Scientific Holism: A Synoptic (“Two-Eyed Seeing”) Approach to Science Transfer in Education for Sustainable Development, Tested with Pre-Service Teachers

3.1. Participatory Action Research

Furthermore, it seemed appropriate in this constellation to use participatory action research. There was hope and promise that this type of research would not only provide conceptual refinement and theoretical progress for the researcher, but at the same time, and independent of research success, provide pre-service teachers with an opportunity for embodied reflection on science teaching, their role as science teachers, and their identity as future science teachers.

3.2. Setting

The study was part of an introductory course for science pre-service teachers at a university of teacher education. In this course, students worked in groups to prepare short teaching sequences called miniatures. They performed these miniatures with their peers as their students. In what follows, we refer to the pre-service teachers who performed the miniatures as teachers and the pre-service teachers who were the students as students. The researcher who taught the course is referred to as the instructor. Miniatures are a type of microteaching that combines actual teaching with guided preparation and assessment sequences. We have always used them to introduce and reinforce important didactic principles such as the concept of didactic reconstruction. This year, for the first time, TES was used as a basic heuristic for this intervention, i.e., it was used for the preparation, implementation, and evaluation of the miniatures.

There were three courses with 20 to 25 participants each. Each course began with an introductory session in which the course schedule was presented and an introduction to the concept of TES was given. Then the students chose working groups of two or three and a topic for their miniature, and for the remainder of the session they began preparing their presentations, assisted by the instructor of the course.

The chosen topics had to be interdisciplinary (biology and physics) and were limited to three areas: Blood and blood pressure, Hearing and acoustics and Musculoskeletal system and mechanics. Within these three areas, students could pursue their own ideas. More about the chosen topics can be found below in the Results section.

After the introductory session, each group presented their miniature by teaching their classmates during the following weeks of the course. Each presentation lasted at least 20 min but could be longer depending on the intentions of the teachers and the activities of their students. No miniature lasted longer than 40 min.

Each presentation was followed by a plenary discussion in which the participants analyzed their observations during the presentation, what they appreciated and criticized during the session, how they would improve certain parts, etc., etc. This phase was followed by a final intervention by the instructor, who added his own observations and linked them and the previous discussion to the heuristic of the TES and to the relevant literature of science education research. Throughout these activities, the initial heuristic was discussed, evaluated, and refined in constant collaboration with all students involved. Course assessment included each student’s active participation in a miniature, in the general activities of the course, and in the submission of a final written summary and reflection by each group on their own miniature.

3.3. Data Collection

In participatory, open, direct observation, the observer participates as much as possible in the life and activities of a group under study in order to gain an insider’s perspective, or at least to understand it. In this project, the instructor had to play a dual role: He was a participant with corresponding functions in the field and at the same time an observer. This can also lead to an overload, as this role means participation and distance at the same time. This conflict was easiest to manage during the presentation of the miniature, where the students acted on their own responsibility and the instructor deliberately retreated to the status of a distanced observer. In the evaluation phase, different levels of participation in the field had to be negotiated against the background of the specific situation. Full participation was required in the final phase of each miniature when the instructor provided direct feedback. However, this had to be carefully reflected upon at each stage. Being as active as possible was not always conducive to the research goal, as there was a risk that participant engagement in the case would become so great that the research would be compromised.

Protocols were used to record courses of action and to “log” behaviors, decisions, etc especially in relation to TES and shaping the design of the heuristic. After each session, the instructor reread the notes, rearranged them, added additional comments and reflections, and commented on the parts where he was directly involved and could not take notes. These notes were considered a type of “tracking” or diary notes. Depending on the purpose and goal, these notes were written in varying degrees of detail. They ranged from verbatim transcripts of negotiations and discussions to notes about important decisions or retrospective reminiscences. They were created using Microsoft OneNote, which allowed a combination of typed and handwritten notes.

It was decided not to use video or tape recordings. While they would have allowed for a more accurate and detailed representation of the process, they were felt to be too disruptive to the natural flow of the lesson and the different perspectives on the actions.

The document collection included actual documents such as work materials used during class, photos of experiments, and PowerPoint slides presented by the teachers. Important documents were also the summaries and reflections on their own miniature that each group had to submit at the end of the course.

After this, the students were much more uncertain about how to get back to the manifest image. They asked what ‘manifest’ was supposed to mean, and at this point the instructor explained that it was about embedding the scientific aspects in the lifeworld. After this explanation, one student suddenly started drawing two children playing sport (with their hearts in the centre of their bodies) and a football in a goal.

“The matter of the pump came up quickly and spontaneously. The valves were also mentioned. Again, the reduction was easier to understand than the interpretation. But this is a good example of how the physical reduction leads to the biological interpretation, which is closer to the lifeworld interpretation. The question was asked why the term reduction is used here. When asked what was missing in the scientific picture, the answer came immediately: feelings. In this picture we also see the lifeworld embedding (would that be a good word?): The first student draws a person around the heart (but very small). The next student then adds a goal and a soccer ball to the small person, as well as a heart rate monitor. The third student adds another person to take the pulse.”

This is an example of data collection that illustrates many features of the collected data: the picture of the students’ drawings, the notes taken after the lesson and the impact on the evolving course. From then on, the term lifeworld image was used instead of manifest image.

3.4. Ethical Consent

All students were informed about the research project at the beginning of the activities and gave their consent for their materials to be used in the research activities.

3.5. Data Analysis

Once the categories of analysis were established, the next step was to review the data to note additional relevant themes and category labels (grounded categories) for sorting the data (axial coding).

After establishing the analytic (top-down) and grounded (bottom-up) categories, explicit definitions or coding rules were developed for each category (either analytic or grounded). This criterion was either simply a specific statement about a particular sentence or word, or it included inferential levels. The data were then sorted according to these criteria for selection into different categories. This strategy was used to identify and explain thematic patterns. This process was conducted using MAXQDA 2022 software.

4.1. Overview of the Miniatures

67 students took part in the module. 29 were female and 38 were male. Their average age was 24 years. Most of these students (54) had completed their secondary school education with a final examination, the Matura, and had then gone straight into teacher training at the University of Teacher Education. Their teaching experience was limited to an initial teaching placement at an external school. Seven of the students had completed another degree programme before entering teacher training, four had previously worked in another non-academic profession and two had previously been primary school teachers.

Many of the groups chose health and well-being topics, i.e., the third learning objective of ESD, as the manifest image. In this way, ESD topics became a natural part of the education of these pre-service teachers, and the scientific aspects of these topics were integrated spontaneously and naturally. Fifteen out of 23 groups used the topics of health, medicine and environmental health to shape their lifeworld approach. This is consistent with the assumption that health, medical and environmental health topics are attractive and can help motivate students to learn science. It should be noted that the students were not forced to choose ESD topics.

4.2. Terminology Problems

During the research process, it became apparent that the original Sellarsian terminology was not fully understood by the pre-service teachers and needed to be partially replaced with more appropriate terms. First, the pre-service teachers preferred to use the term lifeworld image instead of the term manifest image. Also, in the discussion, students discussed the term persons. The discussion went in two directions. Some asked whether only humans can be persons. Can an AI (e.g., Siri) be considered a person? Is a potted plant that you address by name a person? One student talked about her friend who is convinced that the yeast dough she prepares every Sunday so that a yeast cake can mature and grow is a person. She was convinced that the dough will develop better if she talks to it regularly. Another person talked about Gaia, the hypothesis that the earth is like Mother Earth and as such represents a person.

The other strand of the discussion centred on the question of whether people are sometimes treated as things rather than people. In this context, someone talked about the way surgeons see their patients “as a rectangle under green sheets”, as opposed to how a child psychiatrist, for example, sees his clients. Another example that led to a heated discussion was abortion. Is the foetus conceived as a person or as a thing during an abortion? And after how many weeks of development does an embryo become a person?

4.3. Closing the Loop

Closing the loop was a term that quickly became standard in the preparation and evaluation phase of the groups. Closing the loop meant looking at both images equally, the lifeworld image and the scientific image. Many groups began with a sequence of images from the lifeworld, then moved on to the scientific image and then returned back to the lifeworld image. The following example presents a description of a miniature that the students submitted themselves after the course.

Example: We chose the approach “from the lifeworld image to the scientific image”. To do this, we considered the central question “Why do you have to move your feet in an aeroplane?” and based our miniature on this. We thought it would be easier for the pupils if we first drew on their previous knowledge from everyday life and then went into the theory behind it. This is how we started our miniature by asking the class and the pupils why they should move in an aeroplane. To do this, we asked the class to post their thoughts online on Menti. We then reviewed the blood loop, which we had already learnt in the first semester. We also showed a video/animation that illustrated the blood circulation again. [One of us] took over and did an experiment with the students where they were physically activated. She divided the pupils into groups of two and handed out balloons for them to blow up. The groups then had to stand back to back and use body movements, but without hands, to move the balloon from the floor to their backs. In the second step, the same procedure was used, with the difference that the groups of two had to take a step forwards on a repeated command and were only allowed to hold the balloon with their hands behind their backs until L. said that they could continue. [The third of us] then took the floor and explained to the class the problem that the blood in the low-pressure system does not flow back to the heart by itself. He referred to our experiment by showing the hands with the valves in the veins and the movement of the body with the muscle contractions of the skeletal muscles. In this way he explained why the blood returns to the heart. Finally, we returned to the guiding question from the beginning, why we need to move in an aeroplane, and solved this question with the newly acquired knowledge of how the veins work.

This group favoured starting with the lifeworld image because they felt that students would understand the topic more easily if they could relate it to their everyday knowledge. They chose the situation in an aeroplane on a long-haul flight, where people are advised to move their legs from time to time to avoid thrombosis. They then switched to the scientific image by presenting the venous side of the circulatory system and the mechanisms in the veins that transport blood back to the heart. They illustrated this fragile transport mechanism (pressure through the muscles and valve mechanism through the venous valves) with the balloon “experiment”. This sequence is part of the holistic transfer back to the lifeworld image, which leads to the answer to the original lifeworld question.

Some groups started with the scientific image and then transferred to the lifeworld image with the holistic eye. As a rule, these groups did not make a second switch back to the scientific image. As this pattern was only revealed by the retrospective analysis, it could not be discussed with the pre-service teachers. However it seems that this characteristic use of the tool was based on a linear, sequential conception of transfer steps that preferred a start and an ending in the lifeworld image.

4.4. The Scientific Transfer

The scientific transfer is the switch from the manifest image to the scientific image. The tool describes this shift as a change from a person-oriented image to a moving matter image. The students interpreted this concept to mean that they had to find the things that were important in their chosen topic. It turned out that this process was a very helpful tool for didactic reduction, i.e., for focussing on the most important scientific message of the miniature. Through these iterative processes, students developed a more nuanced understanding and application of the scientific transfer, which increased their pedagogical effectiveness: the orientation to things in the scientific image brought the factual nature of the scientific image into play. For example, in the miniature about directional hearing, it was the careful introduction of appropriate physical things (air molecules and photons) that ultimately helped distinguish facts from fiction. The teachers wrote in their reflection:

“We started with the cosmophone from the glacier garden. It claims that the acoustic messages we send out into the universe will travel forever in space. We had our classmates discuss the extent to which this could be true. With this confrontation task, we wanted to encourage them to think about how sound propagates. Some gave the analogy of water and said that air waves probably also would stop at some point”.

Obviously the students were equating a third type of wave, water waves, with acoustic and electromagnetic waves without realising that there are three different particles behind them. The instructor’s response pointed out the danger of mixing fact and fiction when he replied:

“The introductory part of your lesson highlights the danger of […] esotericism, i.e., the use of scientific terms in a way that is not scientifically appropriate. The cosmophone, the sound of the universe: these are all interesting metaphors, but they can contribute to misconceptions about science and should therefore be used with great caution”.

4.5. The Holistic Transfer

The holistic transfer shifts from a moving matter perspective to a person-oriented perspective. The challenge for the students was to identify concrete people to enrich their teaching approaches. They did this on three levels. The primary personal dimension concerned the students in the classroom, here the pre-service teachers acting as students. The classroom represents a community in which the individuality of the pupils is directly integrated. This was illustrated through interactive experiments, such as the experiment in which students moved balloons without their hands to understand the muscle pump mechanism in veins. Other examples included auditory experiments to test frequency and loudness perception and demonstrations of the Doppler effect using mobile sound sources. These activities created a dynamic learning environment in which students experienced physics in a social and lively context. Student-initiated discussions on current topics such as the effects of 5G mobile phone radiation or the interpretation of X-ray images were further examples of this personal engagement.

The role of the teachers as persons were also important, especially when sharing personal stories or resources to enhance the learning experience. For example, one student teacher shared his skateboarding accident and used his X-rays as a teaching tool. Another brought anonymised x-rays from his father, who was a radiologist, into the classroom. A poignant example was the inclusion of the war in Ukraine in the discussion about radioactivity and its effects on people, which directly addressed the students’ current fears and concerns.

The teaching modules also addressed issues relevant to the wider community, such as hearing loss, cardiac arrhythmia and hypertension. Whilst these topics may not have affected directly the young pre-service teachers, they had a community relevance as many of them had relatives or acquaintances affected by these diseases, so the students could relate to these topics on a personal level.

Beyond the expected personal references, the students brought innovative ideas to their lessons. One surprising element was the use of fictional characters who, despite their unrealistic characteristics, were used effectively to create a relatable lifeworld perspective. Another intriguing approach was to deviate from a purely human perspective and consider the perception of animals, as was evident in a discussion about the auditory experiences of dogs. This conversation broadened the scope of the lifeworld image to include non-human perspectives and fostered an engaging dialogue about the effects of different sound frequencies on animals, taking into account the students’ personal experiences with pets at events such as New Year’s Eve celebrations.

The systematic consideration of people in the broadest sense had an important influence on the character of the miniatures. People were considered in a concrete, personalised way, not simply as signs of social aspects or as vague targets for instruction and education. Through the different person-oriented levels of teaching, the pre-service teachers were able to create a multi-dimensional lifeworld image that enriched the learning environment with direct, personal and community connections, as well as innovative and unexpected perspectives.

4.6. The Lifeworld Image and Sentiments

One characteristic of the observed educational setting was that the lifeworld image in class was characteristically permeated by sentiment, a term that the Cambridge Dictionary defines as “a thought, opinion, or idea based on a feeling about a situation or a way of thinking about a thing”. The lifeworld image was person-oriented and thus inherently rich in sentiment.

In contrast, the switch to the scientific image, the scientific transfer, often led to a noticeable drop in sentiment. For example, when a lesson on radioactivity began with references to the conflict in Ukraine, there was a palpable tension in the classroom. However, this tension dissipated when the focus shifted to the scientific explanation of physical radiation, was replaced by a fairly detached atmosphere. This pattern was repeated in several lessons, including the one on blood pressure measurement, where the initial physical explanations about blood pressure left the classroom atmosphere cool and uninvolved.

The emotional climate changed dramatically when the abstract scientific content was personalised by measuring the blood pressure of one student in the classroom, who showed an unusually high reading. This caused excitement and concern at the same time.

Characteristically, the teachers often tended to avoid these emotional reactions. They wanted to focus on the scientific content rather than exploring its affective dimension. However, the importance of sentiments in the educational process was often reconsidered during the lesson assessment. Neglecting sentiments was then conceived as a double failing: Teachers missed opportunities to address students’ confusion and to use sentiments to motivate scientific enquiry.

Usually, sentiments in the classroom were not merely incidental, but were evoked by the scientific content itself. Students’ immediate reactions, be it concern about health indicators or amazement at physics demonstrations, were powerful emotional drivers. The teachers’ own passions, such as an engineer-turned-teacher’s fascination with MRI technology, also had a significant impact on student engagement, even if they were unaware of the technical details. Empathy emerged as an important factor in the classroom. Affective empathy was evident in the shared concern for a classmate’s health, while cognitive empathy played a role in students’ efforts to understand a patient’s dilemma regarding medical procedures like radio imaging.

In addition, the lifeworld image was linked to normative implications and value judgements. Educational miniatures often contained an underlying moral that invited students to reconsider lifestyle choices based on scientific knowledge. These implications were typically definite, unambiguous and incontestable principles. For example, high volumes can damage your ears, so do not listen to music at high volumes through your headphones. An abdominal CT scan can cause high radiation exposure, so patients should ask their doctors if it is necessary. Blood clots in the deep veins of the legs can cause thrombosis, so people should move their legs in the airplane.

4.7. The Role of the Teacher

4.8. ”Learn a Lot, but Also Feel the Spark of Magic”

The analysis of the summaries submitted showed that the students found the concept of miniatures and the two-eyes principle helpful. One group wrote:

“Overall, we find the concept of these miniatures very exciting and appealing to future science teachers. The miniature has shown us that we are really excited about teaching science and the ‘two eyes’ have given us a new perspective on teaching”.

It was also clear that the pre-service teachers used the terminology introduced during the module in creative and thoughtful ways. For example, in their reflection on their miniature, one group wrote:

“It’s also good to have a good mix between the lifeworld and the scientific world in the classroom, so that people-oriented and things-oriented students are given equal consideration”.

Most of the comments also pointed out that it was particularly helpful that the “TES” approach consistently and systematically takes the students’ lifeworld into account. One group wrote that this was an antidote to the “disenchantment of the world”. The most striking argument, however, was that the TES approach focussed equally on scientific knowledge and its life-world interpretation. One group wrote:

“We believe that students can learn a lot in our miniature, but also feel the spark of magic that science can provide”.

5.1. Scientific Literacy and TES

The double role of the teacher seems to be a new concept that, as far as we know, has never before been conceived in literature. Indeed, switching between the two eyes to close the loop and the need for the teacher to switch between the two roles (expert and hermeneut) proved challenging but rewarding. It seems that our students found the holistic change of perspective and the associated hermeneutic role of the teacher more difficult. The expert role is more conventional for a science teacher and the pre-service teachers had most probably experienced their own science teachers in this role.

In fact, the transfer from the lifeworld image to the scientific image is close to the structure suggested by classical concepts of scientific literacy, such as the theoretical framework used in the 2006 PISA project, which is very common among science educators. The core of this framework is represented by scientific competencies. A scientifically literate person must be able to identify scientific issues, explain phenomena scientifically and use scientific evidence. This is very much in line with the shift from the lifeworld image to the scientific image, and scientific literacy in this sense suggests that this is all that needs to be done.

This type of scientific literacy may unconsciously have dominated the conceptual approach of the pre-service teachers which then assumed that scientific transfer in principle answers all questions posed in the lifeworld image. This then may have implied that, starting from the scientific image, the holistic transfer is perceived as an illustration and application of the scientific findings. Once this step has been taken, the circular process is immediately complete and there are no questions left.

A critical examination of the miniatures reveals that many of these indeed reflect the classical concept of scientific literacy. From this point of view, they are examples of well-built context-based science education. This is, of course, a good outcome of an educational process, but it is not the kind of innovation that the project was looking for. The pragmatic challenge for the pre-service teachers was to move away from the linear concept of context-explanation-prediction and to identify a truly two-eyed view onto two complementary images. The findings of this research show that this goal has not yet been fully achieved, but at the same time the findings have suggested some important complementarities that may prove to be helpful in working towards this goal.

5.2. Scientific Image vs. Lifeworld Image

5.3. Orientation to Things vs. to People

5.4. Position Observations vs. Sense Perceptions

Sellars’ ontological concept of point particles was instrumental in guiding students towards an optimal scientific transfer. According to Sellars, these elementary particles are defined solely by their relative position and have no sense properties. They are the theoretical entities that constitute material reality as arrangements of imperceptible point particles in motion.

These ontological considerations enabled the students to refine their choice of elements. By moving closer to Sellars’ concept, they were able to abstract complex phenomena to their basic interactions, such as the interaction between air molecules and cilia in sound reception, rather than relying on more concrete but less basic elements such as hearing aids.

In the holistic transfer, these things had to be connected with the senses of the people involved. In the miniatures this was mainly through experiments, either physical or biological or both. Others were videos, student experiences, memories of certain scenes, etc., etc. Note that these sensory experiences did not take place in a solipsistic vacuum, but within (different, sometimes overlapping) communities. The first and omnipresent community was of course the classroom, with the pupils, but also, and importantly, with the teacher. However, many other communities appear in our miniatures, such as the teenagers (who listen to loud music), the skateboarders, the patients, the citizens, etc.

5.5. Facts vs. Values

TES seems to be a way of introducing value discussions and judgements beyond the scientific method into science lessons, thus avoiding the naturalistic fallacy. The critical moment is the holistic transfer, in which an interpretative element is essential. Scientific knowledge is important for decision-making, especially in health and environmental issues. But the holistic transfer between evidence-based principles, which are part of the scientific image, and value judgments, which are part of the lifeworld image, is the one that explicitly includes the freedom of thought, feelings, norms and actions of the people involved.

5.6. Fact-Related vs. Sentiment-Laden Discourse

In our context, it is interesting to note that the authors provide about two dozen keywords for each cluster, e.g., mind, imagination, wisdom, wise, hunch, understanding, suspicion, believe, think, etc., for sentiment-laden discourse, and scientific, chemicals, model, method, fact, data, etc., for what they call fact-related discourse. A preliminary idea, yet to be tested, is to provide teachers with these discursive resources to help them create teaching materials for synoptic transfer.

5.7. Limitations