I designed a learning activity which develops practical reasoning and argument skills. This activity is based on my research in the history and philosophy of science, and in cognitive psychology, that suggests that a major factor in the development of science comes from the recording and collecting of scientific ‘data’ so that experienced that occurred distributed over time and space can be perceived in one time and place¹

Students are shown how to organise material from an extended and convoluted text², onto one page in columns based on the key metaphors around which the text is structured³. Students followed the procedure I recommended because Clegg’s Framework’s of Power was beyond almost all students’ capacity to begin to understand it otherwise.  If the text were easier students would not be forced to pay explicit and self-reflective attention to the process of building understanding and learn to use it as a tool.

By organising the material, from an extended and convoluted text, onto one page under the key metaphors around which the text is structured, students are able to see connections between the items that are unavailable to their perception otherwise.  Once students have seen the benefit of this they start to use this technique on other texts.

Once students have organised the information about each of the structural metaphors into their respective columns in a table on a single page, they are asked to develop a single rich image or scenario for each organising metaphor or model. This process is based on Masterman's⁴ identification of the key role of concrete analogies in scientific reasoning.

Students learn how to use these rich images to extend and test the metaphor by applying them to examples beyond those considered in the text. This learning activity not only enables students to learn something both from this text and how to approach other difficult texts, but also builds the skills they need to be able to test the adequacy of alternative models against empirical data from some domain of experience. 

Notes