how I think my students think of science until I realized that for the last 16 years, my students identify my courses with raisins. When alums return to say hi, they ask if I still give each student a box of raisins on test days. I started the practice to associate test days with a pleasant experience. Relunctant to give candy, I chose raisins as a healthy snack that provides iron.

The switchboard and the box of raisins did not seem related to me. Luckily, Anne then had us translate the words we chose into drawings. The image that came to mind was not the switchboard but the mass of twisting lines used to represent a large folded protein. I decided to use one continuous line; starting it with a small circle and ending the line with a much larger circle. For me this represented the tremendous energy involved in the evolution of highly ordered life forms from simpler forms. It was not a simple forward process. My students always want to know why things are the way they are. Why are the proteins in the electron transport chain in that particular order? I answer, "because it worked. We do not know all the iterations that formed and were not successful. What we see in the time frame of our lifetimes is what is working now. That is the wonder of life." It took a drawing to stimulate me to put this feeling of science into words out of the context of my classroom. For my students, I drew the box of raisins and realized that is was so related to the drawing I made of my feelings about science because it took an opposite approach. The raisins in the box were ordered. As they spilled out of the box, the raisins landed in a scattere3de, seemingly random arrangement. It is my job as a teacher to help my students put the raisins back in the box, i.e. to apply order to the seeming randomness of the pile of raisins. Later in the year, the students learn why I chose raisins as the test gift. They learn that iron is a key part of the hemaglobin molecule that allows oxygen to bind and makes the red blood cell so much more efficient at distributing oxygen to cells than plasma. They learn that the brain has the highest requirement for oxygen of the body's tissues, and that sitting and thinking requires more calories than they thought. The raisins provide oxygen to their poor test traumatised brains. They not only associate raisins with tests, but tests with energy requirements in braincell that rely on oxygen for aerobic respiration.

Thank you, Anne! I can now explain why I give raisins. Hopefully, I will also now be more discerning when I employ metaphors as aids for learning in my classes. I will also be more inclined to ask my students to choose words to describe how they feel about a new topic under discussion. One caveat- the students in my Grade 7 course make 3-D models of the cell. I can assess their understanding of the micoscopic world of the cell in the relationships expressed in their choices of materials to represent the organelles and the arrangement of the materials in the soccer ball or cantaloupe in which they build the cell. Their models are worth a million words.

 

Science=Eyeglasses+Recess

I wonder what this world would look like without science. It will be pathetic because there will be so many opportunities “staring us in the face” and we will fail to take advantage of them as much as we should because we won’t see that they are available. This is the main reason why I equate science with eyeglasses. It’s the means by which we “see” this world clearly and better.

In addition, eyeglasses and other equipments that enhance our optical capability are used mostly for exploratory purposes. The same thing with science, it’s all about exploration and discovery. When it comes to the students I teach, they see science as recess in the sense that what they are going to encounter during recess is never predetermined. One day, they might go out there and have fun. Whereas on some other days, they go out there and series of events that come up may lead to fights.

So in effect I’m saying that they come to science class to make discovery and play with manipulative and in the same vain they go to recess to make discoveries and play with toys. Secondly, my students see science classes in the school place where they are opportune to move around and interact better as compared to other subjects.

In conclusion, I really want my students to continue to see their science classes as fun and “recess” time so that I can optimize their potential for learning and discovery.

I found this afternoon session to be very valuable. Excellent job to all! I found the activities to be very do able and fun for my students to do as either warmup activities or as part of a unit. I think it ties in very well with the morning session, thinking and learning using similes and metaphors. I formed a lot of questions and I think I can use them to jump start an excellent learning opportunity for my students!

What science is ..... a simile.... a metaphor.... a picture.... a word, this means a lot to me because it helps me explore and make visual pictures. My students also think sometimes in pictures and the word analogies are wonderful ways to active and create new impressions that they might struggle with, if they had to write about them. These ideas can be stored in the unconscious and bought back when they need to apply it in their learning. I enjoyed how everything was bridged together and came full circle.

Ann was helpful in helping me to understand how science can be more incorporated in science.Closure seems to be a need for young minds in the content area.Pictures seem to be the primary communicator rather than words with younger students.Sensory perception,prior knowledge,and experiences makes a big difference.

For me science is like water. Water is used everywhere, everytime by everybody. Water is useful in our everyday life existence. Without water there will be no life, not even for plants and animals too. In other words water is Life.

On the other hand science is also needed in every part of our lives. It can be seen rearing its head up every time everywhere and with everybody. I can safely say water is life, science is life and so science is water.

For my students science is like recess. During recess they get to play around and they believe it is a time to be free in expressing themselves. At the same time they have several options of playing around and it is never a boring time. In the science class, students feel like they have a chance to take a break from learning, play around with "toys" and have fun with their friends. 

Since they think recess is life for them and I believe science is life, then I can merge these two together to give students fun in science so that their concept of life can blend with my own concept of life.

Tola

Interesting connection between this institute and bbi08. Lakoff's point was that all understanding is metaphorical, ie is a story, an interpretation based on observations (for Lakoff, the observations were primary bodily sensations). Another way to say this is that all understanding is constructed from some set of starting points, and so is challengeable as a construction.

But the observations/primary stories are themselves constructions, and so also challengeable (see observations/stories/interpretations and following). What is an observation/primary story for one person may not be for another. To the list of "my knee hurts", we might add "this tastes like wine" and now oxygen and hydrogen (as in the metaphor "water is oxygen and hydrogen"). Asking what kind of pain, or having a wine expert probe for subtler tastes makes possible different "observatons/primary stories". And oxygen and hydrogen may be the concrete ("vehicle" and water the abstract ("tenor") for a chemist but not for a beginning chemistry student.

All of this doesn't in any way affect the main points, that all understanding is metaphor/story and should be understood as such (no, we can't "be careful about using metaphors"; we have no alternative to using them and so need to make their strengths and limitations clear), that all understanding is challengeable, and that communicating understanding needs to be understood as encouraging challenge.

It does though raise some very intriguing new issues. Among them is the rationale for distinguishing, in any given case, betweenbobservation and interpretation (see observations and interpretations and following). And the basis for doing so (Joyce's suggestion that observations are what we commonly agree on). And the question of how the brain switches from one set of primary observations to another.