“Permission to Wonder”: Incorporating Beauty and Aesthetics in the Pre-Service Science Education Classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What happens to pre-service teachers' understanding of science education when they are given the opportunity to explore the wonder and beauty of the natural world? This research explores how a class project titled “Beauty and Aesthetics in Science” (Blades, 2014; 2015) impacts students’ understanding of science curriculum, teaching and learning. Drawing on a hermeneutic (interpretive) framework, the primary research question is: How can pre-service students experience science as a tentative, creative space amidst the content focused curriculum they often experienced in science classes? The assignment asked students to choose something in nature that they were curious about, then to research the science behind the topic and to maintain a journal that recorded their findings and their emotional response to their experience. The students were then asked to prepare an aesthetic expression of their discovery and share their creation with the class in a sharing circle. Results from interviews and analysis of student work showed that some students experienced initial frustration with the open-endedness of the assignment, but once they delved into their topic, they loved the opportunity to creatively pursue their interests. Students realized the complexity of their topic and how their initial question often led to other questions. Many shared how this assignment created a much deeper emotional connection to their topic. Students reported that being given "permission to wonder" within a formal education setting was a foreign experience in their own schooling. Findings also demonstrated that students could articulate a better understanding of the indeterminate and complex nature of science and science education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".