A topic in teaching science
The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
'Making the unfamiliar familiar' could be considered as what teaching is all about. Learners have to be introduced to the novel phenomena and ideas that they are expected to understand and apply.
'Making the familiar familiar' is one of the key ideas for constructivist teaching discussed in a lecture on constructivist teaching: 'Seven slogans for constructivist teachers: key ideas for teaching in accordance with learning theory'
Various techniques can be used for making the unfamiliar familiar.
A common example when explaining the same of something unfamilair is to equate to something more familiar ("…weight which is about the same as five double-decker buses…")
Read about examples of everyday, quotidian comparisons used in science
If the unfamiliar is available and can be safely passed around the room we can simply hand some out and say, this is…'. Sometimes we have to make do with a model or representation of some kind as volcanoes and galaxies are on the wrong scale, and most of the dinosaurs have already left the party.
Even things we can demonstrate (combustion, neutralisation, precipitation, osmosis, thermal expansion) need to be explained carefully so learners know what they are meant to be focusing on and how they are meant to interpret their observations.
Many ideas cannot even be directly demonstrated (we may know the plant is photosynthesising, but it may not be so obvious to the casual observer).
However, many concepts that we teach (extinction, electric potential, aromaticity) cannot be displayed so readily.
Finding a link
Meaningful learning takes place when what the learner is being taught can be made sense of in terms of the 'interpretive resources' they already have available – what they know, believe, understand, have experience of…what us already familiar. The teacher (or the scientists or journalist trying to communicate science) has to find some kind of anchoring point within the learners' 'cognitive structure', where a seed of a new concept can be planted to develop within the learner's 'conceptual ecology'.
"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas, furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision."
David Hume, 1777
This process is not automatic, and can often go wrong (teaching abstract ideas is not straightforward). Teacher sometimes need to be 'science learning doctors', diagnosing how student thinking has moved onto the wrong tracks.
(Read about 'Science Learning Doctors – using diagnostic assessment in the science classroom')
Some language techniques
Among the techniques teachers can use to introduce new ideas and make them seem familiar are:
Narrative:
Using a fictional story with familiar elements (e.g., a story about elements changing partners at the school dance!)
Animism and anthropomorphism:
Animism involves talking about inanimate objects as if they are alive.
Anthropomorphism involves talking as if non-humans had the same kinds of experiences, cognition and motivation as people: the woodlouse decided to move into the damp corner of the box; the atom wanted to obtain another electron.
Teachers using these devises should be aware that sometimes students take to these ways of thinking and talking (indeed, often young children spontaneously think this way), and may not easily move on to the more scientific language that shows a deeper understanding and is needed in examinations.
(Read more about anthropomorphism and learner's anthropomorphic thinking)
Metaphor, simile and analogy:
In principle at least, metaphor, simile, and analogy are somewhat distinct. In practice it may not always be easy to decide which best describes some of the comparisons found in teaching and science communication.
Metaphor: in metaphor something is said to be something it is not, to suggest is has some properties of that thing. Metaphor is very common in poetry, but as it does not make the nature of the comparison explicit it is not an ideal technique in teaching.
Mitochondria are power stations. (No, they are organelles in cells!)
Idioms may seem to be metaphors to someone familair with a language, but may be dificult to understnd for those not familiar with them (such s those working in a second language) as they have established a particular mmeaning through custom which maybe quite obscure. (Why is heavy rain said to be 'cats and dogs'?)
Simile: in simile something is said to be like something else, without any detailed explanation.
Mitochondria are like the power stations in the cell.
Mitochondria are similar to power stations.
Analogy: in analogy something is said to be like (similar to) something else, but some structural similarity is pointed out.
Mitochondra in cells can be considered to be like the power stations you see dotted around the country as they are the places in the cell where most of the chemical processes that provide the cell's energy supply take place.
At the simplest level, a metaphor makes a comparison implicitly without this process being marked; in simile it is made explicit that a comparison is being made; and in analogy the rationale of the comparison is also made explicit.
That might suggest that in teaching we should prefer explicit analogies so that the learner is in no doubt that we are comparing two things, and is told why a comparison is being made.
Read about scientific metaphors
Read about scientific analogies
Read about idioms used in communicating science
Missing links
The educational psychologist David Ausubel famously suggested (and I paraphrase) that the most important principle in the field was that in order to teach effectively we need to know what the learner already knows (thinks, understands). Making the unfamiliar familiar means linking to the cognitive resources already available to the learner. Clearly, the use of metaphor, analogy and the like is not effective if the referent is not already familiar to the learner. As was noted about the writing of the philosopher Jean Cavaillés,
"And yet he [Jean Cavaillés] will often make a mathematical allusion to illustrate a philosophical point, such as when he presents science as 'a Riemannian volume, closed and yet without any exterior'. This concept from differential geometry – more typically known as a 'Riemannian manifold' – is an illuminating metaphor for figuring science in its historical relationship to other regions of thought. It is even more illuminating for readers versed in differential geometry."
Knox Peden
Sources cited
- Hume, D. (1777/2007) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited and with an Introduction and Notes by Peter Millican. Oxford: Oxford University Press
- Peden, K., (2021) Introduction, to Jean Cavaillès: On the Logic and Theory of Science. Urbanomic/Sequence Press.
