Bill nye the science guy senses

Structural Assessment Of Learning Object

This text is an adaptation of Roth, W.-M., & Friesen, N. (2014). Nacherzeugung, Nachverstehen: a phenomenological perspective on how public understanding of science changes by engaging with online media. Public Understanding of Science, 23, 850–865. You can access the original article through the UVic institutional subscription: http://journals.sagepub.com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/doi/pdf/10.1177/0963662513512441 I did the research because of my interest in the kinds of things that online resources make available for viewers to make sense. Often people of all sorts say that such online resources allow them to understand what they did not understand in a lecture. The video analyzed in this text can be accessed through a URL given in footnote 2. You should watch the video before reading this text. This text also provides you with more understanding of how and why humans learn.

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3. Recreation and Re-understanding: An example 3.1 Background In the following, we use an example from the medical field, in part because of the importance of William Harvey to the development of science more generally and because of the potential role of health as a context for developing learner interest in science education more generally. Anyone wanting to be informed about how the heart and circulatory system works has opportunities to find relevant information online. In fact, the editor of a journal on medical education praises the Khan Academy, a YouTube based system of tutorials, as an important tool for teaching about cancer. There is an emerging number of studies investigating or advocating for the communicative impact of YouTube on spreading medical information. For the following illustrative analysis, we randomly took one of the items that resulted from an online search for videos using the terms “heart” and “circulatory system.” The video turned out to be from a popular science series for children and youth: Bill Nye the Science Guy. It has been suggested that that videos like the one Bill Nye produced entice teenage students to return to the video. Typical comments accompanying the video suggest that viewers of all ages appear to benefit from it—e.g., “Lol this made my day. I've been studying for the exam tomorrow for over 4 hours a day for 3 days. This video made me understand it better, in a kinda fun way. :P” and “lol I'm a college_ student, and I'm still learning from this guy.” The Nacherzeugung or Nachverstehen that this video may make possible differs, however, from Harvey’s originary idealizations—and of course also from the circumstances he offers for their reproduction—because the common sense of the early 17th century is different from common sense one today. Figure 2 presents the main part of the transcription of a videotape, including key images, from the Bill Nye series available on YouTube on the heart and circulatory system.1

1 The videotape is available at. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbttJ- 5do9M&lc=TL2097SFBrASMlA0cL91_ZjOAXRQOeV0iwAb_a_BwoI; Details and lesson guides are available at http://www.billnye.com/for-kids-teachers/episode-details/ and http://www.billnye.com/episodes/pdf/episodeguide76.pdf.

From Commonsense to Scientific Sense 2

Figure 2. 3.2 Analysis The video makes available a wide range of resources that offer the possibility of Nacherzeugung and Nachverstehen and, therefore, a transition from everyday sense to scientific sense. Most importantly, perhaps, as our analysis shows, the video capitalizes on the learning opportunities that come with multimodality. Though any one particular viewing might be insufficient to produce a complete scientific understanding, the possibility to do so is given with the resources provided. 3.2.1 From commonsense to scientific sense There are at least two lifeworld experiences to which such a video on the motion of the heart appeals. On the one hand, there is the fundamental experience of being in the world, and knowing our way around the world: persons exerting themselves, losing consciousness in an extreme flight maneuver, standing in a doctor’s office, being auscultated. Second, these fundamental commonsense ways of being in the world become the basis of an extension into the scientific view of the heart and its motions in the way that these have been conceived of by Doctor Harvey (1628) and his successors. On the vertically subdivided screen, one part continuing to show the busy exercise room, Bill Nye emerges, as if from exertion on the right, the left part featuring a cross-section of the heart filled with blue and red liquid. An appeal is made to relate the heart to the exercise in the gym behind Nye, which may

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evoke in the viewer past experiences of exercise, and to the sound of the beating heart, which is audible together with the noise from the gym. The image (turn 02) is also a representation or, in the discourse of the social studies of science, an inscription. It is no longer a naturalistic depiction, such as shown together with the lungs in the human anatomy by Descartes (1662) or verbally described by Harvey (1628), but a cross-section that is unavailable to natural observation. It is also a form of presentation that at the time of Harvey was not yet used or known. (Contemporary illustrations typically show figures with incisions, layers of skin and muscle flayed to reveal hidden bones or organs—with minimal schematic simplification). There is a slight “pumping action” that is visible—a narrowing and widening of the lower part of the animated representation of the heart (turns 02, 10–12). This is evident when the two extreme configurations of the heart in Turn 10 are plotted unto each other. The periodic expansion and contraction is of the kind that Harvey’s description in De motu appeals to as visual experience: “the heart is erected and rises upward to a point … it is everywhere contracted, but more toward the sides, thus, using less magnitude, it appears longer and more collected.” That is, the animated illustration makes an appeal to the same form of visibility that emerged in Harvey’s careful, in vivo studies of the hearts of different animals, especially in situations where the heart movements were sufficiently slow to make precisely the observations that could become the decisive evidence for the associated idealization. The observation is based on and grounded in the everyday experience of the world, against the resting earth as a ground. The motion, in contrast to rest, is itself perceived and perceivable only against an unthematic ground. Harvey began his investigation not with the intent to overturn the canonical explanation that was reigning at the time. Rather, his goal was to see the motions and characteristics of the heart [usu cordis] via his own observations rather than by what he could read in other people’s books. An important dimension of the video is that it makes these motions visible for its (generally non-scientific) audience. Harvey found this a “truly difficult” exercise to the point that he felt God alone could understand the meaning of the heart’s movements. He initially could not tell systole and diastole apart, and dilations and constrictions were, as Harvey wrote, “like a flash of lightening.” The systole appeared to him at one time here, the diastole there, then reversed, varied and confused. As a result, he could not reach a decision about what to conclude on his own and what to believe based on the writings of others. It is in the course of his investigation of cold-blooded animals and his observation of the hearts in dying creatures that he came to identify those moments in the heart’s motion that are so unproblematically depicted in the Bill Nye video. That is, this “larger-than-life” (turn 01) model facilitates making the crucial observations that Harvey’s original transition to a scientific idealization required. Harvey makes reference to three significant observations to be made: (a) the heart rises to the apex (where it strikes the chest such that it can be felt); (b) the heart contracts, particularly on the sides, which makes it appear narrower and longer; and (c) the heart feels harder when it moves then when at rest. He adds that in coldblooded animals the heart is lighter in color during the motion phase than during the resting phase. The translator of the 1928 publication comments on these observations in a footnote to the English text. “This is the first of that remarkable series of extraordinarily acute observations on the motion of the heart and blood so simply and clearly reported by Harvey in this book.” These observations can be made in different parts of the excerpt (turn 02, 07, 09) but especially when the cross-section of the heart is shown as it pumps the blood to the pulmonary system and into the body (turns 10–12). Central to the perspective Harvey developed was the fourfold chambers of the heart and their relative sizes. This number is also made explicit in the video, already apparent at turn 02, but especially from the image and text in Turns 10–12. What Harvey first articulated as the different roles of the two sides of the heart, one in the circuit to the lung and back, the other in the circuit to the periphery of the body and back, is indicated in the video in the different coloring, blue for the left, and red for the right (from viewer). 3.2.2 Visibilization The motion of the heart is only very indirectly accessible to everyday experience and, therefore, is not subject to the same kind of apodictic evidence that provides us with our everyday, common sense of the world. The blood circuit is also not available to observation as such. It is therefore not surprising that these

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features, do not generally appear in children’s drawings or that even teachers have misconceptions about this bodily system. In fact, the blood circuit was not available to Harvey, in whose time the body was thought more of as a collection of different organs—much in the way that children represent these today. In fact, the translator of the 1928 edition notes that Harvey, in his philosophical orientation, is still fundamentally Aristotelian. One way of describing the issue, therefore, is in terms of a transition made from an Aristotelian perspective to what subsequently was recognized as the first modern description of the motions of the heart and blood and a first modern explanation of its circulatory function. That is, on the grounds of an Aristotelian worldview, as embodied in the work of the ancient Greek physician Galen, a new, very different worldview arises. It is in and through such representations as presented with Turn 09 and Turns 13–14, that everyday experiences with liquids flowing and under pressure may enable idealizations of the circulatory system. That is, although not visible as such, knowledge of a circulatory system is enabled through the use of inscriptions that themselves draw on experiences in our technologized world. 3.2.3 Appeal to everyday, practical understanding As suggested above, our everyday lifeworld is the intuitively concrete world that is antecedent to science, but which always relates to the former with respect to the constitution of sense. Any scientific object, any scientific discourse, is based on our mundane, everyday common sense, however much the former might seem to contradict the latter. These understandings are extended metaphorically to the aspects and functions of the body that are not immediately accessible by the senses. Following the part of the video featuring representations of the heart and circulatory system (turns 02– 17), the video appeals precisely to everyday experiences in a scene shot on a lawn involving a narrator and a “subject.” The narrator, a young woman, talks about normal heart rates and compares these to rates while sleeping (lower, with diminished need for oxygen), when surprised or scared (when the heart rate speeds up), and while doing “intense physical exercise” (the body needs more oxygen). In the background, a young man sleeps, is suddenly awakened, and then jogs. The video finally shifts back to black and white documentary footage, with a doctor auscultating a baby and then an old man, while explaining that the heart beats about two and one half billion times over an average lifetime. Harvey, too, appealed to the everyday experiences of the pulse and its change with various activities: “It is not supposed to be that the uses of the pulse and the respiration are the same, because, under the influences of the same causes, such as running, anger, the warm bath, or any other heating thing (as Galen says) they become more frequent and forcible together … but in young persons the pulse is quick, whilst respiration is slow. So it is also in alarm, and amidst care, and under anxiety of mind; sometimes, too, in fevers, the pulse is rapid, but the respiration is slower than usual.” In this quotation, Harvey appeals to the very same everyday experiences as the analyzed video does. This highlights the specific observations that can be made in such situations: the sound of an accelerated heartbeat is audible after exercising, and illustrated when Nye is moving into and through the gym or the teen is jogging. These, then, become part of the (what shall become the scientific) argument that respiration and blood flow are two separate systems. Prior to Harvey, a particular, shared sense certainly did exist about the heart and blood in the human being. Shakespeare, for example, writes of “a voice issu[ing] from so empty a heart,” then confirms that the common saying is true “The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.” These types of sense are based on the self-evidently true (apodictic) experiences of people generally and scientists in particular. Harvey’s “discoveries” arose from and against this common sense. But because Harvey himself grew up in this culture, in and through his scientific practice, a new “sense” came to work against and overcame his existing common sense. At the same time, this experience with the tools and materials for his work provided the foundation on which the new scientific sense is to be built. Moreover, the old sense does not completely disappear: it continues to exist in the general culture, as shown in the science education literature reviewed above. The video, finally, is characterized by a functional discourse prefigured, but not fully realized, in Harvey’s idealizations. Harvey generally did not write in the functional language that would only develop during the later part of the seventeenth century. In his text, the word ūsus [use] and its inflections are much

From Commonsense to Scientific Sense 5

more frequent than the word fūnctiō [function].” But his descriptions, by means of Recreating/ Re- understanding, make it into a part of the general culture and also into other sciences: they not only lend themselves to such developments, but also they became the sources for metaphorical and analogical extensions into other fields, such as economics, where the idea—one might even say the “culture”—of continuous circulation took hold: It is only after Harvey that the category of circulation became a fundamental analytical tool in many sciences. In fact, it was over a century later that function takes on the dominant role over structure and other descriptive approaches to organisms. 3.2.4 Appeal to other experiential modes Besides the visual mode, the video also provides resources for the auditory sense. Throughout the video, there are periods when the audience can hear in the background of the soundtrack, more or less clearly, the beat of a heart (e.g., during the opening part, when Nye shows up on the split screen next to the heart, turn 02). The beating heart, especially following exercise, is something directly accessible to our senses. The pulse, too, is easily accessible; and we learn early in life how to feel the pulse on the neck or near the base of the thumb. It is a common experience that offers opportunities for an idealization of the organ. Harvey uses the analogy with a horse that drinks, whereby the movements of the throat can be heard and felt. A similar case exists in the heart, where with each portion of blood transduced in the veins and arteries, “a pulse is made, and can be heard in the chest.” Harvey’s is one of the first recorded observations of the heart sounds. Today, such as in the video, no special mention is necessary that the pounding we can hear while exercising is associated with the heart. 4. Discussion In this study, we use a phenomenological perspective on the question of the overturning of pre- scientific understandings through common sense and sensuous observation and evidence. The pre- scientific understanding comes to be sedimented in, and to form the basis of, scientific understanding even as the former is overturned. The essence of our proposal runs like this: In every constitution of (scientific) sense that occurs as someone engages with online materials such as a YouTube video on the human body, something of the original constitution and experience of the body is relived and reenacted. However, because culture has changed, the constitution as a starting point is no longer exactly the same: as that which is apodictically self-evident, everyday common sense itself has changed. Such a phenomenological approach is fruitful because it provides an answer to the question how the way in which we experience the world everyday leads to abstract scientific knowledge. Even more fundamentally, it answers how mundane, everyday knowledge is used as a resource for achieving a form of knowledge that ultimately transcends, overcomes and retains the quotidian. In our pre-scientific life experience, we participate in the flux of life. Although things change, we are certain to see, touch, and hear them, that is, know these things in their properties as objectively real things that are in this and not in another way. This certainty of things, and the associated apodictic certainty that we associate with the everyday world, gives us a sense of objectivity and reality. Our normal, everyday, mundane, and practical lives are characterized by this sense-certainty, to which the video also appeals. We share this sense with others, because of the common experience of a pathic life, which also is the ground of empathy and sympathy. It therefore becomes the basis upon which the pedagogical function of the video rests. This everyday, common sense constitutes the ground and horizon for everything else we do and learn. It circumscribes the source of sense on which other, newly acquired sense is built in a continuous expansion and transformation. In the online video, viewers come to be presented with the image of a two-color circuit. It is a finished result from observations and inferences not thematized in the video. In Harvey’s De motu cordis, on the other hand, we can clearly observe the descriptions that serve as the basis of inferences. Some of these descriptions were already known to others and, therefore, also part of the Aristotelian viewpoint that was

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integral to Galen’s doctrine about the heart and blood. One of the ideas that Harvey created, in and with De motu cordis, was that of a continuous circuit as part of which the heart has a special role: that of pushing the blood into the arteries right to the peripheral vessels. The parts and their names already existed. It was the function and the functional whole that changed with the work of Harvey. There is empirical evidence that everyday folk today have to move through the same sort of process to achieve a first idealization. Thus, a study that analyzed the differences between experts and novices of complex biological systems, including the human respiratory system showed that whereas there are little differences between the groups on structures, but significant differences existed between them on understanding functions and causal relations. In the video, the heart is presented as a pump. Harvey himself did not explicitly see the heart as a pump operating in a closed system to keep the blood flowing. It was the French philosopher René Descartes (1662) who articulated, 20 years after De motu was published (i.e., in 1648), the idea of the human heart as a pump, the blood vessels as a circulatory conduit system, and the human body as a machine. The video clip appeals to this common experience in the world, in which learners of all ages experience the function of liquids and gasses being pumped and under pressure in a range of technical contexts (e.g., swimming pools, hospitals, bicycle repair). These everyday experiences change in the course of human cultural history. Thus, what was part of the everyday experience of being in the world at the time of Harvey was different than those into which we are born today. For example, pumps, plumbing and other machine systems are part of the everyday world that constitutes common sense and, therefore, the background against which we constitute the sense of every new experience. These provide resources for understanding the heart and circulatory system as systems, powered and sustained by the systemic operation of machine parts that together form a coherent and interdependent whole.