Surrealistic Perspectives Useful in Science Education.

• This paper was induced by the observation of how children, about 6 years old, at the Magritte Museum in Brussels were introduced to the idea that the depiction of an object always differ from the object itself. They looked at a painting and discussed how facial expressions in general only partly reveal the character of a person. It clearly demonstrated how the children understood that no matter how naturalistically we depict an object, we never do catch the item itself. The picture helped them with assistance of a supervisor to create this view.Many students are trained in trying to understand what the teacher wants to hear rather than to understand the principles of the theories taught. In science, and most other subjects in school, this results in a knowledge concept based on the quality in the reproduction of texts, formulas, or drawings and the use of important words for concepts in relation to the original presentations. Instead, teaching should result in useful skills based on the understanding of the theories taught.Methods used in presentations of art work at galleries and museums could also be used when science is taught and learned at science museums and in the classrooms. The discrepancy between the representation and reality open up new fields of interpretations which can be used by the teacher to create curiosity. Whatever is demonstrated for students they should be induced to discuss how this should be interpreted and to construct the reality behind instead of trying to remember the representation itself.As the creation of understanding appears in the mind of the student the teacher has to create situations stimulating the wish to understand the reality behind the object instead of the wish to reproduce the mind of the teacher. Here we give some examples of how this method could be used in science education but also how it can be used when assessing the results of teaching.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Didaktik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Didactics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

teaching

curiosity

art

phenomenology

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)