Metaphor and Narrative in Science. Imaginative Approaches to Learning and Communication
On December 2, 2016, the Center for Metaphor and Narrative in Science. Imaginative Approaches to Learning and Communication was inaugurated, which is hosted by the Department of Education and Humanities of Unimore. Its mission is to promote multi and inter-disciplinary research relating to the role of metaphor and narrative in science communication, science education, and mathematics. At the center, we wish to explore metaphor and storytelling as fundamental devices of imaginative rationality, especially as they are used in science education.
In collaboration with Hans U. Fuchs and Elisabeth Dumont (Zürich University of Applied Sciences at Winterthur, Switzerland), the center, MANIS, was conceived and founded by Annamaria Contini (who is its current director) and Federico Corni (who chairs the Scientific Committee). It brings together international experts from a wide range of fields: physics, geology, biology, and mathematics; aesthetics, pedagogy, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature.
This center will be the research arm of an initiative directed at developing modern education for schools and universities, training of the coming generations in scientific-industrial and related settings, and science communication for all sectors of society. We aim at bringing together leading experts from fields as diverse as cognitive science, philosophy, anthropology, economics, developmental psychology, science and engineering education, history of science, and linguistics and narratology.
The results of our research on imaginative rationality are seen to be directly useful for applications and the assessment of their efficacy. This is certainly true for science learning in schools, teacher training, and the interaction between the public and science. We believe that research on metaphor and narrative in science will add to our understanding of science learning and communication .
Imaginative rationality and understanding
In recent years, metaphors and stories have been the subject of much analysis by scholars of cognitive science and in education. Research has shown that metaphors and stories can be viewed as tools for thinking—both are expressions of imaginative rationality that plays a crucial role in the theory of embodied cognition. They are cognitive tools in the hands of learners and teachers alike. Specifically, theories of macroscopic physical science have been shown to structure the experience of forces of nature in terms of conceptual metaphoric networks directly drawn from the commonsense human mind.
We build our research upon the relationship between metaphors and stories and their use in learning and teaching, in the belief that, in a narrative, a metaphor is not only in context but also takes a meaning not reducible to what we might associate with it in isolation. Narrative is a kind of “connective tissue”: the story organizes image schemas, metaphoric projections, conceptual and linguistic metaphors in terms of a network. There is an important function that is performed in the narrative by the categories of time, agent, agency, process, and the resulting continuity between stories and scientific forms of thought. Moreover, narrative does not just characterize (set) the world, giving order and consistency, but also helps to refigure the world, to offer a different image of it. This aspect of narrative also seems important to extend the reach of narrative in science.
Narrative and models and simulation in science
An important connection has been drawn between the acts of storytelling and modeling of natural and technical dynamical systems. If we accept that stories create story-worlds, we can see a parallel between models and simulations on the one hand and story-worlds and stories on the other. Creating (mental) simulations of natural scenes therefore bears the seeds of scientific concepts that are components of formal scientific models. Just as the reading of a story lets a story-world (a mental model) form in the mind of a reader, simulations of dynamical systems lets ideas for scientific relationships grow and take form in the mind of a learner.
Since the use of models is a narrative act, storytelling is an element of the scientific method. This allows us to create and use stories in science not only for their important role in relating rationality to emotion and affect but also as direct entry points to scientific understanding.
In summary, we believe that recent developments in our knowledge of the role of imaginative structures for rational thought should be deepened and expanded and that metaphor and narrative need to be connected to science and science learning even more strongly. Research in learning teaching science must profit from these important developments in cognitive science, philosophy, and linguistics.