SEEING IS NOT UNDERSTANDING: Vygotsky, Halliday and Metaphor in Forming and Forgetting Middle School Science Concepts.

When teachers explain science concepts-for example, the solar wind, or plasma waves-some methods seem to be quick-acting and others long-lasting. Still others pose as many problems as they seem to solve. How, for example, does a parent explain how there can be solar wind without any air in space? How does a teacher explain how there can be plasma waves without any water? Locating metaphor between thinking and speech rather than within one or the other, we work out a single scheme to analyze two conversations with adult Koreans. These suggest that a text studied some ten years ago in middle school science class, replete with striking visual images, has left little more than everyday concepts. Instead of trying to use the striking visual images to refill gaps in the memory, however, the questions asked by a skilled science teacher suggest ways in which thinking could be freed from the middle school dogma of only three matter phases (solid, liquid, gas). To understand a metaphor like "solar wind", we need to replace fixed matters of fact with some more elusive facts of matter.

Hot Wind, Cold Sun: Kuhn, Vygotsky, Halliday and Metaphors in Science and Science Education.

How and why do crises happen in the history of science? What can they tell us about how crises happen in child psychological development and child behavior? And-as a bonus question-can crises in child development tell us anything about crises in science history? We compare and contrast two superficially similar answers. Then we look at three models for the formation of general, abstract concepts in children developed in integrative psychological and behavioral science by the Soviet pioneer L.S. Vygotsky. Using later, but similarly integrative, linguistic work by M.A.K. Halliday on generality, abstraction and metaphor in child language, we consider a real test case. An outstanding anomaly in solar physics is that the solar wind is actually far hotter than the surface of the sun itself, and a recent paper argues that the energy comes from the damping of waves in the plasma. We analyze the language of a ten-year-old Chinese boy trying to make sense of this phenomenon, and we find that lexicogrammatical metaphors play a very important role in posing the problem to the child, but a process of limiting and deflating metaphors is key to his understanding. This process of limitation and deflation, which corresponds to a crisis, shows us that the analogy between concept development in children in science and the same process in children is no mere metaphor.

Vygotsky's Emotions: Desire/Passion in Spinoza, Proposal/Proposition in Halliday, and Teaching Sexual Consent to Children in Korea.

Some problems, unraveled, seem to resolve each other. The Soviet integrative psychologist Vygotsky bequeathed to us an unfinished paper on the emotions. But was it about the teachings of Spinoza, was it concerned with contemporaneous theories, or did Vygotsky have a teaching/theory of his own? Vygotsky called his approach "Spinozian but not Spinozist" in his notes, but in his actual writings this appears as a distinction without a difference. What did he mean by it? In many places, Vygotsky appears to be retracing his steps rather than proceeding to a conclusion, yet he was already considering a title and a dedicatee. Was it really finishable? This paper argues that Vygotsky intended to use the teachings of Spinoza to critique his colleagues and associates; that he turned the critique back on "Spinozism" itself, and that the theory he intended to construct would be properly called "Spinozian". In the end, however, only practice can resolve the Spinozist teaching on emotions into the kind of working Spinozian theory Vygotsky had in mind; only real data will help us tie up the last loose threads. To this end, a linguistic approach to the problem of how the concept of sexual consent develops in Korean children is proposed.

Developing critical thinking in STEM education through inquiry-based writing in the laboratory classroom.

Laboratory pedagogy is moving away from step-by-step instructions and toward inquiry-based learning, but only now developing methods for integrating inquiry-based writing (IBW) practices into the laboratory course. Based on an earlier proposal (Science 2011;332:919), we designed and implemented an IBW sequence in a university bioinformatics course. We automatically generated unique, double-blinded, biologically plausible DNA sequences for each student. After guided instruction, students investigated sequences independently and responded through IBW writing assignments. IBW assignments were structured as condensed versions of a scientific research article, and because the sequences were double blinded, they were also assessed as authentic science and evaluated on clarity and persuasiveness. We piloted the approach in a seven-day workshop (35 students) at Perdana University in Malaysia. We observed dramatically improved student engagement and indirect evidence of improved learning outcomes over a similar workshop without IBW. Based on student feedback, initial discomfort with the writing component abated in favor of an overall positive response and increasing comfort with the high demands of student writing. Similarly, encouraging results were found in a semester length undergraduate module at the National University of Singapore (155 students).