Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE
Interview with Graeme Gooday
Author: David Mossley
Journal Title: Discourse
ISSN: 2040-3674
ISSN-L: 1741-4164
Volume: 7
Number: 1
Start page: 61
End page: 80
Return to vol. 7 no. 1 index page
Thankyou for agreeing to talk to Discourse, Graeme. Please could you tell us a little about your own history—how you got into the history of science, and your academic career?
Originally I wanted to be a scientist, and went to study natural sciences at Cambridge University, in 1983, with a view that I would become a physicist. I soon discovered that the way in which science was taught was really not to my liking. I'd been used to a much more studentcentred, technology-focused approach to learning science, and discovered that Cambridge were still very much operating in a traditional mode of learning and teaching, particularly in physics; so when the chance came along to try something different, in my second year, I tried history and philosophy of science.
Suddenly, vistas opened up to me—I knew this was a subject that I actually cared about, and I liked learning, and had things to say. I took the chance therefore in my third year of my degree to pursue history and philosophy of science alone, and that was very exciting. I don't think I was the world's best third year student, it took a long time for me to adjust from being a scientist to being a scholar of history, and I think by the time I'd done that, I'd learned exactly how much of a distance there was between learning in the arts and learning in the sciences.
I did well enough to get to do a PhD, at the University of Kent at Canterbury, in the wonderfully titled subject History, Philosophy and Social Relations of Science; and from that point onwards my career has not looked back. I've been employed as a historian of science and/or technology ever since my PhD finished.
My thesis had been about the development of physics teaching laboratories in Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, being interested, as I was, in the strange phenomenon of the laboratory. As an undergraduate laboratory student in the sciences, quite what laboratory training was supposed to do was entirely unclear to me, and the level to which students simply made up the results which they were supposed to find or faked them made me wonder why on earth we'd actually invested so much in them. So my thesis had in effect been a sort of catharsis, finding out what had led to the strange regime of making students repeat measurements of things which were supposed to be well defined numbers—although I couldn't find evidence they were—and expecting students to acquire skills which ironically were presupposed as already existing in the students, in the operation of experiments. The laboratory was a very paradoxical place, so I explored the origins of that whole culture—of measurement based learning in physics.
After that, my first post was a three year British Academy postdoctoral fellowship which I took up at the University of Kent in Canterbury. I wanted to extend the insights of my thesis, and my postdoctoral work initially was about how the learning laboratories in electrical engineering and biology were also problematic. In biology I looked at the ways in which it was really difficult for people to learn to see the laboratory as a place where nature resided. Nature very clearly for many Victorians was not something that you find in a laboratory, it was the very last place you'd find it, and for electrical engineering it was interesting to see how there was a very strong sense in which engineering could only be learned outdoors. On the engineering side, just as with biologists, it was felt that laboratories could only capture a very tiny and skewed aspect of the world, so it was interesting for me to discover how the origins of laboratory learning in natural sciences and technology were very much about how a particular role could be found for the laboratories, and how very particular kinds of learning could complement what already existed out there, either with nature study, or with large scale engineering works.
I discovered in the process that I really wanted to do the history of technology, and I then spent two years at the University of Oxford on a British Academy and Royal Society post-doctoral fellowship that was dedicated to the history of science and technology. It was a five year fellowship and I spent my first two years on it. While I was there, I did some extra work on the history of electrical engineering, particularly developing my work with Robert Fox, who was my close collaborator on a book that emerged from that period.1 We both began looking at the history of physics at Oxford. Oxford University, despite its eminence, seemed to be convinced that in terms of physics it was very much the backwater in the 19th century, comparing poorly to the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge. So the myth said, physics only really got going at Oxford in World War II, but what Robert and I decided to do was to look at this more carefully.
I'd done a PhD chapter on Oxford physics, and Robert had examined the University of Oxford's own history, a multi-volume affair, and had learned from that a great deal about what had been going on in Oxford physics in the period 1839-1939. So particularly in the light of what had emerged from that, we agreed to look at Oxford physics, and its distinctive college based culture of learning, more closely. There was much more physics happening in that period than people had thought, and much of it was actually happening in the colleges, not in the central university facilities. Much was done by college tutors, and much wasn't even called physics, it was actually called mechanics or physical chemistry. Radioactivity was studied by the chemist, Frederick Soddy, not by the physicists at Oxford. It seemed that much of what would be called physics elsewhere was just not called so in Oxford.
We learned to understand that particular cultures of learning were local to a particular institution and this filled up a very large book, in fact, which showed in detail that Oxford had not been a backwater. Understanding the particular cultures of learning at institutions made us realise that physics was much more vigorous at Oxford than had been thought, and particularly that trying to understand the history of physics and physics education was not best done through, say, for example, the default template of the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, which my previous learning had done.
This was much more student centred learning, much more delocalised learning, much learning not undertaken with the somewhat parvenu name of physics. In the late 19th century physics was very much not the subject we take it to be now. It might have been at Cambridge but not at Oxford, where in many ways it is still seen as either natural philosophy, or a branch of mathematics or a branch of chemistry. That taught me a lot about how to think of an education more sensitively, about how individual organisations formulated what their project was in distinctly localised ways and also how the process of learning is really very difficult to separate out from research in certain institutions, in Oxford particularly. In Cambridge, by contrast, it's worth bearing in mind that the history teaches that students had been kept out of research, but at Oxford the two were much more unified. Looking at it that way you can see some interesting insights into the integration of research and teaching today, I think, David.
Yes, indeed.
So through my work on the history of technology, I ended up becoming a lecturer at the University of Leeds.
So, talking about the nature of learning within a university, how do you see a university? Because obviously there are different formations, different parts of a university that go into the process of learning that's involved here. You spoke about laboratory learning and the strange phenomena that that produces, so how do you conceptualise a university as such?
Well, I have to say there is no one single conception of a university that I can subscribe to. I can only think of them in the particular. In the Oxford case, and at each university I've been to, my sense is that they have very different historical traditions to draw upon, and forms of excellence to uphold, different kinds of audiences, different kinds of buildings, locales, so I'm going to be very much the historian and be a particularist. I just can't find anything in common to universities except that in some sense they are all naturally engaged in higher education and research, but what I can simply say is that if they are good universities, if I can be prescriptive rather than descriptive, they have to bring their research and their teaching into line, or to have some integration between them. That is what a good university would be. I've been at universities as a student where research was the main activity and teaching suffered accordingly, but I've been an external examiner at one place where little research went on and it's clear that the teaching suffered accordingly. So my conviction, personally, is that we ought to have teaching and research integrated.
I think you also need to think of universities as stakeholder institutions with many stakeholders, students being central to that discussion, not merely as customers. What bothers me slightly is that students increasingly are encouraged to think of themselves as paying customers, whereas in fact they're not. We still have to maintain a sense of the teacher student relationship.
I think it was John Stuart Mill who pointed out that you can't, or shouldn't, treat education as a matter of laissez faire, because one doesn't know the value of education until after one's had it, by which time it's too late to make choices about it. I think there's a very delicate balance to be maintained in universities between what we think is good for students, and what students would like to do. Negotiating that is possibly one of the bigger challenges that we face, but it's one which good universities handle well. A university is in some ways like the BBC, it'll take you to places you might not have expected you wanted to go, and helps you to become a more rounded and interesting person, better able to cope with the world both inside university and beyond. I think good teachers can inspire students to follow their lead into interesting and valuable areas of scholarship, and not just indulge in what is easiest, or what might appear to be most fun.
So, talking about good teachers, and obviously teaching itself is very important to you, which educator would you say has had the most influence on you and why?
That's a bit tricky—my primary experience in education has been of bad teachers! So my dedication to enhanced pedagogy has largely come from learning from the mistakes of those who taught very badly, with the wrong sorts of assumptions and with inappropriate practice, and I'm determined that my students shouldn't have to go through what I went through as a student.
In terms of that commitment to good teaching, you've recently been awarded three prizes. Could you say a little bit about those? The three awards, in sequence, just in summary, were first the History of Science Society's Hazen Prize for Educational Excellence, awarded in November 2006, and in January 2007 came the University of Leeds teaching fellowship, and then in June 2007, I was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship. Now the work I did to get these fellowships, all of which I should say other people nominated me for, or asked me to apply for, derived from a period I spent from 2000 to 2003, working in what was then called the Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Learning and Teaching Support Network Centre at the University of Leeds, now called the Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies.
I was the Associate Director for History and Philosophy of Science for roughly three years, and organised quite a lot of workshops, mostly on teaching history of science, but also some on teaching history of medicine, and one on teaching philosophy of science. They brought together higher education practitioners to talk about educational difficulties in higher education in ways that really hadn't been done before. Previously there had been very sporadic discussions occasionally, mostly either about very particular, narrow topics, or about school level education. In discussion with other university teachers, including Andrew Warwick (Imperial College), many of us agreed that in teaching students who are not historical philosophers but who are doing science degrees, or other degrees, we spend much of the time just trying to get students to understand what we're giving them in history of science. So for the first time university teachers of the history of technology and medicine and/or philosophy of science got together to talk about how to help teachers appreciate that pedagogical challenge.
I suppose I drew heavily from my own experience as an undergraduate undergoing the conversion from being a scientist to an historian, so for me actually identifying the problem was remarkably straightforward, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that people thought my insights were quite novel and original. I think what emerged from these workshops is that there was a common sense that something had been achieved by pooling expertise together. My role was basically that of starting a discussion going with a document, where I raised some concerns, and I chaired the meetings, but the collective approach of the meetings, of everyone bringing their own insights to bear, was much the most productive feature of it, and I'm very happy to be associated with those.
I did those for four years, and then I moved on to work closely with the British Society for History of Science. I've been a member of its Education Section committee since 2000, but I then found myself getting much more closely involved with the new Outreach and Education Committee set up in 2005, which I've since come to cherish. That has been involved with a lot of interesting initiatives, not just following through the debates on education and history of science in higher education, but also looking at some ways that higher education could support secondary and even primary school teachers in history of science. They do outreach activities too, bringing history of science to a wider population, by organising events. Some of the teams I've worked with have done interesting projects, one of which for example is getting students to produce 'object autobiographies', an interesting exercise showing how museum curators and teachers bring objects to life. They have also done role play activities, which went down very well. One being launched this year was the reconstruction of an investigation into the plague in York in 1645, with the public being involved in the discussion of the causes of it.
All these activities seem to have added up to quite a good portfolio, and combined with the success I seem to have had in Leeds with developing the teaching of the history of science and technology and particularly also now in the history of philosophy and ethics of technol- ogy, I've also been lucky to have students think that my teaching was good, so I was put in for the Hazen prize in 2005 and was lucky enough to get it in 2006. I went all the way to Vancouver to collect it, and it was a very prestigious event. The HSS is largely an American organisation and certainly in North America, particularly the USA, teaching is taken very seriously indeed. There are many institutions with very high levels of resources to support teaching and academics who devote their entire life to teaching, so for a Brit to succeed in that competitive marketplace is actually quite amazing. I was stunned to receive that award.
Indeed, many congratulations.
Thank you. And then what followed from that was a chain reaction, I was advised very strongly to apply for a University of Leeds university fellowship, oddly going in the wrong direction, from international to local—funny how these things work out. I would never have thought of putting in for an internal university teaching fellowship, until that point, but I was advised that an international award was probably quite sufficient recognition, so I submitted for that and was successful. I was one of two people who were then nominated, as winner of a University of Leeds teaching fellowship, to be put in for a National Teaching Fellowship. That took some time to develop, as I had to get evidence from colleagues around the country who were able to say nice things about my workshops, and from my students and colleagues of previous years who had watched me teach and who I'd supported in their learning how to teach. I got the National Teaching Fellowship in September.
The prizes I've got from each of these awards have been very helpful as they've provided me with a supply of money which has been used so far to hire in post-graduates to do tasks to develop better educational resources in the history of science and technology. The university teaching fellowship, for example, is being used to develop some on-line tutorials called, most likely, 'electricity on-line', which will have students going through online self-guided tutorials to understand the history of electricity, going from the most elementary stage of those who are just casually interested and/or just at school still, who can use Google or other search engines to find things out, and critically evaluate what they find on the web, all the way through to advanced level research skills. It might be formulated in the training programme of a Masters or PhD student.
I haven't yet fully decided what to do with the National Teaching Fellowship money, that's £10,000, the UTF being £15,000, but it'll probably be more of the same, developing more on-line resources. Post-graduate students are, in this department, extremely experienced at teaching history and philosophy of science because we hire them to teach our first year undergraduates, so it's great to be able to draw upon their abilities to teach and understand first year students, and their sense of what will be interesting to them. As one approaches middle age one increasingly realises one does not understand how first year undergraduates work any more, and we just increasingly forget what it must be like to encounter history and philosophy of science for the first time. So using post-graduates means we are able to recapture that sense of strangeness and otherness, if I can use that phrase?
What Joe Cain calls encountering the borderland, the boundary?
Yes, it's certainly a boundary, but one that you can take people over, and one of the great things is seeing how many people enjoy crossing borders. Many people cross the border very willingly, and one just has to hope that we don't end up converting too many scientists into historians of science by making history of science too interesting!
So, along that same theme, what sort of skills and abilities or capacities would you look for in a student who would be likely to succeed in the history of science?
One, I think, is the ability to stand back from science and look at it critically, not taking it for granted as the permanent answer to all questions. I think the intelligent science student will already be aware that science changes, and is fallible, and is sometimes contradictory, so being able to understand how science got that way, how science changes, requires you to be able to stand outside it. Many students who have had a bit of training in the humanities are good at that, but there are some students who really resist it, they just want to learn what's in the text books and be pragmatic about getting into research, and they may be less capable of doing history of science.
The next most important attribute I think is empathy. The histo- rian's role is to understand how people in the past thought, without thinking they were irrational or incompetent in some way, and trying to reconstruct what they did and why they did it, and how they may have changed their minds about things. For example as a historian of science you want to be able to understand how a particular theory which had been absolutely taken for granted was gradually rejected, and in fact you can start to see how things that we might regard as being quite bizarre now would have been perfectly comprehensible in the past. For example, the faith in the divine creation of the universe, faith that the Earth is at the centre of the universe, or the belief that there are four elements, earth, air, fire and water. Various things that were thought fundamentally true, for many people in distant past times, are no longer so, and students who are good at the subject are able particularly well to balance this great conflict of views of how to interpret the natural world. Some students panic when they see that there is no consensus, or the experts don't agree, but the best students realise this is normal, in science. Because of this, history of science gives a good training to students at a professional level of science, because there are going to be debates and disagreements amongst professionals. It's great for a student to be given a history of science education which brings out their ability to think about those issues of science which are not discussed in the science curriculum. The skills we cultivate, therefore, complement the kind of skills that they get in the science curriculum and are useful for them professionally as well.
So how good is contemporary history and philosophy of science education in actually developing those skills? How good are we at cultivating these skills of empathy and being able to step outside and evaluate other people's positions?
Well, it's difficult to make a general judgement about this. My experience has two relevant forms to consider. One is being an external examiner at three other institutions. It's become clear to me, looking at the work of students, many of whom are scientists, that they've come a very long way from where science students are, by the time I see their papers. They've learned to think a lot. Certainly many of them show signs that they are still utterly convinced of the truth and power of science, but many of them are able to be much more sophisticated and critical and reflective about it and that's encouraging. The other thing I suppose could be that the very fact that history and philosophy of science has survived for decades now in a very competitive marketplace.
There are very few areas of scholarship where the history and philosophy of something would be a self-sustaining area of autonomous scholarship, so we've had to do our job very well in order to maintain our existence, and I think many people now realise that what we do is valuable. Looking back at the two cultures debate due to C P Snow,2 there was a rough sense that science and the arts tended to be bridged with HPS, or that it was the best way perhaps to do that; and insofar as we've been bridging that gap ever since, making people in the arts understand the sciences, and vice versa, we've done our job pretty well, I think. We certainly get a lot of interest now, much more so than 20 years ago, from the media about what we do, and no longer, for example, is it so obvious that it's scientists that we ask about the history, historians of science and philosophers of science are increasingly consulted. If you listen to Radio 4 in the mornings, you quite often get a historian of science being asked to comment on the world, and they are thought to have some interesting insights.
So, you say that there is a changing role in public debate and discussion of science that uses history and philosophy of science more appropriately now. Could you say a bit more about how that's changing, and the future direction of the involvement of graduates in the history and philosophy of science in public discussions about science?
Well I guess the most obvious thing is that we're getting two areas of interest—the ethics of science, and the science of communication. People who do the history and philosophy of science are often quite good at pinpointing the value issues that arise in any area of science, and more specifically what the different options are, what arguments have been put forward in the past, and what other arguments have not been explored but are there in the literature of philosophy and scientists from different periods or different countries, and are enabling those to inform the debate. So certainly I see a lot of people who work in our area being able to help in discussion about the ethics of science and what scientists should do. This is only a question that's come up in the last decade or two. I think the response from the public has been, 'who can guide us?' and I think we can help them.
The other area of public discussion has been the science of communication. A lot of debate has gone on in the last 15 years about how to get the public to engage with science. Initially the problem was seen to be the public understanding of science, the idea being that if only the public knew more about science, they would understand it and stop criticising it. But more recently the problem has been that since the end of the Cold War, now that the investment in science is no longer justified by having to defend the state against invasion or bombing, or against holocaust, people question what the purpose of science actually is. Scientists, certainly, have been a little uneasy at having to live in a world where the funding is no longer taken for granted and I think science communication in its current form has helped because no longer can one assume in this new paradigm that the public are simply ignorant of science—the issue is often one of trust. There's a moral dimension to the relationship between what is claimed is knowledge and what you might call the epistemological relationship. I think science communication, as I'm currently teaching it right now, raises all the complex and interesting ways in which the scientists can engage with the public, and why the public might respond in various ways. From this, one can develop a model about how scientists and the public can engage much more productively without the cross-purposes or the antagonism or distrust that has been characteristic of previous decades.
How do you see the relationship between history of science and philosophy of science changing? Because it has changed in the last 10 years.
Yes, it's changed in various ways. One thing to put into context is that the history and the philosophy of science were of course thought to be quite well integrated in the early years of the field, in the 1950s, and we assumed that one couldn't do history of science without the clarifying methodological insights of philosophy of science, and that philosophy of science was completely pointless without some empirical input from the history of science. One really had to know about what science had thrown up as case studies to consider. But increasingly philosophers and historians have gone their own separate ways, with philosophers of science wanting to maintain a much more rationalist framework and historians of science moving more into areas of scholarship influenced by anthropology, literary theory and sociology. However, there has been an attempt recently to bridge that gap, and I think it's clear that historians of science are rediscovering once again that philosophers of science can help them think about much of the conceptual apparatus of science and the debates that there are about science at a pretty high level of analysis, and the philosophers of science have managed to learn about how to deal with the historical case studies that they often will use to substantiate their point. Certainly the recent relationship between UCL and Leeds in HPS has been most productive and very genial...
See the report on the website3...
That's right, and it's clear that many people have much to discuss, there are many people around that regard themselves still as being both historians and philosophers of science, or at least are historically minded philosophers of science or philosophically minded historians of science. I would probably see myself as a philosophically minded historian of science and technology, still engaged in philosophical debates of various sorts, and still think there's much to be gained by historians of science and technology working with philosophers so long as they can actually establish the common territory carefully and not expect there to be a complete alliance in every single issue.
Ok, so, Graeme, you're obviously well-engaged in contemporary pedagogy, and engaging with the debate, and your awards are clearly a demonstration of the recognition that you've gained through working in contemporary pedagogy, so could you say a bit about how you've seen teaching change, over your career as a teacher? How has the approach to teaching changed, and how have the attitudes of your colleagues changed, and indeed your own attitudes?
Well, several major changes have taken place. I think that one of them is that as far as I'm concerned I'm a much more student-centred teacher, and much more inclined to cultivate debate amongst students. I think I went into the classroom initially with a great radical fervour, convinced that there were certain particularly right ways to do history of science, and I'm no longer convinced that that is either appropriate or even effective pedagogically, because I think that one of the most disempowering things for students is to be told how they should think. Instead I've developed a technique of forcing students to engage in debate by always showing them at least two aspects to a story, and as far as I can never allowing them to know what my views are, and I think that's quite different to how I was taught as an undergraduate. I remember quite vividly being taught quite prescriptively about things to write, and that there were things that you shouldn't say, that undergraduates were not meant to have their own views about things, just to summarise other people's.
I think another major change that's happened is that the history of physics has disappeared really, as a subject. People are no longer impressed by the history of physics, it does not capture one's attention at all. I was raised with the idea that history of physics was the canonical discipline, and that's no longer the case. I find I have to use history of technology increasingly to show how the history of physics does matter in some interesting sorts of ways. The students themselves are very different, they're less impressed by science, they're much more impressed by technology, so one often has to teach them history of science through history of technology to get them to pay attention. Also I think the fact that the students are paying fees now means that you are aware they are expecting a much more well-defined interaction with you, they are expecting certain kinds of resources. One has to be much better at producing documentation, lecture notes, and everyone I think has to understand how students learn. There's much more of a sense now that teachers have to be conscious of what it is that motivates students, and what things they do best.
Web resources are something I've come to in the last two or three years, and I've found that when students are encouraged to go out and search the web, they are much more effective at finding out interesting things. They enjoy it much more, and it drives them to produce creative critical thinking much more than if you just sent them off to read a book or two. Learning has become much less book-centred, but I guess one has to accept this as part of the way all students of each generation do new things in new ways, and if one is to make learning of history of science democratic, it's going to have to become much more web based, because so many students out there do not have access to libraries. That's why I'm increasingly dedicated to developing web resources, and directing students to good web resources, and warning them conversely of course about the dangers of web resources, because some are extremely poor, misleading and confused.
Those who were teaching history of science in the 1970s are aware that the game is utterly different now, perhaps because the numbers are much greater. The pressure's much greater— we're no longer able to teach history of science as if it intrinsically mattered, we have to teach history of science and philosophy of science as if they had some benefit beyond just disciplining the mind. They're not just liberal studies any more, they serve a purpose, and again, to use a phrase that Joe Cain uses, students have become 'critical consumers' of science, and that notion is one that's very recent, and wins favour with many people that teach nowadays. One way is of pinning down to students particularly what difference learning history and philosophy of science actually makes to them, and how they can be better citizens accordingly.
The benefits to civic society. So what do you think are the most pressing factors that are driving that change? Is it policy, is it the marketisation of higher education?
Well, it's the marketisation that is the thing. I'm not sure if anyone has a very clear policy about what to do with history of science. We're much more conscious now that we have to follow the markets rather than trying to dictate them, and we live in a world where educational work has to be sensitive to both student demand and financial viability. Those two things of course are connected, and what you have to do is establish a research culture that means that your performance as researchers will enable you to perform with a reasonable level of autonomy from your institution. If you research well and you bring in research grants you'll be given enough freedom to teach what you want, and if you don't do well in research then it's a lot harder to find the freedom to do what you want. Some institutions have closed down the history of science or the philosophy departments completely, because they weren't doing well in research ratings.
The other thing to consider is simply that students are now more and more concerned with vocational matters, and having an enjoyable time at university. They are paying for their education, and they see it perhaps not quite yet as American students do, as an investment, but they see now they want to get particular kinds of benefit out of it, so we've had to adapt the way we teach a little bit to engage with those agendas, and present ourselves as doing things which are vocationally useful, and indeed highly enjoyable. Not every student who ever receives history and philosophy of science will think 'oh what fun', but very few will think of it first as having vocational benefits. Most of those who take it do realise that it can be great fun, very rewarding to learn and highly beneficial. History and philosophy of science was recorded some years ago at this university as having one of the highest employment rates. Students have a broad range of understanding of the arts and sciences and seem to do fairly well in the educational market, which shows I think that we have been able to adapt well to the changing circumstances, but I look forward to the day when we can sit down and have a policy about its teaching. The only thing I can think of as a policy that we might be considered to have is, at least in this department, to keep the history and the philosophy of science together, and to cover the history of science, technology and medicine, because science is certainly less prominent than it used to be, and students are invited to learn all those different areas of the subject coherently on the curriculum. We just have to accept that some courses will get dropped and others will become more popular as students' interests change and as we have to consider new partnerships with other departments. The key point in the two cultures debate that I considered earlier is actually that we often teach other departments' students. We find that some departments are very friendly towards us—the biology department here at Leeds is particularly enthusiastic about having us teach their students—but other departments have become less so, partly on financial grounds, and also because they simply want more of their students to be specialising in their own field. It's a real challenge to us that some departments in this country really feel that history and philosophy of science can only be a distraction—that it can't enhance learning. This is in really great contrast to the USA, where every engineering and science student is obliged to take some arts or liberal element in their curriculum. It's not a matter of choice—the very basis of American education is that students must be broadly educated, and it would be inconceivable for students to go through their educational career just doing engineering or just doing science. I think we have a lot to learn from the USA in that regard, and I hope we can make that come into place here. I still think that we suffer in this country a little bit from the suspicion that education is a slightly unfortunate activity that has to be got out of the way as fast as possible, whereas in the USA people see education in much broader terms, seeing it as an investment in a broadskilling culture as well, in a way that simply can't be given to you by your birth or your school. The USA has the most successful history of science community of any nation—it has departments in most universities, or a teacher of it of some sort—because everyone agrees that scientists need history of science, or something like it.
So if you were looking back at your career as an educator, a teacher, what would you say was your greatest achievement to date?
(laughter) Well in one sense getting three history of science prizes for education in one year, that was something I'd never thought I would do, it was incredible.
In terms of my personal achievements, I guess it's being able to keep students stimulated. Their interests have changed radically, but to keep finding that every year I can go to teach and see that students' faces switch on and brighten up when I raise certain topics, and get them to feel confident and able to think for themselves, is very rewarding. The most enjoyable thing about teaching history and philosophy of science is that it can enable students to see the subject of science, or history more generally, or human culture even, writ large, in ways that they hadn't imagined before. If you can help them adjust to this, the new vistas that they have, and make them feel confident about what they know, and how to use their critical faculties appropriately, you've done them a huge favour.
I think on that basis history and philosophy of science can educate students into things that are more rewarding than a lot of other subjects, and doing the teaching of it, and knowing the students benefit that much, is what I think is a great achievement. It's easy to make history of science dull, but it can be done well, and if done properly it is an achievement I want to claim. You can send out into the world mature, rounded learners who are confident and adaptable and can succeed in all sorts of careers. And several of my students have now gone on to careers in history of science, and I've been able to encourage them to take their fields of interest beyond my own narrow area, so I think I've been able to bring some benefit to the world. I think when I die there'll be someone out there who will remember me and think kindly of me, and that gives me a sense of achievement.
Thank you very much.
Endnotes
- Robert Fox, and Graeme Gooday (editors), Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939 : Laboratories, Learning, and College Life, (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2005).
- C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).
- http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk/PrsDiscourseArticles/13
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This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
