Doctoral Degrees in HPS&ST

Candidate’s Name:   Christine Janczur
email: [email protected]
Institution: Laboratory of History of Biology and Education (LaHBE) - Dept. of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology, University of São Paulo, Brazil.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Maria Elice de Brzezinski Prestes
Thesis title: Original sources of the History of Science in Biology Education: commented translation of the Preface and Parts 2 and 3 of the book Introduction à L'étude de la Médecine Expérimentale (1865) by Claude Bernard

Abstract:
This thesis is a historical, theoretical, and practical investigation of the translation of primary sources in the history of science. The research subject is the book Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Expérimentale, by the 19th-century French medical researcher, Claude Bernard (1813-1878), published in 1865. The chosen work is considered a landmark reference for the development of the experimental method in Human Physiology in the 19th-century. The general goal is to develop epistemic-methodological parameters specific to the translation of primary sources in the history of science, based on the articulation between the foundations of two areas of knowledge: the history of science and translation studies. It started with a conception previously developed in my master's research for a commented bilingual translation, which had been applied to an excerpt from the same book by Claude Bernard. In the process, we sought to establish what is most essential of each of the two disciplinary translation views. It was found that the look at the history of science, in its theoretical and methodological aspects, converged closely with theoretical foundations that subsidized the previous translation options. In addition to the convergence, the history of science added reasons, expanded the scope of the notes in the commented translation, and offered criteria for the notes’ categorization. The history of science added reasons because it reaffirmed the choice of the so-called "foreignization" as a strategy of translation on the basis that it is this modality that contextualizes the work diachronically, thus fulfilling the basic precept of work in this area. It expanded the scope of the notes by pointing to new sets of information that broadened the interpretation potentials and diachronic analysis of the text. Finally, the history of science added subsidies for determining the criteria for note categorization in translations of past scientific works. The categories suggested and applied in the notes of the commented translation accompanying this thesis are five: sociocultural, biographical, epistemic, scientific updates, and related to the translation process. This thesis is structured in four parts. The First Part focuses on concepts related to translation and the role of the translator, the history of translation practices and theories, and contemporary approaches to the study of translation. In the second part, the path to the construction of a methodology specific to the translation of primary sources in the history of science is presented. For this, after analyzing the practices of these translations and the discussions that appeared in the recent literature, aspects of the desired diachronic contextual translation for primary sources are identified. A detailed contrastive analysis of the translation carried out here compared with a prior translation to Portuguese offered illuminating examples of the effects on the final product. Based on this, epistemic and methodological aspects for the translation of primary sources in the history of science were identified. The third part contains the results of the research on Claude Bernard and his work, developed according to the methodology of the history of science. After a contextualized analysis of his life and work, the two main aspects of the legacy left by the book are presented: the concept of the internal environment and experimental medicine and the approach on the glycogenic function of the liver. In part four, the commented bilingual translation is presented, which notes reflect the epistemic-methodological parameters resulting from this research. The translation included the Preface, the Chronology, and parts 2 and 3 of the book, complementing and developing a translation previously performed in my master's dissertation (Part 1 of Bernard's book). The parameters developed can serve as a reference or a starting point for the theory and practice of translations from primary sources in the history of science. It also indicates the specificity of this type of technical translation, pointing to the potential for delimiting a particular type of translation. The translation presented here aims at an audience of students, teachers, and researchers from several fields of knowledge, from biomedical disciplines, passing through meta-scientific disciplines such as history, philosophy, and sociology of science to disciplines from areas of linguistics, history, and scientific education. The resulting translation also offers the potential to approach the contextual science teaching and learning process based on the use of primary sources.

Candidate’s Name: Andreas Henke, 
email: [email protected]
Institution: University of Bremen, Institute of Didactics of Natural Sciences
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Dietmar Höttecke and Prof. Dr. Horst Schecker
Thesis title: Lehren und Lernen über die Natur der Naturwissenschaften - Potentiale historisch orientierten Physikunterrichts
(EN: Teaching and learning about the nature of science - exploring the potentials of HPS in teaching physics)

Abstract:
“This thesis highlights the chances, but also the difficulties of stimulating explicit and reflexive learning about the nature of science (NOS) within the framework of an historical-investigative approach to physics teaching. Within the EU project HIPST teaching units according to this framework were developed in teacher-researcher-teams and were tested multicylically at secondary schools in Lower Saxony. In the course of several empirical investigations, first 8th grade student's conceptions of the historical development of science were investigated. Subsequently, the teachers involved in HIPST were asked about their perceived difficulties in implementing the historical-investigative teaching units. Finally, the effects of this type of teaching were explored in detail by comparing changes in pupils' conceptions about the NOS within two lesson series (also 8th grade): One following a historical-investigative approach, the other following an inquiry-learning approach. Both featured explicit and reflective learning opportunities on the same NOS ideas. Additionally, trait-treatment-interactions were explored, i.e. for both teaching approaches the effects of several motivational measures of students on their learning about the NOS were compared. Quantitatively, both treatments result in similar NOS learning outcomes. Motivational measures only influence NOS learning in the context of the inquiry based unit. Qualitatively, three conclusions can be drawn from the results:
1. Some educational properties of historical-investigative teaching of physics need to be consistent with its NOS learning goals and content: the degree of open-endedness and pre-structuredness of classroom experiments and their conceptual and methodological learning goals; the ways and aims of promoting empathy with historical scientists and of dramatizing historical information.
2. Science teachers only feel competent about teaching the NOS within historical-investigative lessons, if they have knowledge about pupils' ideas about history and about the NOS, if they know the advantages and disadvantages of different pedagogical models for coordinating historical and current science concepts, and if they are able to give meaning to historical classroom investigations by mediating between the pupil's autonomy and the open-endedness of authentic investigations on the one hand and the closed-endedness of history and of the curriculums’ conceptual learning demands on the other hand.
3. Student's perspectives - their preexisting ideas about the NOS, their abilities concerning historical thinking, their affinity for physics teaching, as well as their learned expectations towards physics teaching - determine whether and how they make sense of historical-investigative physics teaching, of the NOS learning opportunities, and of the historical information contextualizing them.”