Abstract
Two boys, 10-years-old, are exploring with a special set of bottles. These bottles have three pieces of tubing going through a two-hole stopper at the top of the bottle. One piece of tubing comes out of a hole and is about 3 ft long. Another piece of tubing comes out of the second hole and is also 3 ft long. A third piece of tubing is attached to the bottom of the stopper. This piece extends to the bottom of the bottle.
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Notes
- 1.
Drawing is from the Siphons curriculum guide. Permission granted by Kelvin, the publisher.
- 2.
For a extended investigation of siphoning and siphon bottles see the “Explore-it” curriculum guide, Siphons, published by Kelvin.
- 3.
Nowadays, many textbooks do have accompanying visuals complementing the text. Therefore, this description as a pedagogical practice may seem highly artificial. Nevertheless, there are teachers and some authors who still rely heavily and sometimes exclusively on the written or spoken work. For instance, run through the pages of one of Richard Dawkins’ (1998) book Unweaving the Rainbow. You will not find one drawing even though he is explaining phenomenon such as wave motion or the complexities of molecular biology. He is considered one of the great communicators of science today.
- 4.
In addition there was a strong inclination on the part of some of these scientists to search for symmetry in their theoretical formulations. Einstein and Maxwell sifted through relevant concrete experience and gradually moved to a progressive abstraction that ended up in formulations dealing with invariances. Closely related to this search for symmetry seems to be a certain kind of aesthetic sensibility where the eventual formulations result in a strong affective reaction that is more than a result of the satisfaction of accomplishing something. There is a sense of internal transformation, reordering, and reshaping which results in forms and formulations that to the creator have a beauty. This beauty is more than intellectual satisfaction. It is akin to the artist finishing a sculpture or painting The spare abstract mathematical formulations of the famous e = mc 2 and the final equations of electromagnetism of Maxwell might be compared to the very spare works of contemporary minimalist painters and sculpture who paint monochromatic canvases or place a singular object on wall of the museum. The algebraic formula or simple object has associated with it a deep context that it represents. How the scientists or artist arrived there was and is part of the aesthetic appreciation of these symbolic works.
- 5.
Interpreters of Vygotsky tended to emphasize the role of language. This was not necessarily the position of Vygotsky (Wertsch, 1991).
- 6.
I mentioned this here because Mark Johnson also argues for non-propositional modes of thought that are derivative of body-based experience. Both Johnson and Bisiach are concerned and argue against the claim that only propositions but not analogues qualify as cognitive structures.
- 7.
There is some research that suggest that touch can provide similar kinds of information as sight. In a series of studies with blind subjects John Kennedy (1997) found that they use similar kinds of representations in their drawings as the sighted. In fact, in one study he discovers that a blind subject used a visual representation that only recently became a visual convention. This was the use of lines in a circle to represent the motion of wheels. Kennedy points out that this was a type of visual metaphor and upon further probing with his blind subjects found that they could understand as well as produce their own visual metaphors. Gibbs concludes after reviewing a number of studies of blind subjects that mental imagery does not have to be visual. Blind persons develop their imagery through the haptic exploration of objects (Gibbs, 2005, p. 131).
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Zubrowski, B. (2009). Sensory Understanding. In: Exploration and Meaning Making in the Learning of Science. Innovations in Science Education and Technology, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2496-1_6
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