Studies in Science Education

Vol. 44, No. 1, March 2008, 63–82

Historical writing on science education: a view of the landscape

John L. Rudolph*

Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA

(Received 14 August 2006; final version received 10 August 2007)
Taylor and Francis Ltd
RSSE_A_282930.sgm

This article surveys historical scholarship on science education over the last 15 years and lays
Studies
10.1080/03057260701828143
0305-7267
Original
Taylor
102008
44
jlrudolp@wisc.edu
JohnRudolph
00000March
&inArticle
Francis
Science
(print)/1940-8412
2008Education (online)

out a map of the different approaches to writing about this topic found in a variety of
disciplines and fields. The hope is to provide scholars interested in science education past and
present a better understanding of how this enterprise has functioned in western culture, both in
terms of training future scientists and managing the relationship between science and the lay
public. Highlighted in this article is the compartmentalised nature of current work which, I
argue, presents an obstacle to more productive thinking about the history of science education
in modern society.
Keywords: history of science education; scientific training, science and the lay public

Introduction
Few would quarrel with the assertion that the history of science education is a niche field. The
ease with which it can be defined in the abstract results from the multiple intersections of the more
general fields involved – history, science, and education. The straightforward way these bound-
aries can be sketched strictly from a subject perspective, however, belies a complexity that stems
from the widely varied professional training and affiliation of those with interests in this compar-
atively small field. Such individuals can be found in science education, the history of science, and
the history of education in addition to the broader field of history with all its various sub-fields.
There are also those who hail from the science studies areas such as sociology, philosophy, and
anthropology of science. One of the consequences of this diversity of authorship has been the
creation of pockets of scholarship that exist in isolation from one another. And though working
within the confines of an established scholarly community with well-defined questions and meth-
ods is all to the good, the current situation abounds with missed opportunities for productive
consideration of a wider range of historical questions, conceptualisations, and approaches.
There was a time not long ago when the history of science education seemed to be on the
verge of taking off as a sustained and coherent field of study. In the late 1970s and 1980s a small
group of scholars put together comprehensive overviews of extant writing that provided a prom-
ising foundation for future work. Roy Mcleod and Russell Mosely (1978) outlined key issues
related to university science instruction in 1978, drawing broadly on work from a number of
historical fields to contextualise science education in the colleges and universities. This was
followed only two years later by Edgar Jenkins’ (1980) wonderfully detailed summary of work
on secondary school science during the twentieth century. Gary McCulloch’s historiographical
essay of 1987 further described histories related to school science and technology in England
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Collectively these articles not only pointed out the

*Email: jlrudolp@wisc.edu

ISSN 0305-7267 print/ISSN 1940-8412 online

© 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/03057260701828143
http://www.informaworld.com
64 J.L. Rudolph

foundational work in the field, but also alerted readers to important scholarship from history
generally, the history of education, and history of science relevant to science teaching and learn-
ing as well as to archival and primary source material that had yet to be carefully studied. Despite
these efforts to till the ground for future scholars, the bounty of historical work did not quite mate-
rialise as expected, at least not in the UK. There was never much chance it would have occurred
in North America where historiographical tools such as these were missing entirely.
These works, however, provide a fitting backdrop for a look at histories produced since the
last of these essays were published. One of the conclusions drawn by McCulloch, in particular,
was his sense that historians needed to move beyond merely tracking the organisational and
institutional aspects of the school science curriculum or looking at things from the top-down
government policy perspective, both of which had been far too common up until then and remain
common in some quarters even today. With this he was calling for a fresh approach to thinking
about the history of science education, and a good deal of recent work – though still in short
supply – has begun to do just that. The essay that follows seeks to highlight this work, taking as
its organising framework a functional perspective of the role of science education in society.
Understanding the scope of historical writing about science education begins with an under-
standing of the unique location of the natural sciences as a collection of cultural and intellectual
practices. Of all the intellectual activities in the modern world, perhaps none is as uniquely situ-
ated as science. While science and scientific thinking have been sold at various times and places
as amenable to easy deployment in everyday affairs (Huxley’s notion of science as organised
common sense and Dewey’s advocacy of science as problem solving come to mind), the fact
remains that science as an institutionalised knowledge-generating practice has existed since at
least the middle nineteenth century as distinctly separate from the ongoing activities of the public
at large (Burnham, 1987; Morrell & Thackray, 1981; Tobey, 1971). The historian and sociologist
of science Steven Shapin has described the situation as one where members of the scientific
community are ‘deemed to have acquired relevant cognitive and manipulative skills that members
of the public do not possess’ (1990, p. 993). Yet as separate as the knowledge and practices of
science are, at the same time it is clear that science is viewed by the general public and govern-
ments worldwide as perhaps the single most important factor for economic development, national
security, and overall human health and well being (Gieryn, 1999a; Toumey, 1996). In addition to
the instrumental value science undoubtedly possesses in these various arenas (its ability to make
things behave more or less as we would like), at a more fundamental level science is viewed by
many as providing insight into what the world is really like, a function that historian of science
Peter Dear has referred to as its ‘natural philosophy’ role. These two closely intertwined scientific
products – instrumental success on the one hand and ‘truth’ about the world on the other – confer
on science and scientists a level of cultural authority that is unmatched by other social practices
(Dear, 2006; Gieryn, 1999a; Shapin, 1998).
All this is to say that there exists within society at large groups of disciplinary activities that
are so very separate and isolated from the public at a cultural and intellectual level and yet so
tightly coupled in terms of both the public’s material dependence on the knowledge and technol-
ogies these activities create and the practitioners’ dependence on the public’s social and material
support of their work (see Hollinger, 1990 on this point in the postwar period). Science education,
as a bridge between these two worlds, thus itself stands apart in many ways from other kinds of
educational endeavors – science and the public are mutually dependent upon the transactions
between these worlds that constitute science education in all its forms. Understanding this helps
us begin to see how science education functions, what purposes it serves, and ultimately whose
interests it advances in the wider social and cultural arena.
Given the place of science in society, we can think about science education as aiming at
two distinct, though not unrelated, purposes. The first and perhaps more obvious involves the
 Studies in Science Education 65

reproduction of technical practice, where the goal is to train individuals to carry on the tasks of
conducting research in a particular disciplinary field, such as physics, molecular biology, or phys-
ical geography. This kind of education has been called among other things ‘science for scientists’
and it concerns the various institutions and pedagogical practices that move individuals from their
initial position as outsiders (members of the lay public) to a place as participants in the ongoing
community of scientific practice. Thomas Kuhn (1962) notably wrote about the manner in which
pedagogical practices – focusing on the form of textbooks in particular – have enculturated
students into the thought structures and knowledge practices of scientific disciplines, work which
has served as a stimulus for a reawakening of interest in the history of science education in certain
quarters (see, for example, Warwick & Kaiser, 2005).
The other function of science education, in contrast to the enculturation of future scientists,
has to do with negotiating the ongoing relationship between institutional science and the lay
public. Here the aim is to develop some sort of mutual understanding (one might think of this as
science education as mediation) or to transfer something of value from one sphere to the other.1
Typically this function is viewed as a one-way flow of what are perceived to be the primary porta-
ble assets of science – its method, its basic concepts, sense of wonder, or foundational habits of
mind – all of which have been packaged in various ways over the years from ‘moral order’ to
‘scientific literacy.’ Educational activities in this category are far more diverse and include every-
thing from what goes on in formal elementary school science teaching to more wide ranging
efforts at science popularisation for the interested adult citizen. Scholars engaged in writing histo-
ries that fall into this second category come, not surprisingly, from a correspondingly wide variety
of disciplinary and professional backgrounds.
Thinking about science education in this way – as defined by a boundary which divides
educational efforts into those that happen within the scientific community (the enculturation of
novice practitioners) and those that are directed outside of the scientific community to the non-
scientific public (general science education) – is productive in a number of ways. For one, as
I show in the following, it seems to represent faithfully actual categories of historical writing.
That is, the framework is descriptive for the most part and offers a way to organise the existing
scholarship. In addition, the idea of a boundary or border between science and the lay public
provides interesting ways to think about the different kinds of educational work that has taken
place since the arrival of modern science in the world. We can see science pedagogy that in its
goal to train new practitioners has had little concern with non-scientists, though exerting consid-
erable influence on the ongoing disciplinary practices of the scientists themselves – what might
be thought of as ‘internal’ science education.2 We can see also instances where the very idea of
a boundary between science and the public allows us to more fully appreciate what goes on at the
interface between scientific ideas, values, and cultural commitments and non-scientific ideas,
values, and cultural commitments – when (and where) has science pushed out across that bound-
ary and when has the public pushed back? Who has worked at this boundary at different times
and places and for what purpose?
My purpose in this essay is to use this framework to lay out a map that will provide a concep-
tual picture of the landscape of historical writing on science education – one that cuts across the
variety of disciplines and fields in which such work is currently found. Such a map, I would argue,
will provide all of us who are interested in the ongoing work related to science education and its
development over time a fuller picture of the various ways this enterprise has functioned and
continues to function in western culture. This map will also, more importantly, reveal the compart-
mentalised nature of current work, the islands of scholarship so to speak, and in doing so create
a greater cross-field awareness that might present opportunities for new ways of thinking about
the history of science education in modern society. As with any analytical framework imposed on
a diverse and ever-changing field of intellectual activity, this one will have shortcomings, to be
66 J.L. Rudolph

sure, in the way it represents the historical work in question. But in the survey of writing that
follows, the main categorisation along with the assorted sub-categories and qualifications should
provide one view at least of this topic that can help point the way to a more complete treatment
of the history of science education. In doing so, I hope to draw out key issues of significance for
a fuller understanding of science teaching and learning today.

Scientific training and disciplinary reproduction

As a category of historical analysis, scientific training has seen a resurgence of interest among
scholars. Historian of science Kathryn Olesko noted recently that such study ‘has of late experi-
enced a renaissance, and with that, a revolution in perspective’ (2006, p. 863). This work, which
has emerged only in the last few years, has built upon and elaborated a more longstanding, if less
pedagogically focused, range of scholarship that has treated broad questions related to the ongo-
ing establishment and reproduction of distinct patterns and traditions of scientific practice all over
the world. Common to this work is the attention to the different ways in which research practices
in the sciences organise, sustain, and reproduce themselves. In this sense, the interest is in science
education that is internal to established scientific communities and institutions.
One of the more well-established areas of historical analysis related to disciplinary reproduc-
tion centres on the institutional settings in which research has been pursued (often tied to colleges
or universities). Not uncommon are the somewhat standard histories that focus on the politics of
institution building and the prominent figures involved. Fox and Gooday provide a fine example
of this kind of work. They trace the changing fortunes of physics teaching and research in a
specific institutional context in their edited volume, Physics in Oxford, 1839–1939: Laboratories,
Learning, and College Life (2005). Other studies have explored how institutions of various types
have responded to growing societal demands for technically trained personnel at different times
in history. Kargon and Knowles, for example, in ‘Knowledge for Use: Science, Higher Learning,
and America’s New Industrial Heartland’ (2002) offer a detailed look at the founding of technical
institutes and the practical needs they served in a select number of rapidly industrialising cities
such as Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the decades spanning the turn of the last century.
The article highlights the role these schools played as training sites for a new class of scientific
workers that was essential to the burgeoning oil, steel, and electrical industries of the period.
Another example in this vein is Geiger’s ‘What Happened after Sputnik? The Shaping of the
University Research System in the United States’ (1997), which examines geopolitical factors on
technical training across research universities more generally. Though such studies provide
insight into the broader institutional structures and social forces that have led to and supported
technical training, they are often not concerned with the details of teaching and pedagogy.
At the level of the classroom and teaching laboratory, we find a number of scholars who have
written about the emergence of specific instructional methods, which have been found to be
closely tied to the sponsoring disciplines and even to commercial and industrial interests as well.
While the connection to the former is to be expected, establishing the influence of commercial
interests on educational methods is an important recent contribution of this work. Such connec-
tions show up clearly in studies examining science education in Britain during the nineteenth
century. The expansion of the telegraph industry, Gooday (1990) argues, was one of the primary
factors that led to the embrace of laboratory methods of teaching physics in colleges and univer-
sities at Glasgow, Oxford, Edinburgh, and London in the later 1860s and 1870s. This develop-
ment is richly described in his article ‘Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics
Teaching Laboratories in Victorian Britain’, which details how scientists’ views of disciplinary
progress spurred by the advent of thermodynamics led to the expansion of research practices
grounded in precision measurement that became the basis for training engineers and telegraphists,
 Studies in Science Education 67

along with new physics teachers (see also Gooday, 1991). The importance of precision and accu-
racy within physics as a whole appears to have been driven by the nineteenth-century rise of
industry and the necessary industrial standards economic development required. Excellent over-
views of the alignment of the physical sciences with values of standardisation and precision
during this period are provided by Morus and Gooday in their respective books, When Physics
Became King (2005) and Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian
Electrical Practice (2004), both of which pay particular attention to physics in the British context.
The influence of industry and disciplinary progress on teaching were by no means limited to
technical training in Britain. Historian of science Kathryn Olesko has generated a sustained
programme of research over the past decade and a half that has looked at how scientific norms
and practices shaped the nature of physics teaching at both the university and secondary school
level in nineteenth-century Germany. In an early article titled ‘Physics Instruction in Prussian
Secondary Schools before 1859’ (1989), she uncovers how the introduction of measurement exer-
cises in the middle 1800s effected a pedagogical shift in schools from the use of physical cabinets
and classroom demonstrations to the widespread use of individual student laboratory work. This
shift was facilitated, she argues, by a new generation of secondary physics teachers – educated in
the natural science seminars at universities in Bonn and Königsberg among others – who sought
to replicate the disciplinary practices of university physics at the secondary level. A more in-depth
look at the manner in which the seminar at Königsberg transmitted the norms and practices of preci-
sion measurement at the post-secondary level is provided in her 1991 book Physics as a Calling:
Discipline and Practice in the Königsberg Seminar for Physics.
Olesko’s and Gooday’s historical studies have been but lone instances of scholarship on
scientific training in the decade or so leading up to the new millenium. Since then we have seen
a veritable explosion of interest in the history of science pedagogy. In 2005 David Kaiser
produced a collection of essays that explores the myriad connections between pedagogy and the
propagation of scientific knowledge and techniques. The volume, Pedagogy and the Practice of
Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2005a), is guided by a ‘big tent’ definition
of pedagogy that focuses squarely on methods and techniques of scientific enculturation. The
driving question for this work is, in Kaiser’s words, ‘what are the institutions of training by means
of which young recruits have become working scientists and engineers?’ (p. 4). Among the eleven
chapters are studies that examine the role of scientific handbooks, the influence of different
modes of research and graduate training on the production of scientists, and the role of computer
simulations in the reproduction of knowledge systems. The narratives are drawn from a variety
of national contexts from Japan to France, Germany, and the USA, and vary in time from the
nineteenth century to the present.
The essay by Kenji Ito, ‘The Geist in the Institute: The Production of Quantum Physicists in
1930s Japan’ (2005), illustrates the range of what counts as paedagogy in the volume. In this
chapter, Ito describes how in the 1920s Nishina Yoshio brought the quantum mechanics devel-
oped around Niels Bohr in Copenhagen to a new generation of physics students at the Institute of
Physical and Chemical Research at Riken in Japan, identifying the key factors that contributed to
the transfer of theoretical practice from Copenhagen to Tokyo. Japanese mastery of quantum
physics, Ito argues, was highly dependent on the assimilation of the tacit knowledge, or spirit, of
expert practitioners. Yoshio effectively recreated the informal, even playful, collaborative envi-
ronment characteristic of the Copenhagen group, Ito explains, but also adapted it to the social and
cultural norms of Japanese researchers. Other works in this edited volume similarly examine the
informal pathways along which disciplinary practices have been transmitted to novices. Kaiser
writes about the importance of the network of postdoctoral researchers to the dissemination of
knowledge and techniques in his essay, ‘Making Tools Travel: Pedagogy and the Transfer of
Skills in Postwar Theoretical Physics’ (2005b), and, moving back to Japan, Sharon Traweek
68 J.L. Rudolph

explores how the apprenticeship model of scientific training changed from one generation to
the next in four different periods since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 in her chapter ‘Generating
High-Energy Physics in Japan: Moral Imperatives of a Future Pluperfect’ (2005).
Studies of more formalised modes of knowledge transmission in the training category have
tended to focus on the manner in which textbooks function to codify and transmit knowledge to
scientific novices. From the Kaiser volume, Garcîa-Belmar and colleagues report on their study
of over 500 French chemistry textbooks in ‘The Power of Didactic Writings: French Chemistry
Textbooks of the Nineteenth Century’ (2005). They trace the emergence of science textbooks as
a distinct genre and argue that these books need to be understood not only as repositories of settled
disciplinary content, but as vehicles of creative theoretical expression as well. And in his article
on Soviet physics textbooks, ‘“Think Less about Foundations”: A Short Course on Landau and
Lifshitz’s Course of Theoretical Physics’ (2005) Karl Hall documents the process through which
a particular set of teaching texts came to establish distinct sets of conventions in Soviet physics.
Examining textbooks and their role in scientific reproduction has continued to occupy the
attention of historians of science. A recent special issue of the journal Science & Education
explores the history of science textbooks on the European periphery. Bernadette Bensaude-
Vincent opens the issue with a call for putting textbooks on the map of science studies. From text-
books, she writes, we learn:

that teaching is not a marginal aspect of scientific activity. Not only because it is indispensable for
training new generations of scientists or because it enriches our view of science as a social and
cultural activity, but also because it determines the disciplinary partitions of scientific knowledge
(2006, p. 668)

The articles in this issue collectively seek to understand how scientific and technical knowledge
has circulated and been stabilised in places outside the traditional scientific centres of Europe.
Among the essays are those that examine the consolidation of conceptual knowledge in chemistry
textbooks in Italy, Spain, and Portugal after the chemical revolution in the late eighteenth century
(Carnierno, Diogo, & Simões, 2006; Bertomeu-Sanchéz & García-Belmar, 2006; Seligardi,
2006); the interaction of politics and disciplinary knowledge in Greek textbooks in the 1700s
(Patiniotis, 2006); and the role of translation in Greek textbooks in the eighteenth century (Petrou,
2006). All of these works represent what has emerged as a healthy sub-field of scholarship on the
history of science textbooks.
Among the recent flurry of writings on scientific training there have been a handful of studies
that have begun to consider how teaching and scientific practice interact at a different level alto-
gether. Instead of looking at how instruction has been shaped by the prevailing activities of
science, these scholars are interested in the manner in which the imperatives of science pedagogy
have influenced science, that is, how the conceptual tools of teaching have informed the ongoing
practices of research. One of the more exciting studies along these lines is Kaiser’s ‘Scientific
Manpower, Cold War Requisitions, and the Production of American Physicists after World War
II’ (2002). In this essay, Kaiser describes the explosion of graduate student enrollments in physics
during the 1950s and 1960s and then shows how the rapid expansion of graduate-training in phys-
ics departments across the country led to mass production-style instructional materials and tech-
niques. The advent of Feynman diagrams and other calculational shortcuts in quantum theory
were characteristic of this new pedagogical approach where the primary goal was teaching large
numbers of students to solve problems by the most efficient means possible. Thus, according to
Kaiser, the way physics was actually done changed fundamentally in response to the influx of
students (see Kaiser, forthcoming).
Another example of how instructional methods shaped scientific practice is found in the
recent book Masters of Theory by Andrew Warwick (2003). Warwick here provides what he calls
 Studies in Science Education 69

a cultural history of the emergence of mathematical physics at Cambridge University in England

during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Students at this centre of learning were intro-
duced to the esoteric practices of theoretical physics by means of innovative pedagogical tech-
niques that broke significantly with past instructional methods. Tutors and coaches increasingly
used one-on-one instruction, graded problem sets, and examinations to train novices in the disci-
pline, and Warwick goes on to show how these paedagogical materials and methods, even the
very form of exemplary problem solutions, shaped the research methods and styles of the field’s
mature practitioners. The historical understanding offered by Warwick centres on the connection
between the means of learning and the subsequent knowledge and skills possessed by the learner.
The book provides that rare glimpse into the detailed elements of science instruction as they
unfolded in the classrooms and tutorials of nineteenth-century Cambridge.
Gooday’s recent article, ‘Fear, Shunning, and Valuelessness: Controversy over the Use of
“Cambridge” Mathematics in Late Victorian Electro-Technology’ (2005), from the Kaiser
volume provides an interesting follow-up to Warwick’s work. In this essay, Gooday illustrates
the ways in which the university mathematical training that became embedded in academic
science bumped up against the real-world practices of electrical engineers in Britain in the late
1800s. Josefowicz’s recent article ‘Experience, Pedagogy, and the Study of Terrestrial Magne-
tism’ (2005) also illustrates this more dynamic interplay between practice and pedagogy, showing
how pedagogical philosophies with different national genealogies (Germany and England) influ-
enced the organisation of work in science, in this case the study of terrestrial magnetism as illus-
trated in the research programmes of Carl Friedrich Gauss and John Herschel.
Nearly all of the work surveyed above, it should be noted, has been produced by historians of
science, that is, scholars who work in history of science departments or who are otherwise aligned
more closely with the sciences than they are with education. Given their interest in matters of
scientific practice and expertise it is no surprise that they have begun to mine the rich fields of
scientific institutions, training, and pedagogy. As Olesko rightly points out, as an object of study,
science pedagogy ‘is in fact central to understanding the contours of scientific practice, the forma-
tion of scientific personae, and indeed the ability of science as an enterprise to reproduce and
survive’ (2006, p. 863). But in their concern with the transmission of technical knowledge, the
stabilisation of disciplinary boundaries, and the training of new scientists, these scholars have
neglected to explore educational efforts aimed at providing a non-technical understanding of
science and the natural world.

Science education and the lay public

Studies concerned with the science education of a non-scientific audience, in contrast to those
described above, are diffused across a number of disciplines, fields, and sub-fields. This should
be expected given the wide range of cultural, intellectual, and political interactions that take place
at the science-public boundary, which naturally attracts historians from a variety of professional
backgrounds. The range of historical questions they have sought to engage makes developing a
coherent framework here more challenging. The boundary metaphor, however, provides produc-
tive ways for thinking about and describing the recent scholarship in this area.3
When we think about general science education, one of the first things that may come to mind
is the rather straightforward question of how science instruction has been organised to convey
science content to students. A number of historical studies have been written that seek to answer
this sort of internalist question. One of the more widely read works on this subject in the United
States is George DeBoer’s A History of Ideas in Science Education (1991). In this rich and atten-
tive book, DeBoer traces the main trends and debates in US science teaching from the middle
1800s, when science struggled to gain a foothold in the curriculum, through the re-establishment
70 J.L. Rudolph

of inquiry teaching in the 1980s and then uses this as a foundation from which to frame recom-
mendations for current policy and practice, which include everything from philosophical discus-
sions of what science should be taught in schools to considerations of the developmental
appropriateness of certain aspects of science content and process for today’s students. Edgar
Jenkins and B. J. Swinnerton’s book Junior School Science Education in England and Wales
Since 1900 (1998) similarly chronicles changes in the organisation of instruction, curriculum
development, governmental policy (which is more relevant to science education practice in the
UK than it is in the USA) over time. Both these works and others like them provide valuable
accounts of the organisation of school science and how it has changed in different social and
historical contexts.
Reasons for teaching science to the lay public, however, typically have less to do with the
disciplinary content of the subjects in question, which is often assumed rather than considered in
detail in these accounts. One finds the commonplace references to understanding the process of
science, fostering scientific literacy, and learning about the science of everyday things. In this
sense, the studies noted above are somewhat analogous to the internal histories of disciplinary
reproduction and training that occupied early historians of science. Recent historical writing has
looked more deliberately at what science teaching has sought to push along with science content
across the science-public boundary and how various interest groups have, in turn, pushed back at
different points in time. These studies have focused on what might be called the collateral aims
or purposes of science education, some of which have been more implied than directly stated.
One of the more common examples of these collateral aims has been the value of science as
an instrument for maintaining social order and class status. Richard Jarrell, in his 1998 article
‘Visionary or Bureaucrat? T. H Huxley, the Science and Art Department and Science Teaching
for the Working Class’, describes Huxley’s advocacy of science teaching for the British working
class in both elementary and secondary school settings. Jarrell argues that Huxley’s efforts to
expand science to the broader working men’s culture had less to do with linking scientific skills
to industrial productivity than with helping the lower strata understand that ‘social phenomena
are as much the expression of natural laws as anything else’ (p. 236). In other words, the study of
the order and regularities of the natural world revealed by science would, it was thought, foster
recognition and acceptance of the existing social order. The learning of detailed science content
was a secondary outcome.
This view of science as an agent of social stability was by no means limited to Britain.
A powerful example from the Continent is described in the essay ‘Teaching Community Via
Biology in Late-Nineteenth-Century Germany’ (2002) by Lynn Nyhart. In the unsettled social and
political environment of this rapidly industrialising country, reformer and school teacher Friedrich
Junge sparked a curricular movement away from teaching about living organisms from an isolated,
taxonomic perspective to seeing organisms within and dependent upon their environment. Junge’s
hands-on approach cast the ‘village pond’ as a model biotic community and sought to use ‘biolog-
ical laws as models of lawfulness for schoolchildren’ (p. 152). This curricular shift, Nyhart
explains, was embraced by German teachers and administrators, in large part, for its promotion
of social stability and civic responsibility during a period of political tension. Science was
deployed in an analogous way in the United States as Philip Pauly’s work reveals. His essay, ‘The
Development of High School Biology: New York City, 1900–1925’ (1991) (which was incorpo-
rated into a larger historical exploration in his book, Biologists and the Promise of American Life
(2000)), argues that biologists have long aimed to use science to ‘culture’ the American public in
the same way biologists culture plant stocks and other living specimens, in the sense of directing
their growth. Biology education, Pauly argues, was an important component of these efforts and
was thought to be an effective tool to ‘Americanize’ the immigrants who swarmed into the USA
in the early twentieth century – science for social order once again.
 Studies in Science Education 71

Not unrelated to the stabilising benefits of science study is the use made in particular of the
knowledge-generating apparatus of science, which could serve as a foundation for rational social
(as well as personal) analysis. This asset of science is described in my own piece ‘Epistemology
for the Masses: The Origin of the “Scientific Method” in American Schools’ (Rudolph, 2005b),
which relates the manner in which the rise of psychology and the demands of large-scale educa-
tion in early twentieth-century America influenced educators’ formulations of scientific process
in science textbooks and the curriculum. The result was a standardised version of scientific
thinking that, many believed, could be rationally applied to problems of all types – natural,
social, or political.
The focus on social goals quickly shades into the connections between natural science and
morality. Historical studies documenting this aspect of science instruction reveal uses and views
that were at the same time more complex and in flux. It has been long established that much early
science instruction (when the subject first gained access to the course of study in the nineteenth
century) was predicated on its ability to reveal the moral order of a divine creation, science as
natural theology (e.g. Guralnik, 1975). Along these lines, Jonathan Topham’s essay ‘Science and
Popular Education in the 1830s’ (1992) has examined how the Bridgewater Treatises – the classic
work of natural theological writing – were utilised by educationalists associated with early
nineteenth-century mechanics institutes, Sunday schools, and popular science outlets as a safe
means of getting what was viewed as good science to a working-class audience. Colin
McGeorge’s study ‘The Presentation of the Natural World in New Zealand Primary Schools,
1880–1914’ (1994) provides another example, this time from the South Pacific, that demonstrates
the role of science teaching as a means of revealing God’s handiwork. The moral benefits of
science other than those explicitly aligned with a pious outlook, however, included ideas about
the virtue of inquiry as something generally noble and pure (Hollinger, 1984) and even notions
of rational self government, an idea that straddles the border between moral and social order.
The picture of the science-public boundary isn’t complete, certainly, without a look at those
on the receiving end of these educational efforts. Perceptions of a creeping naturalism associated
with science have been the catalyst for a number of episodes where the public, or particular inter-
est groups to be precise, has pushed back against science teaching efforts. Jim Donnelly’s 2002
article, ‘The “Humanist” Critique of the Place of Science in the Curriculum in the Nineteenth
Century, and Its Continuing Legacy’, for example, explores the questions raised in the late-
Victorian period by humanist educators about the educational value a thoroughly naturalistic,
even materialistic, subject like science can offer students. He highlights the intellectual core of
the humanist objection to science – grounded in its perceived inability to cultivate human under-
standing – and suggests that this tension between the naturalistic foundation of science and the
humanistic goal of education remains a ‘central problematic’ (p. 555). Here the concern is,
perhaps, as much with the displacement of traditional subjects by science as it is with science’s
educational shortcomings.
Public concern over moral questions, of course, has been most intensely focused on the teach-
ing of evolution, particularly as scientists and science educators have over time shed their earlier
theistically friendly versions of this science. This topic has generated an abundance of scholarship
in the USA, where the debate has been most pronounced. There is, for example, George Webb’s
book, The Evolution Controversy in America (1994), which chronicles the many legislative and
cultural battles surrounding evolution education, as well as Jon Roberts’ revealing 2005 article
‘Conservative Evangelicals and Science Education in American Colleges and Universities, 1890–
1940’ detailing the evangelical attacks on the evolutionary teaching of college and university
professors in the half century following 1890. These challenges to teaching evolution at the
college level can be understood partly as a reaction by religious conservatives to the increasing
secularisation of higher education, which was tied to the intellectual and cultural adoption of
72 J.L. Rudolph

science and scientific methods across nearly all academic disciplines in the late 1800s (on this
point, see Rueben, 1996). Mention should be made also of the historic battle between science and
public sentiment that played out in the American evolution trial of 1925, which is well captured
in Edward Larson’s book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing
Debate over Science and Religion (1997). Although most pronounced in America, these debates
found fertile soil in which to root elsewhere as well. McGeorge tells of the battles over the subject
in New Zealand in the first half of the twentieth century in his piece ‘Evolution and the New
Zealand Primary School Curriculum, 1900–1950’ (1992). He explains how the specific context
of that former British settlement tempered the strength of public opposition, providing a useful
contrast with the American experience.
The historical studies briefly noted above treat a range of contributions science has sought to
make to school students. They help illuminate the social function science education has played as
a passage between the relatively isolated scientific community and the uninformed public apart
from the conveyance of technical content or skills, a passage that has primarily been viewed as
a one-way flow of ‘goods’ so to speak. Of course, as these studies also document, despite the
growing influence of science and its characteristic attributes – from its seemingly generalisable
epistemology to its naturalistic assumptions and worldview – the public has not always been a
willing consumer of those perceived ‘goods’. At times, when science teaching has threatened to
undermine established ideologies or social frameworks, groups have not hesitated to beat back
the unwanted incursions of scientists or science educators.
In addition to these chronicles of the diverse excursions of science and reactions to them,
scholars have documented another sort of educational work that has occurred at the boundary
between science and the public. Recent history shows us that a good deal of science education has
also been about managing the often-conflicted relationship between the public and the scientific
research establishment. In these instances, as we will see below, science teaching has been
pursued for the purpose of bolstering the public perception of the profession, often to maintain
the status and cultural authority of science, which has been a prerequisite to securing a reliable
stream of public resources.
Educational work of this nature has at times been the personal goal of charismatic figures in
history. Jarrell’s study of T. H. Huxley (1998) described above provides an example of just such
a figure, Huxley represents the classic individual whose career was defined in many ways by his
‘selling’ of science to the public. This point is particularly well made in Gieryn’s essay about
John Tyndall’s advocacy of science in nineteenth-century England (Gieryn, 1999b). Another
instance is offered by A. M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, and Andrew Brown-May in their analysis of
the career of a prominent nineteenth-century Melbourne botanist, Ferdinand von Mueller, whose
educational efforts were, in part, aimed at ‘maintain[ing] the flow of funds from Government’
(2006, p. 52).
These cases illustrate the obvious overlap that exists between science education aimed at the
dissemination of the assets of science and that concerned with the need to maintain or improve
the status of professional science in society – the value of science to the general public is often
used to justify continued public support. A good example of this is described in Roger Geiger’s
1998 article, ‘The Rise and Fall of Useful Knowledge’. In this piece he writes about the growth
and utilitarian promise of science offerings at scientific and technical schools in America in the
mid 1800s. As these subjects became established (based on their perceived utility) they became
increasingly co-mingled with traditional liberal studies in the colleges and universities toward the
end of the century, which resulted in more academic variants of the science disciplines. In this
case, the need to provide explicit justification of science in practical terms subsided with greater
institutional security at which time science had the luxury of turning inward to serve its own
disciplinary ends.
 Studies in Science Education 73

Histories that document efforts to safeguard the status of science span a variety of periods
and locales. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt in her study ‘Nature, Not Books: Scientists and the Origins
of the Nature-Study Movement in the 1890s’ (2005) writes about the contributions of profes-
sional scientists to the establishment of the new field of nature study, an approach to science
instruction in the lower grades that was designed to strengthen the public support for science as
it gained a foothold in the colleges and universities (this subject in the British context is explored
by Edgar Jenkins and B. J. Swinnerton in ‘The School Nature Study Union, 1903–1994’ (1996)).
Olesko tells of the early-twentieth century American high school physics teachers who rebelled
against the imported German laboratory method with its emphasis on precision measurement and
mathematical analysis. Her study, ‘German Models, American Ways: The “New Movement”
Among American Physics Teachers, 1905–1909’ (1995) lays out their concern with perceptions
that this approach led to declining student interest in the sciences and describes the broad-based
reform of USA science teaching that ensued. Shortly thereafter in the USA, a group of reformers
took up the development of general science, an entirely new course designed to re-ignite public
interest in science as well as to secure the professional legitimacy of a new class of professional
science educators as distinct from their college and university counterparts who were committed
to their own discipline-specific interests. This effort is examined in my article ‘Turning Science
to Account: Chicago and the General Science Movement in Secondary Education: 1905–1920’
(Rudolph, 2005a). Similar efforts to secure public support for science during this period are
examined in ‘Reluctant Technocrats: Science Promotion in the Neglect-of-Science Debate of
1916–1918’ by Anna-K. Mayer (2005). In this article, she traces the way in which models of
pedagogy intersected with ideas of national character between England and Germany during
World War I and how science in the liberal humanist tradition was defended against the brute
technocratic views of science that characterised German economic and military might.
In the postwar period the status question became more complex as science, having proved itself
during World War II, was increasingly called upon as an instrument of national security. In many
countries there was what historian of science Sam Schweber referred to as the ‘mutual embrace’
of science and the military (1988), which saw large-scale government funding of scientific research
that produced acute tensions between the scientific research community and military–industrial
interests. In the USA this situation led to a range of efforts to enlist science teaching at all levels
in the task of managing the relationship between researchers and the public – particularly the public
as represented by government officials who sought to actively control the direction of scientific
research. The overriding interest of scientists in this period was the maintenance of their profes-
sional autonomy as well as high levels of government funding. Steven Fuller’s provocative biog-
raphy, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosopher for Our Time (2000) devotes a chapter to Kuhn’s work as a
graduate student under Harvard president James Conant, describing how he worked at the side of
Conant and others to reform the general education curriculum for Harvard undergraduates. The
goal of this work, according to Fuller, was to develop courses that would portray science in a way
that would insulate it from external political control.
This perceived threat of political interference, along with concerns over the interruption
of public funding, equally framed much of the science education reforms at the high school level.
I describe two such reform projects in detail – those undertaken by the Physical Science Study
Committee and the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study – in my book Scientists in the Class-
room: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (Rudolph, 2002) (these
efforts, among others, were the American analogues to the Nuffield projects in the UK). A similar
story of curricular change is told by David Donahue. In his article, ‘Serving Students, Science, or
Society? The Secondary School Physics Curriculum in the United States, 1930–1965’ (1993),
Donahue takes the long view, tracing the shifting nature of physics teaching from a focus on the
everyday environment of students to an emphasis on research physics after the war. Efforts to
74 J.L. Rudolph

manage public perceptions of science via the school have also been found in the European context.
Kristine Hays Lynning explores the postwar situation in Denmark in her article ‘Portraying
Science as Humanism – A Historical Case Study of Cultural Boundary Work from the Dawn of
the “Atomic Age”’ (2007). There she describes how the syllabi for physics developed by a
committee of the Danish Ministry of Education sought to present science as a cultural endeavour
to help reveal the humane foundation of technical knowledge. This approach, she argues, was part
of a broad effort to appease a public increasingly skeptical of an enterprise turned toward technical
proficiency in the service of military ends.
As noted above, the distinction between the more expansive dissemination efforts of science
teaching and the more nuanced goal of managing public perceptions in the interest of maintaining
status is in some ways simply a matter of emphasis. Times when science has enjoyed high levels
of cultural authority and respect appear to have fostered an imperial mindset among science advo-
cates and educators. Episodes of public disquiet or hostility, on the other hand, seem naturally to
have promoted a retrenchment, or reigning in of cultural ambition. The primary difference
between these two educational approaches historically lies with whether the lessons to be learned
from science, whatever they may be, are aimed at something beyond science (everyday problems,
social and/or political structures, etc.) or the intellectual and institutional practices of science
itself – the conditions necessary for research to survive and flourish – and the immediate instru-
mental benefits they can provide.
One last function of science education that occurs at the boundary between science and
the general public in some ways spans both the dissemination of goods and the managing of
the science-public relationship perspectives: this concerns the issue of recruitment and access.
Activities falling into this category are targeted at bringing individuals from the non-scientific
public into some meaningful relationship with science, either by drawing them into scientific
training or by fostering a less committed but positive interaction with science, that is, managing
the perception of science. Studies in this area have primarily examined traditionally underrepre-
sented groups, women in particular. A classic study of this kind dealing with university-level
recruitment and training is Margaret Rossiter’s Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative
Action, 1940–1972 (1995), a follow up to her earlier work Women Scientists in America: Strug-
gles and Strategies to 1940 (1982). Both of these works provide wonderfully detailed accounts
of the academic and institutional roadblocks women have had to traverse to gain access to this
traditionally male domain.
Turning to the secondary schools, Kim Tolley’s book The Science Education of American
Girls: A Historical Perspective (2002) tackles the question of how science education has been
differentially offered to, and taken advantage of by, girls from the early 1800s through the middle
of the twentieth century in the USA. Her book is one of the first efforts to examine the intersection
of gender and science education at this level and as such should spur additional research in this
understudied area. Some of this work has already begun. Sevan Terzian’s essay ‘Science World,
High School Girls, and the Prospect of Science Careers’ (2006), though not related directly to
classroom science teaching, provides an in-depth look at how images of science and scientists in
mass-media outlets that targeted high school adolescents in the postwar period conveyed mixed
messages to girls even as they encouraged them to follow scientific career paths, and Cristina
Isabel Panasco Santos, in her article ‘Portuguese Provision and Characteristics of Science
Education for Women’ (2001), describes the difficulties girls faced over the years as Portuguese
education slowly emerged from the control of the Catholic church and other conservative social
forces in the twentieth century. This cluster of valuable studies on women in science should point
the way to much needed work on other under-represented groups.
Whether treating science teaching at the high school or university level, these studies reveal
the variety of contextual factors that influence what ultimately is presented in classrooms and
 Studies in Science Education 75

laboratories as desirable science instruction. Most interesting in all this is the incredible mallea-
bility of what we call science. Through history, school science has rarely mirrored the practices
of professional scientists in any direct fashion, though it is widely believed to be the subject (or
collection of subjects) most resistant to external influence – the facts of science are the facts of
science after all, or so many claim. The historical record shows that school science, on the
contrary, has been deliberately and selectively constructed, subject to the interests and ideologies
of its creators as well as the more pervasive influences of contemporary intellectual currents,
industrial trends, prevailing politics, and so on. Classroom science – specifically that directed
toward a non-specialist audience – in this sense is no different from other public arenas where
science is constructed so as to further the interests of the stakeholders involved, a point well
made by Gieryn in his book Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (1999a), a
penetrating historical sociology of scientific image building.

Cross-disciplinary opportunities – lost and found

The brief survey of historical scholarship outlined in the preceding paragraphs – work that treats
both questions of disciplinary reproduction and issues related to education that occurs at the
boundary between science and the lay public – demonstrates a clear richness of engagement by
historians in a multifaceted, highly contextual enterprise. Clearly, excellent and groundbreaking
work is being done on a wide variety of topics at multiple levels in a number of countries. But
there are instances where a look at the broad science education landscape reveals a narrowness of
focus in some quarters that prompts questions about whether a greater awareness might not lead
to even more productive avenues of scholarship. Two pockets of work in particular are worth
noting: the first is the writing related to scientific pedagogy, or disciplinary reproduction; the
second lies further afield, with historically minded science education researchers.
The history of science pedagogy movement now underway has demonstrated considerable
value in its efforts to examine the critical element of scientific training that is responsible, ulti-
mately, for sustaining communities of scientific practice. In her recent commentary ‘Science
Pedagogy as a Category of Historical Analysis: Past, Present, and Future’ (2006), Olesko purports
to develop categories of analysis ‘that will recast, and deepen, the historical significance of
science pedagogy not only within the history of science but also within the larger framework of
historical scholarship as a whole’ (p. 864). She goes on to argue (adopting an inside/outside
perspective not much different from that used in this essay) that our understanding of scientific
training must necessarily consider not just what goes on within science but influences from the
culture at large. Yet, even with this acknowledgment of the broader culture in which science is
embedded, at no point does her discussion ever venture beyond its primary concern with scientific
training. Perhaps it is to be understood that by ‘science pedagogy’ she and the others who have
written in this sub-field mean nothing more than instruction aimed at the enculturation of scien-
tific practitioners. Much could be gained, I would argue, from a more ecumenical perspective. Our
understanding of science education could benefit from a fuller look at the intersections between
the internal and external or simply for more historians of science to begin to take science education
for the lay public seriously. Commenting on the relationship between science and the public in
1999, the historian and sociologist of science Steven Shapin wrote that we ‘just do not know very
much about the laity’s appreciations of science – of its methods, its concepts, the bases of its
power – and it would be nice to know more, to replace facile imputation with systematic inquiry’
(1999, p. 13). There has been only some progress since then. As recently as 2005, Kohlstedt noted
that ‘[h]istorians of science have paid little attention to the history of science education in the
public schools, despite the fact that, in the twentieth century, such education has provided an
essential infrastructure for later studies’ (2005, p. 325).
76 J.L. Rudolph

Ironically, Olesko’s work on science education and training in nineteenth-century Germany

highlights the potential for more cross-cutting work. Her essays on physics in Prussian secondary
schools and the transfer of laboratory methods from Germany to the USA provide an international
perspective that is sorely lacking in the history of science education literature. Given the trans-
mission of ideas that has occurred across national boundaries, especially between England,
Germany, and the USA during the rise of mass schooling in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, there is a lot to learn about the way scientists and professional educators thought about
and implemented (or reacted to) science education practices and philosophies from abroad. Much
remains to be uncovered, also, about the interactions between university instruction and the
changing educational mission of high schools in the early twentieth century as they moved from
models of teaching derived from disciplinary practice to models that considered the science needs
of a lay audience. Olesko’s work in this area has raised a host of important questions that are wait-
ing for additional historical analysis for answers.
The benefits historians of science might enjoy by looking to science education as a resource
for more general historical understanding is evident, for example, in Philip Pauly’s (2000) work
on the history of professional biologists in the USA. While his essay (1991) on the origin of high
school biology in 1900s New York city is a model of historical scholarship on science education,
it becomes even more powerful in the context of his richly detailed look at the rise of biologists
as a professional class in the sweep of American history from the early nineteenth century to the
middle of the twentieth. In this larger story, the history of high school biology education serves
as an object lesson for the active engagement of biologists in their project to cultivate the
advancement of American society and culture. Pauly’s use of this episode of science education
shows not only the powerful ways in which our understanding of educational efforts can illumi-
nate broader themes in modern science and culture, but also reciprocally how our educational
efforts are best understood as but part of larger social and political projects that are dependent on
the particulars of time and place. Clearly, more could be done by historians of science to take
advantage of science education efforts for the lay public. Scholars in this professional area simply
have not mined the educational enterprise as productively as they might.
The situation with respect to the science education research community is more troubling,
and there is perhaps no more glaring example of parochialism in this area than the chapter –
jointly authored by J. Myron Atkin, originally a New York science teacher who ended up a
faculty member and dean at Stanford University, and Paul Black, a physicist turned education
researcher based at Kings College London (2007) – on the history of science education in the
newest Handbook of Research on Science Education (Abell & Lederman, 2007). This chapter
offers a sweeping survey of science curriculum reform from the mid-1700s to the 1980s revealing
little awareness of the variety of historical work that’s been done both in the USA and the UK
over the past 15 years.4 To be fair, their survey is typical of writing done by historically minded
education researchers over the years. It seems that few have any knowledge of the work produced
by historians of science or education. At least this is true if one uses the ‘works cited’ as a
measure of scholarly range or interest, a measure that doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable.
These types of shop histories, as they might be called, exist in research handbooks and educa-
tion research journals because they perform a number of important functions, such as providing
historical context for ongoing research and policy interests, creating a sense of historical inevita-
bility to justify present interests and actions, and chronicling past science education efforts to help
define a professional identity or consciousness – work that is often central to securing the legacy
of a profession. Unfortunately, crafting historical narratives for these purposes in isolation from
the wider historical knowledge base results in work that tends to be derivative, based as it often
is on a small set of recycled secondary source material, and largely acontextual. The result is often
oversimplification and, in the worst cases, outright distortion. Of course, using the past to aid in
 Studies in Science Education 77

understanding and shaping the present – be it policy, practice, or professional identity – is a laud-
able goal. Indeed, given that society has come to see science and technology as the key to global
economic competitiveness and national strength, there has been a natural appetite for any work
that purports to deepen our appreciation of the complexities of science teaching and learning, and
more so for work that can suggest direct improvements in the ongoing enterprise. But perhaps the
most obvious point to be taken from this work is to recognise that the education community
contains an active and interested group of scholars who value historical work and see it as an
important tool in their efforts to make sense of, and improve, science education.
Given this appetite, it would seem that casting a wider net for historical insight would pay
significant dividends. Despite the rather detailed and specialised character of much of the work
written by and for historians of science and of education, there is a good deal that can be learned
that would without question enrich our understanding of current efforts to teach science at multi-
ple levels. McCulloch’s 1998 essay (which appeared in this journal), in fact, provides a well-
developed argument for the value of historical studies in science education. What needs to be
realised is that the lessons to be learned are a step or two removed from the specifics of any given
narrative. Studies related to past conflicts over the teaching of evolution, for example, can
provide insights into the longstanding struggles over the fundamental nature of secular public
instruction. Roberts’ (2005) piece on the conservative evangelical attack on university-level
evolution teaching in the early twentieth century, Webb’s The Evolutionary Controversy in
America (1994), and McGeorge’s (1992) study of evolution education in New Zealand reveal key
points on which the public in various countries has sought to exert pressure on public institutions
in the past. The extent to which university teaching and school science teaching have maintained
their institutional form and relationship to the public into the present allows us to see how these
different contexts matter in terms of susceptibility to outside influence. Adding in Pauly’s (1991)
essay on high school biology teaching expands our understanding further to include the manner
in which biology teachers at the local level have adapted to such pressures in terms of their mate-
rials of practice (the textbook in this instance). A case study such as this suggests that, at the
classroom level, important ideological commitments are likely to persist even in the face of
sometimes very public external disapproval, if not outright prohibition.
Recent work on the material culture and representational tools of science education further
illustrates what can be gained by looking across the disciplinary reproduction and general educa-
tion camps and provides, at the same time, fertile ground for thinking about current science teach-
ing and learning, making evident the benefits that inhere in a broader view of the historical
literature. Much of science education, whether focused on technical training or lay understanding,
is, after all, about the communication or transmission of knowledge and skills in one form or
another, and understanding the media through which this occurs (and the social and political
context in which they are deployed) cuts to the heart of the enterprise. Iwan Rhys Morus, for exam-
ple, looks at how the development of electrical demonstration apparatus in nineteenth-century
British culture contributed to the advancement of disciplinary practice among physicists studying
fundamentals of electricity and magnetism in his essay ‘The Two Cultures of Electricity: Between
Entertainment and Edification in Victorian Science’ (in press). In a similar vein, Lissa Roberts’
study ‘Devices Without Borders’ (in press) about late eighteenth-century steam engines in Leiden
illustrates that scientific instruments can have variable identities depending on the context in
which they are displayed, thus crossing the boundaries between public science and private
research. Other work that has opened up consideration of the material aspects of science education
include Brian Dolan’s piece on the development of mineralogical training kits described in
‘Pedagogy through Print’ (1998) and Massimiano Bucchi’s examination of instructional wall
charts in Germany described in his article ‘Images of Science in the Classroom: Wallcharts and
Science Education, 1850–1920’ (1998). These studies are just beginning to help us unpack the
78 J.L. Rudolph

role of material elements in science teaching and learning and reveal the new perspectives that
might be gained by thinking more broadly across what are now rather isolated communities of
scholarship.
Science education researchers might look at this historical work on the material and represen-
tational aspects of science instruction and dismiss it as interesting, perhaps, but clearly beyond
the realm of significance for science teaching at the pre-college level. A closer look, however,
would suggest otherwise. Consider Kaiser’s work on Feynman diagrams, for example, specifi-
cally his piece ‘Making Tools Travel: Pedagogy and the Transfer of Skills in Postwar Theoretical
Physics’ (2005b) from his edited volume Pedagogy and the Practice of Science. Although his
account is concerned primarily with the ways in which Feynman diagrams were deployed and
adapted among different groups of post-doctoral researchers as the infrastructure of research
physics rapidly expanded after World War II, what Kaiser illustrates so well is the key role repre-
sentational forms have played in the communal work of physicists as they pushed the bounds of
theoretical development. For the science educator, this story highlights the importance of the
paper and pencil elements of disciplinary practice and suggests that their development and use be
made a central, explicit part of science instruction. Other work in this edited volume as well as
that by Warwick and others similarly define the material and intellectual contours of science. If
educators are serious in their efforts to pursue inquiry-based pedagogical strategies, they would
benefit by their exposure to these sorts of deep historical analyses of scientific work.

Conclusion
Looking across this landscape, it is clear is that there is a growing interest in the history of science
education among scholars from a number of fields from history of science and of education to the
science studies fields and science education. What I have tried to do in the foregoing paragraphs
is lay out the range of historical writing that has been published over the last decade and a half to
give interested readers a place to start and some sense of the multiple approaches being pursued.
In this survey I have also tried to show that there are at least two bodies of historical work in circu-
lation, one that has focused on the reciprocal influences between scientific training and disciplin-
ary practice, and another, broader literature that has dealt with the various transactions that have
occurred at the border between science and the lay public. The fact that two areas of scholarship
so clearly exist, I would argue, is a consequence of the unique cultural and intellectual space that
science itself occupies in society at large; these two primary functions of science education, train-
ing and mediation (as well as their more subtle variants) have naturally emerged as science has
become an essential, if somewhat isolated, enterprise in modern civilization.
This wider perspective not only makes apparent the diversity of historical scholarship on
science education, but also highlights places where productive interactions have yet to take place.
The potential exists for rich cross-field study between education researchers and historians which
would further our understanding of the diverse ways that science education functions in society.
This historical understanding, whether focused on the more typical formal school science subjects
in colleges and universities or on the more advanced tacit means by which knowledge is passed
on from experienced scientists to graduate student apprentices, all have relevance for science
education researchers, teachers, and curriculum developers. A more sophisticated understanding
of the way science has been transmitted, disciplines built, and researchers trained – which these
histories of enculturation and training provide – has real and concrete value in thinking about both
how this process might be carried out more effectively, and how it might be broadened to a larger,
more representative cross-section of individuals. Education researchers who seek to use history
as a means of understanding present-day issues and concerns need to look beyond the narrow,
internal histories they have traditionally used as the foundation of their work.
 Studies in Science Education 79

Science education, in turn, offers a rich site for understanding science in culture. Historians
have yet to fully exploit science education for the general citizen – this enterprise of educating
citizens at all levels about the knowledge, benefits, and practices of science – as a site of histori-
cal understanding. The rich interplay of interests that results, as scientists, educators, and the
public undertake the collaborative work of teaching about science, provides a unique window
onto questions of culture, status, ideology, and politics among many other factors. In particular,
the way science has sought in its more expansive eras to impose its various intellectual, ideolog-
ical, and moral positions on the broader public through the schools and the way the public has
variously embraced and resisted aspects of this is currently an under-examined topic in the
history of science and education as are the connections between the pedagogies of disciplinary
training and science teaching for the lay public. The potential for cross-disciplinary growth
clearly exists, and I hope that this essay can move us in some way toward realising that potential.

Notes
1. The ‘two cultures’ debate, famously delivered at the Cambridge Senate House by C. P. Snow, comes to
mind here. While Snow was concerned with comparing a scientific education to a literary one – specif-
ically critiquing the literary traditions of British society and culture – my comparison is more pedestrian,
between the specialised knowledge-generating practices of science and common understandings of the
non-scientifically trained public (see Burnett, 1999).
2. The use of ‘internal’ here is not meant to suggest that social forces don’t impinge on the institutions and
pedagogical practices in question, merely that such practices are focused on training individuals within
the discipline. It should not be thought of as analogous to ‘internalist’ history of science as that term is
commonly understood.
3. There is of course a well-established body of work within the history of science that has examined the
many informal efforts to disseminate science to the general public. This literature falls under the general
heading of science popularisation and represents a well-defined sub-field within the history of science
(see Cooter & Pumfrey, 1994 for an overview). The amount of scholarship in this area grows even larger
if one includes studies on the public understanding of science, which in many ways is the later twentieth-
century counterpart to popularisation. For the purposes of this essay, however, I intend to set aside this
work and limit what follows to historical studies of science education located in formal school settings.
4. This unfortunate situation of professional isolation is more pronounced in the USA. Science education
scholars in the UK have always been more attuned to the history of science education and its relation to
science teaching and learning.

Notes on contributor
John Rudolph is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Curriculum and Instruction, and History of
Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently working on a book examining the changing
portrayals of scientific epistemology in American schools from the late 1800s through the 1990s. This essay
and his current projects have been supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation and a National Academy
of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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