The civilizing process

This chapter examines the role that representations and visualizations can play in the chemical curriculum. Two types of curricular goals are examined: students’ acquisition of important chemical concepts and principles and students’ participation in the investigative practices of chemistry—“students becoming chemists.” Literature in learning theory and research support these two goals and this literature is reviewed. The first goal relates to cognitive theory and the way that representations and visualizations can support student understanding of concepts related to molecular entities and processes that are not otherwise available for direct perception. The second goal relates to situative theory and the role that representations and visualizations play in development of representational competence and the social and physical processes of collaboratively constructing an understanding of chemical processes in the laboratory. We analyze research on computer-based molecular modeling, simulations, and animations from these two perspectives and make recommendations for instruction and future research.

Students Becoming Chemists: Developing Representationl Competence

In this historical and observational study, we describe how scientists use representations and tools in the chemistry laboratory, and we derive implications from these findings for the design of educational environments. In our observations we found that chemists use representations and tools to mediate between the physical substances that they study and the aperceptual chemical entities and processes that underlie and account for the material qualities of these physical substances. There are 2 important, interrelated aspects of this mediational process: the material and the social. The 1st emphasizes the surface features of both physical phenomena and symbolic representations, features that can be perceived and manipulated. The 2nd underscores the inherently semiotic, rhetorical process whereby chemists claim that representations stand for unseen entities and processes. In elaborating on our analyses, we � Examine the historical origins and contemporary practices of representation use in one particular d...

The Roles of Representations and Tools in the Chemistry Laboratory and Their Implications for Chemistry Learning

I. INTRODUCTIONA few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits - and consequences - of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not been before), the advert proclaimed "Geography is History." What the advert signalled to as the "end" of geography in the sense of the social gradients associated with space and distance is what is known, variously, as "time-space convergence" and "time-space distanciation."1 The terms embrace not just the "collapse" of geographical space given technical advances (in travel time and in communications - consequences of what Castells calls "the information age" and "the network society"2), but also the idea that the modern world has become more homogenized. One place is now much the same as another. Further, given the likelihood of such technical and cultural changes continuing into the future, geographical distinctiveness, evident in the particularity of place, would be a thing of the past: geography would indeed be history. There is, of course, much evidence to the contrary: that, in the face of "globalisation," questions of locality, sense of place and of identity in place matter now more than ever. Even, then, as Francis Fukuyama cautioned against the "death" of liberal democratic politics as The End of History,3 geography - that is, geography understood as questions to do with place, and questions to do with where you are in the world as part of questions about how you are and who you are in the world - has had considerably heightened significance and for some places and people more than others.4These notions of place - as a particular location, and the character or sense of place - are only part of the meanings associated with place in geographical and in historical work. Like space, its regular epistemic dancing partner in geographical ubiquity and metaphysical imprecision, place is a widespread yet complex term. What follows is historiographie al in focus and, of necessity, partial in range. I offer a historiographical survey of the term place, principally but not alone within recent work in geography. In more detail, and with reference to one of the strong senses in which place is used, namely that of locale, "the local," or localness, I trace here the connections between place, space, and the idea of the local as evident in recent work in history and in geography, especially within the history and the geography of science. Particular attention is paid in this context to the distinctive features of what we may think of as the "spatial turn" in the history of science by looking at the idea of place and space in recent work in Enlightenment studies. My argument is three-fold. Notions of place and space, much debated by geographers, have been as central a concern for intellectual historians and historians of science as for philosophers and others, but they have been differently expressed. There is, I shall argue, value in looking at these different views in order to understand that whilst place is a commonplace term it is not agreed upon: working with imprecision has been both opportunity and restriction. In relation to work within the history of science and in Enlightenment studies, consideration of the so-called "spatial turn," of place as social practice and of placing as a process in accounting for the uneven movement of ideas over space and time may help provide some precision and strengthen connections between geography and history.II. PLACE (IN GEOGRAPHY): A PARTIAL HISTORIOGRAPHYPlace is one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography. It is also one of the most problematic.5 Place, or small-scale regional space, features as a subdivision within the Classical tripartite division of cosmography (the earth in relation to other planetary bodies), geography (the earth as a whole) and chorography (parts of the earth or regional geography). …

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Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in History

Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution.

Between the Library and the Laboratory: The Language of Chemistry in Eighteenth-Century France

List of illustrations Acknowledgments Note on the text Introduction 1. Representing knowledge: reading the Encyclopedie 2. Enlightenment critique and Diderot's art of philosophizing 3. The matter of judgment and the art of phrasing sensation 4. Critical narratives: Diderot's Salons 5. Embodying knowledge 6. Portraying Diderot: the aftermath 7. Interpreting Diderot: critical values, critical violence Notes Index.

The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing

1. Producing Enlightenment history 2. The event of Enlightenment: beginnings 3. The subject of Enlightenment: constructing philosophers, writing intellectuals 4. Designing the past: thinking history through Montesquieu 5. Literature and the making of Revolutionary history 6. Inventing a literary past 7. Commemorating Enlightenment: bringing out the dead, belatedly 8. The Voltaire effect 9. Reading among the ruins 10. Epilogue Bibliography.

The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought

Recent disciplinary reconfigurations have shifted focus from a temporal-historical explanation of social life to one designed to investigate the latter's spatial dimension. This article examines the development of various spaces in the eighteenth century—physical, social, colonized, epistemological, and esthetic—and proposes a mode of cultural analysis and of historical understanding relating to the eighteenth century that takes account of these disicplinary shifts.

Daniel Brewer

Papers

Between the Library and the Laboratory: The Language of Chemistry in Eighteenth-Century France

The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing

The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought

Lights in Space

Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity