Everyday Scientific Imagination : A Qualitative Study of the Uses, Norms, and... - Random

impactology, 23 days ago

Everyday Scientific Imagination : A Qualitative Study of the Uses, Norms, and Pedagogy of Imagination in Science by Michael T. Stuart

https://michaeltstuart.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Stuart-M-2019-Everyday-Scientific-Imagination.pdf

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impactology, 23 days ago

To explain how this norm weakens, we can look to scientific pedagogy. Here is a plausible story about how imagination is pushed away during undergraduate education, only to be later embraced during graduate training. At the undergraduate level, students learn to solve species- level problems. There is no advice offered about how to solve more general (genus-level) problems. Rather, students learn the tricks of the trade by solving simplified problems, often represented formally or mathematically. These problems can seem unconnected to the cutting edge. Students also reproduce historical experiments in the lab, but again, they do this not to answer cutting edge questions but rather to learn certain problem-solving methods. It might be unclear to the student of science how these standardized problem sets and historical experi- ments are relevant. And certainly, throughout this period, students need not mobilize a great deal of imagination. Indeed, it is possible that they are actively discouraged from doing so (Ozdemir 2009). When the student enters graduate school, however, their mentors introduce genus-level problems and begin teaching them how to whittle these down into species-level problems: check for this, read that, talk to this person, etc.. Students might still be discouraged from using their imaginations while they learn to apply standard methods of solving species- level problems. =

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