Title: Case Studies from the History of Science in Science Education: a Field Research in Italy Authors: Liborio Dibattista, Francesca Morgese Affiliation: Interdipartment Centre of History of Science, University of Bari "Aldo Moro", Italy Topic: Case Studies in STEM Education Abstract According to definition of Arthur Stinner about case studies in science education: “case studies are historical contexts with one unifying idea designed according to the guidelines for writing a large context problem”. The main idea of the case-study must be an important idea for science, but also a significant idea for the world in which the students live in order to capture their attention and imagination, so it is necessary to propose a story, a scientific narrative, that can shed some light on this fundamental idea, through the dramatization of biographical episodes, either of famous debates or retracing the theme through the centuries and showing the various interpretations within the scientific conceptions of subsequent epochs or different geographical regions. Current views on the nature of learning have made in-depth reflections on storytelling as a learning tool in educational contexts and on the ways in which storytelling can be used to facilitate student learning and critical thinking skills. Many authors have suggested storytelling as a means of making sense of experience and have pointed out some strong links between reflection, learning and storytelling in education. Storytelling is gaining popularity in education as a result of the fact that it seems to be capable of making learning meaningful and achieving important learning outcomes, such as the ability to reflect, to generalise, and to evaluate. We agree that the true winning move, from a didactic point of view, is that the history of science enables us to tell stories. The infinite stories of scientists and of their controversies are an inexhaustible mine of narrative ideas that have an undeniable advantage: they help to keep the students’ attention. Starting from these assumptions, we designed a field study to test the feasibility of the case studies in the classroom to foster learning of science and NoS (Nature of Science). So, the goals of our study was the following: · to test a research model that would involve high school teachers and university professors in the planning and creation of teaching units which use case studies from the history of science and the epistemology of science to teach scientific disciplines; · to stress the importance of an inquiry based approach oriented towards issues regarding NoS (Nature of Science), thanks to the history of science; · to produce evidence that this approach is effective in achieving a higher level of interest in scientific subjects on the part of learners. The project, which we called “The History of Science goes to School”, ran into junior and senior high school classrooms in Puglia (Italy), at the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year. The project was the final stage of an awareness campaign that has been conducted by our research institute for several years with the secondary school science teachers in our region. The first step we undertook was to plan and implement a series of meetings in the schools in which we wanted to propose the study. Twenty-four teachers participated in the project (11 from junior high schools, 13 from senior high schools). At these meetings, we illustrated the particular modalities, case studies methodology, with which we would present the history of science in the classroom and the benefits that we hoped the learners and the teachers would enjoy. The next step was the preparation, by the teachers of the schools participating in the project, of the case studies that they intended to present to their classes, adopting the historical-philosophical method that we proposed. In this phase, the university researchers acted as tut

Perché lo sbadiglio e il sorriso sono contagiosi? Perché il tifo sportivo e il panico sono fenomeni collettivi? Le emozioni si contagiano al pari delle infezioni da microrganismi? Questa raccolta di saggi affronta queste domande da una prospettiva differente da quella classica della psicologia sperimentale. Ne ricerca cioè le manifestazioni e le motivazioni nella storia e nella filosofia delle emozioni, con esiti che aprono nuove ed originali prospettive alla comprensione del fenomeno

Scienza ed arte sono attività squisitamente umane che hanno nei secoli intrecciato le proprie storie nello sforzo di conoscere, esprimere e manipolare il reale. Il presente volume, che mira a ricostruire alcune tappe di questo percorso congiunto, raccoglie una scelta dei contributi presentati nel corso delle varie edizioni dei Seminari del martedì, tenutisi, dal 206 al 2012, presso il Seminario di Storia della Scienza dell'Università degli Studi di Bari

The hysterical in-patients at the Vieillesse Femme, the Charcot’s Salpêtrière in Paris at the end of the XIX century, saw the world as a sepia-coloured daguerreotype with some reddish glares. In this paper we look back to the history of hysterical amaurosis from Dalton’s colour blindness to the last words on Charcot’s Grande Hystérie at his birthday centenary congress in 1925, through Parinaud’s studies and the synthesis made by Gilles de la Tourette. Once again, this singular episode in the great history of hysteria shows how a clinical syndrome can be ‘constructed’ from its original cultural context , and demonstrates how difficult it can be to set apart the short-lived scientific object from the definitively stated when referring to a ‘scientific object’ like a disease.

La fisiologia, al pari delle altre specialità mediche, si rese autonoma dal tronco della Medicina nel corso dell'Ottocento. Un momento importante di questo processo fu il tentativo di matematizzare la "Storia Naturale dei Corpi Organici" attraverso il metodo grafico, una metodologia che consentiva di 'immobilizzare' il movimento vitale congelandolo in un tracciato o in una sintesi crono-fotografica. Questo programma di ricerca venne condotto soprattutto a Parigi, al Collège de France, prima da da E.-J. Marey che ne fu il principale teorizzatore e, in seguito dal suo successore C.E. François-Franck che ne tentò la sintesi con le tecniche sperimentali preconizzate dal nume della fisiologia francese, Claude Bernard. Il presente volume ripercorre i momenti salienti di questa avventura scientifica mediante la ricostruzione delle biografie intellettuali dei due fisiologi e la sottolineatura delle peculiarità delle loro epistemologie, a volte esaminate anche con il ricorso a tecniche di linguistica computazionale applicate alle opere principali. Il 'movimento' impresso alla fisiologia da questo approccio doveva peraltro arrestarsi, sorpassato dall'avvento della chimica fisiologica e della biochimica.

Come insegnare la scienza ai nativi digitali della società della conoscenza? Come costruire a scuola le competenze scientifiche nell’ottica del lifelong learning? Il volume tenta di dare alcune risposte concrete a queste e ad altre domande che riguardano il processo di apprendimento-insegnamento della matematica e della scienza nella scuola di oggi. Vi si illustra il progetto IL RACCONTO DELLA SCIENZA – Digital Storytelling in classe, ideato e realizzato dal Centro Interdipartimentale Seminario di Storia della Scienza dell’Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro in collaborazione con un coeso numero di istituti scolastici di Scuola Secondaria di I e II grado della Puglia. Partendo dalla diffusione presso le scuole pugliesi di un bando di concorso finalizzato alla realizzazione di Digital Storytelling a contenuto storico-scientifico, il progetto ha realizzato nell’a.s. 2010-2011 una vera e propria ricerca che ha indagato: le immagini della scienza diffuse presso gli insegnanti, l’efficacia dell’approccio storico, narrativo e costruttivista e l’efficacia della costruzione di ambienti di apprendimento audiovisivi e multimediali nella promozione delle competenze scientifiche degli studenti. Idea forte alla base della ricerca è che la conoscenza della storia densa della scienza, della complessa dimensione culturale, politica, economica ed epistemologica della produzione di conoscenza scientifica sia un elemento irrinunciabile, oggi, per essere davvero cittadini “competenti”. Vincitore del finanziamento del MIUR nell’ambito della Legge 6/2000 per la Diffusione della cultura scientifica, al progetto hanno collaborato importanti istituzioni del territorio pugliese: l’Ufficio Scolastico Regionale della Puglia, la Cittadella Mediterranea della Scienza di Bari, il CISMUS (Centro Interdipartimentale di Servizi per la Museologia Scientifica), la Fondazione Apulia Film Commission e l’Associazione SCIENZ@PPEAL – Diffusione e comunicazione della cultura scientifica di Bari.

For quite some time, many EU and Italian Ministry of Education official doc- uments have warmly suggested the introduction of the history and the philosophy of science in the teaching of science disciplines at school. Accordingly, there is a shared agreement between pedagogists and science historians about the efficacy of this approach towards an understanding of the current curriculum content and the Nature of Science. What is missing, at least in Italy, is a concrete fieldwork in the classroom to show the validity of these declarations. This essay is a report of the experience of introducing history and philosophy of science into junior and senior high school classrooms in Apulia (Italy). The aims of this project are: (a) to build a model of research involving high school teachers and university lecturers in the design and construction of teaching units that use the story of science and epistemology for teaching science and (b) produce evidence that this approach is effective in getting more interest from students in science. We relied on many schools for carrying out the historical-scientific teaching modules. The modules were carried out through the case study approach. In the first phase, the participating teachers were trained by University tutors on the modalities of this particular teaching approach. In the second phase, the teachers carried out the modules in their classes and finally these modules were presented in a conclusive con- ference. Moreover, we evaluated the efficacy of the intervention through specifically created agreement questionnaires.

In this paper, outcomes stemming from computational linguistics tecniques application are set out in order to highlight the pivotal role of the French neuropathologist J.M. Charcot, in building a highly scientific language, that of neurology. The current analysis is carried out through the application of a linguistic pro- cessor to an extensive corpus of neurology-specific works, being performed by Charcot in the second half of the nineteenth century, and composed of roughly 400,000 words. A comparison is, thus, made between the lexicon grasped from such corpus and the texts produced by Duchenne de Boulogne and Jules Dejerine, written respectively 25 years prior to and after Charcot’s work.

Georges Dumas importante e relativamente poco conosciuto psicologo e filosofo, si occupò ripetutamente di emozioni e della loro supposta trasmissibilità. Questa saggio ricostruisce storia e paradigmi sottesi al lavoro dello scienziato

For quite some time, many EU and Italian Ministry of Education official documents have warmly suggested the introduction of the history and the philosophy of science in the teaching of science disciplines at school. Accordingly, there is a shared agreement between pedagogists and science historians about the efficacy of this approach towards an understanding of the current curriculum content and the Nature of Science. There is also a lively debate about the different practical modalities that could be used for its introduction in class. What is missing, at least in Italy, is a concrete didactic research to show the validity of these declarations. This essay is a report of the real experience of introducing history and philosophy of science into junior and senior high school classrooms in Apulia (Italy). We relied on many schools for carrying out the historical-scientific teaching modules. The modules were carried out through the case study approach. In the first phase, the participating teachers were trained by University tutors on the modalities of this particular teaching approach. In the second phase, the teachers carried out the modules in their classes and finally these modules were presented in a conclusive conference. Moreover, we evaluated the efficacy of the intervention through specifically created questionnaires. These are the positive results of the research: the efficacy in the conveyance of the scientific contents, the openness of the learners (and the teachers) towards issues on the Nature of Science, the attainment of a more complex view of science and the student’s great enthusiasm in showing publicly the work done. Some criticalities: the extra time and work that the teachers were asked to devote to this research on the one hand for preparing the modules and on the other for the lack of ad hoc teaching aids. On this latter criticality we will devote our future efforts.

In the first half of the twentieth century, more than a million young Italians were found affected by a new disease: the Pende’s hyperthymic syndrome. Nicola Pende was the renowned clinician who wrote the first great Italian treatise of endocrinology and who later founded the “sciences” of biotypology and orthogenesis. The paper tells the parable of the syndrome, the story of big lazy children and their fate in radiation therapy for the greater glory of Roman Italic race.

La reazione di Wassermann ,s pecimen per l. Fleck della genesi e sviluppo di un fatto scientifico , viene rivisitata alla luce della New Philosophy of Science

A means for studying the evolution of scientific concepts may be to analyze the shift of meaning of key words over the time. In this paper we made an attempt in this direction by te use of the Corpus Computational Linguistics to stress the similarities and the differences of the lexicon of emotion in two fundamental essays by Charles Darwin and Duchenne (de Boulogne). In this way it will be seen the change from the strictly anatomical approach used by Duchenne to a broader conception, physiological and adaptive in Darwin.