The aim of this study is to contribute to an understanding of how curricular change is accomplished in practice, including the positions and conflicts of key stakeholders and participants, and their actions in the process. As a case, we study the treatment of energy in Swedish secondary curricula in the period 1962–2011 and, in particular, how the notion of energy quality was introduced in the curricula in an energy course at upper secondary school in 1983 and in physics at lower (...) secondary school in 1994. In the analysis, we use Roberts’ two competing visions of science education, Vision I in which school science subjects largely mirror their corresponding academic disciplines and Vision II that incorporates societal matters of science. In addition, a newly suggested Vision III represents a critical perspective on science education. Our analysis shows how Vision II and III aspects of science education have gained importance in curricula since the 1980s, but in competition with Vision I considerations. Energy quality played a central role in providing Vision II and III arguments in the curricular debate on energy teaching. Subsequent educational research has found that Swedish teachers and students struggle with how to relate to energy quality in physics teaching, which we explain as partly due to the tension between the competing visions. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe popularity of botany and natural history in England combined with the demographic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century to bring about a new aesthetics of gardening, fusing horticultural practice with a connoisseurship of botanical science. Horticultural societies brought theoretical botany into the practice of gardening. Botanical and horticultural periodicals disseminated both science and prescriptions for practice, yoking them to a progressive social agenda, including the betterment of the working class and urban planning. Finally, botany was (...) incorporated into systems of education, reinforcing the union of theory and practice.Three garden plans from the 1790s, 1835, and 1846 illustrate the embodiment of this theory and practice in the design of private suburban gardens. These horticultural/botanical gardens, described in the second half of the article, represent a neglected side of botany's bifurcated descent from Renaissance collections of curiosities into horticultural gardening and herbarium-based systematics. (shrink)

Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin discovered in 1857 that they had a fundamental disagreement about biological classification. Darwin believed that the natural system should express genealogy while Huxley insisted that classification must stand on its own basis, independent of evolution. Darwin used human races as a model for his view. This private and long-forgotten dispute exposes important divisions within Victorian biology. Huxley, trained in physiology and anatomy, was a professional biologist while Darwin was a gentleman naturalist. Huxley agreed with (...) John Stuart Mill's rejection of William Whewell's sympathy for Linnaeus. The naturalists William Sharp Macleay, Hugh Strickland, and George Waterhouse worked to distinguish two kinds of relationship, affinity and analogy. Darwin believed that his theory could explain the difference. Richard Owen introduced the distinction between homology and analogy to anatomists, but the word homology did not enter Darwin's vocabulary until 1848, when he used the morphological concept of archetype in his work on Cirripedia. Huxley dropped the word archetype when Richard Owen linked it to Plato's ideal forms, replacing it with common plan. When Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species that the word plan gives no explanation, he may have had Huxley in mind. Darwin's preposterous story in the Origin about a bear giving birth to a kangaroo, which he dropped in the second edition, was in fact aimed at Huxley. (shrink)

Biography and geography do not always sit easily together in historical narrative. With a few notable exceptions, due weight is rarely given to the significance of territorial features in tales of talented individuals. Biographers perhaps play down the untidy contingencies of civic, institutional and domestic spaces in order to present a historiographically coherent portrait of their subject. However, once the vicissitudes of environment and everyday life are taken into account, the identity and accomplishments of the ‘great individual’ begin to merge (...) inextricably with the vagaries of local politics and fluid socio-cultural alliances. For a figure with as formidable a posthumous reputation as T. H. Huxley, such a deconstruction might, at first, seem mundane and of little scholarly value. Yet there is considerable evidence that Huxley was not always successful in his efforts to gain power and influence within the many and varied sites of his working environments. Careful scrutiny of such evidence will show new perspectives on Huxley's complex career in Victorian London. It will also document problems in the construction of the South Kensington suburb as a credible site and fruitful resource for Huxley's remarkably diverse activities in education and science. (shrink)

Huxley, the visionary, was a key figure in creating modern science education. He was also an employee and bureaucrat of the Science and Art Department most of his working life. The Department was established to organize scientific education for the working class, and many of Huxley's activities on its behalf marked him as a friend of the artisan. It will be argued here that Huxley's vision of working-class scientific education was not in the least radical but reflected the middle-class views (...) of his contemporaries in the Department. Their views, by as late as the 1890s, were little different from those of the late 1840s. Huxley's attitudes were narrowly meritocratic and in no way egalitarian. By the time the movement for technical instruction gathered momentum in the 1880s, Huxley's ideas were distinctly old-fashioned. (shrink)