Distinctive features and underlying rationale of a philosophically-informed approach for energy teaching

Abstract

Understanding energy is widely recognized as a significant learning objective of science teaching, starting from the elementary school grades. It constitutes a cross-disciplinary concept that spans all domains of science. In addition, energy has been identified as one of a small number of disciplinary core ideas for science learning. Despite this wide recognition of its significance, introducing and elaborating energy in school science continues to pose a significant instructional challenge. In this chapter, we firstly elaborate on the essence of this instructional challenge by presenting an analysis of the epistemological barriers that are inherent in attempts to introduce energy. We then propose a novel teaching approach, for middle school, that could contribute toward addressing the instructional challenge. The main features of this approach include (a) the shift from a purely conceptually-oriented approach toward a philosophically-informed approach, (b) placing emphasis on energy and its features (transfer, form conversion, conservation and degradation) as a coherent theoretical framework for system analysis, (c) drawing on the crosscutting nature of energy for eliciting its added value as an interpretive framework, and (d) distinguishing between forms of energy and energy transfer processes (as a precursor to the fundamental distinction between states and processes). We describe these key features and we elaborate on the rationale underlying the proposed teaching approach as a whole that aims for coherence.