Pedagogy
and the Practice of Science.
David Kaiser, ed. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 2005. Pp. 440. $45.00, cloth. ISBN: 0-262-11288-4. TEL: 800-405-1619
• FAX: 800-406-9145
This book provides a sustained examination of how scientists’ and engineers’
training shapes their research and careers. The wide-ranging essays move pedagogy
to the center of science studies, asking where questions of scientists’
training should fit into our studies of the history, sociology, and anthropology
of science.
Chapter authors examine the deep interrelations among training, learning,
and research and consider how the form of scientific training affects the
content of science. They investigate types of training—in cultural and
political settings as varied as Victorian Britain, interwar Japan, Stalinist
Russia, and Cold War America—and the resulting scientific practices.
The fields they examine span the modern physical sciences, ranging from theoretical
physics to electrical engineering and from nuclear weapons science to quantum
chemistry.
The studies look both at how skills and practices can be transferred to scientists-in-training
and at the way values and behaviors are passed on from one generation of scientists
to the next.
They address such topics as the interplay of techniques and changing research
strategies, pedagogical controversies over what constitutes “appropriate”
or “effective,” the textbook as a genre for expressing scientific
creativity, and the moral and social choices embodied in the training of new
scientists. The essays highlight the simultaneous crafting of scientific practices
and of the practitioners who put them to work.
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