Inquiry as Disciplined Imagination: A Lesson in Quantum Mechanics

• In Event: STS as Critical Pedagogy: Experiments in Undergraduate Teaching and Learning - II

Abstract

One of the goals of science and STS education is to cultivate in students a habit of scientific inquiry. Traditional approaches to scientific inquiry divide it into smaller processes such as questioning, hypothesizing, experimenting, and analyzing. These approaches are limited on two fronts. First, they do not integrate the cultural, political, and ethical constituents of scientific inquiry, and second, the breakdown of inquiry into smaller independent processes disregards their interconnection and simultaneity. A more responsible interpretation, in line with STS, would determine inquiry as a process of disciplined imagination (Buchanan, 1927). Framed this way, participation in inquiry entails the construction of possibilities that are logically and experientially consistent and targeted at solving real-life problems.

What does such a reinterpretation of inquiry mean for STS/STEM education? First, it implies an expansion of one-dimensional conceptual questions to multi-faceted techno-socio-cultural problems. Second, it refocuses pedagogy from the imitation of processes to the nurturing of reflective practice. Experiments in quantum mechanics (QM) serve as excellent demonstrations of these shifts as they amplify the entanglement of phenomena and situation and the breakdown of the observer-observed. In consideration of this affordance of QM, this study presents a lesson designed to engage college-level STEM/STS students in the collaborative exploration of a digital world governed by QM laws. Under the guidance of a teacher, students will critically examine the ontological, epistemological, technical, and socio-cultural problems that constitute the foundations of QM and attempt to construct their own consistent possibilities of its meaning.

Author

• Aditya Anupam, Georgia Institute Of Technology