# Hans U. Fuchs · Federico Corni

# Primary Physical Science Education

An Imaginative Approach to Encounters with Nature

Primary Physical Science Education

Hans U. Fuchs • Federico Corni

# Primary Physical Science Education

An Imaginative Approach to Encounters with Nature

Hans U. Fuchs Center for Narrative in Science Winterthur, Switzerland

Federico Corni Faculty of Education Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Bressanone, Italy

ISBN 978-3-031-43952-0 ISBN 978-3-031-43953-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43953-7

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To Dario and Magnus

& to Gigliola

# Preface

This is a textbook on Primary Physical Science Education (PPSE) for student teachers of kindergarten and primary school levels. The term primary is used here in a dual sense. It means early in the sense of education addressed to children when they build their primary understanding of the world. It also refers to the understanding of concepts of physical science that may rightly be called primary, i.e., the concepts that form the roots of scientific thought. These elements of understanding are important not only for children but for everyone, at any age, for a meaningful approach to aspects of physical reality.

In this book, we create a narrative account of how Primary Forces of Nature (FoN) such as Wind, Rain, Fire, Light, and Heat and Cold are understood (Fuchs et al., 2019; Fuchs, Corni, & Dumont, 2021; see References); and we outline an equally imaginative approach to the handful of Basic FoN (Fluids, Electricity & Magnetism, Heat, Chemicals, Gravitation, and Rotational and Linear Motion) that populate macroscopic physics (Fuchs, 2010[1996], 2015; Fuchs, d'Anna, & Corni, 2022). In it, we show how children and their teachers can start their encounters with nature by engaging with what are colloquially called the elements. These encounters will let young children connect to and converse with nature in a manner that is the prerogative of youth during their phase of mythic consciousness, before the cognitive tools of literacy have become dominant (Egan, 1997).

Analysis of human experience of nature (Dewey, 1925) can set us free from a belief that we need to take a scientific approach to nature education for children. Children should not be taught science per se, which, for young learners, often comes as a watered-down version of "true" science. We believe that, in contrast, we should ask how people in general and children in particular experience and interact with nature, and how they communicate about it with their teachers and their peers. The point of origin of our approach to nature pedagogy is the child or, even more radically, the nature-child relationship, rather than science. Science will emerge dialectically from the interaction of mythic experience and a scientific attitude that becomes available to learners during their adolescence.

If high-quality direct (physical) experience of nature and artifacts is fostered and joined with narrative experience made possible by stories of Forces of Nature Di Paolo, 2007; Hutto, 2007), the foundations for later understanding of science will be laid. In a nutshell, by emphasizing the role of imagination for our understanding, we are putting human nature back into the scientific exploration of the world around us. Where certain practices of science and philosophy—at least since René Descartes—have undoubtedly alienated us from nature, we want to build upon an approach to physical systems and processes that can help bridge the divide that was created between humans and nature. and other imaginative forms of participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Two volumes. The book is divided into two volumes. The first of these, Primary Physical Science Education: An Imaginative Approach to Encounters with Nature, outlines a primary form of engaging with physical processes. This will be particularly suited for children during kindergarten and the first few years of primary school (Corni, 2013, Corni & Fuchs, 2020, 2021; Fuchs, Corni, & Pahl, 2021). In Chapter 1, we introduce readers to early, mythic forms of consciousness and culture, and to Kieran Egan's scheme of recapitulation of cultural forms of understanding that make use of cognitive tools of mythic, romantic, and philosophical phases of development (Egan, 1988, 1990, 1997). The first chapter clarifies the role of imagination and cognitive tools such as metaphor, story, and visual art, and charts a course towards the very first encounters with Forces of Nature. Moreover, we briefly describe important differences between mythic and scientific attitudes toward engagements with physical processes and then show in what sense modern macroscopic physics is a collection of theories of Forces of Nature.

In Chapter 2, we introduce Primary Forces and explain how experiencing them leads to imaginative forms of communication and understanding. Stories included here and in later chapters demonstrate how narrative experiencing of Forces can arise. Chapters 3 and 4 serve a somewhat more formal description of the imaginative structures underlying the Basic Forces of Fluids (represented by Water and Air), Gravity, and Heat. Importantly, the discussion of interactions between these Forces leads to the notions of power and energy.

Visual metaphors and mimetic (embodied) plays, introduced in Chapter 5, will help teachers deal with Forces productively at various levels. Process Diagrams allow us to imaginatively represent our qualitative, yet formally and scientifically compelling, understanding of the interaction of Forces in chains of processes. Such diagrams resemble storyboards used in designing Forces-of-Nature Theater performances suitable for learners in primary school. Finally, in Chapter 6, we sketch an example of how different forms of experience and expression—physical, narrative, and mimetic—can be brought together for creating a unified imaginative approach to nature studies for young learners that is not yet scientific but can lay the foundations for later scientific engagement with physical systems and processes.

In Volume 2, Primary Physical Science Education: Experiencing Forces of Nature in Natural and Technical Systems, we continue the description of (1) the Basic FoN with chapters on Electricity and Magnetism, Substances, and linear and rotational Motion, and (2) imaginative education centered on schematic, metaphorical, analogical, and narrative uses of oral and written language (there, we briefly introduce important elements of modern cognitive linguistics and narratology). Moreover, several of the topics in physical science will be used to demonstrate how, with the help of simple-to-use software, dynamical models of physical systems and processes can be created—these models and their simulations represent a scientific analog to story-worlds and storytelling (Fuchs, 2015). We shall conclude Volume 2 in a manner paralleling the final chapter of Volume 1; however, in Volume 2, we shall choose examples of nature pedagogy that make a gentle move towards scientific forms of engaging with nature and machines.

Studying real life complex systems. Engaging with FoN allows us to account for the role of physical phenomena in our natural environment. When outlining properties and functions of Forces, we make physics part of the study of real-life systems—we involve it in fields such as earth and environmental science, physiology, astronomy, and energy engineering. Examples include the role of sunlight for our planet, the production of wind, the global cycle of electricity and the role of thunderstorms, global cycles of water and carbon, the blood circulatory system and water transport in trees, and our planet's place in the solar system and the universe. Moreover, we show how Forces are active in technical artifacts, particularly in renewable energy systems.

And finally, the form of presentation is meant to demonstrate to teachers how elements of our understanding of the Forces around us can be gently nurtured in learners, starting with a mythic approach to encounters with physical phenomena and, during the later years of primary school, by joining the cognitive tools of beginning literacy with those of scientific practices such as experimenting, measuring, and simple calculating; collecting, categorizing, graphing, and mapping; and, generally, organizing and documenting. Formal and theoretical forms of understanding must be left to middle and high school.

Winterthur and Bressanone, 2023 Hans Fuchs and Federico Corni

### Notes and Materials

We present issues relating to physical and cognitive sciences that are important for teachers who want to take a look at physical phenomena from an imaginative and narrative perspective. The book is not a manual of day-to-day teaching. Nevertheless, the approach taken here suggests pedagogical and didactic ideas and activities. In the first volume, we present a number of stories of Forces of Nature suitable for teaching, and in Chapter 6, we outline a concrete example of early nature pedagogy where we discuss design principles for stories and Forces-of-Nature Theater performances. In the second volume, we shall develop cases that show how children's minds can be nurtured to evolve from mythic understanding of Forces towards scientific forms of collecting, creating, and organizing knowledge of important processes in natural and technical systems.

A note for instructors of student teachers. As instructors of student teachers and in-service teachers, we have made it our goal to explore the roots of human engagement with physical phenomena. For us, trying to become aware, and encouraging our students to become aware, of the origin of abstract elements of thought arisoneself in the shoes of children—to the extent that this is possible—is worth the effort: we are rewarded with an understanding of the origin of concepts in physical science, and we can discover physics from a new perspective. ing in the experience of Forces of Nature, has been truly revealing. Putting

The references listed here will hopefully help instructors to embark on this journey. See, in particular, Corni (2013), Corni & Fuchs (2020, 2021), Fuchs et al. (2019), Fuchs, Corni, & Pahl (2021). For the science of Forces of Nature, see Fuchs (2010[1996]) and Job & Rüffler (2016). For a wide-ranging coverage of topics for physics courses at middle and high school levels, see Herrmann (1990-2021).

Above all, we should mention Kieran Egan's work on the philosophy of primary education that can be of profound help if we wish to see the issues of science and children's learning with new eyes (Egan, 1988, 1990, 1997).

Additional materials on the science of Forces of Nature. There are three books on the subject of physics and one on chemistry that take the perspective of what we have called Forces of Nature. Two of these are for middle and high school, the third and fourth are for university level courses.

The first of these is the Karlsruhe Physics Course KPK (Karlsruhe Physikkurs, KPK) by F. Herrmann (1990-2021) and co-workers (see References at the end of the book). In several volumes for middle and high school (available in several languages, including German, English, Italian, and French), it covers a wide range of classical and modern topics in physics using language and imagery that is similar to (but slightly more formal than) what we do in this book. The form of presentation makes the KPK eminently readable, and eminently useful as a companion text to our course.

The second (Borer et al., 2010) presents a very short outline, suitable for high school, of the basic phenomena of classical physics. It includes an introduction to how to create dynamical models of physical systems and processes employing system dynamics modeling software with graphical user interfaces that make use of visual metaphoric building blocks.

The third of these (Fuchs, 2010[1996]) is devoted to a modern theory of the dynamics of thermal systems and processes; it includes a short introduction to other fields of classical physics using the perspective of Forces of Nature and their interactions, and develops the generalized approach to the energy principle how we apply it here. Finally, the book on chemistry by Job & Rüffler (2016) develops a theory of chemical processes from a unifying perspective by making use of chemical potential and amount of substance as primitives—a form that parallels that of a science of Forces of Nature.

### Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the individuals and institutions who have helped us in our endeavor. The Faculty of Education at the Free University of Bolzano in Italy has generously supported us by financing the Open Access publication of this volume. Two anonymous reviewers have helped us strengthen our argument for PPSE. Angelika Pahl and Alessandro Gelmi have given us valuable feedback relating to Chapters 1 and 6. Robin Fuchs is co-author of several of the stories of FoN presented here, and she did the language editing of the entire text.

Then there are all those who have made their artwork and photos available to us: Guidetti, Dario Lepitschnik (DL), Magnus Lepitschnik (ML), Peter Lepitschnik (PL), and Margherita Rosi. The book is dedicated to the two youngest of these artists, DL and ML. Pei An, Arthur Baumann, Marion Deichmann (MD), Robin Fuchs (RF), Michela

Last but not least, we are very grateful to Robin Fuchs and Gigliola Menabue, without whose unwavering and loving support this book would not exist.

Attributions for figures. Attributions for figures have been added directly to the figure captions. Where this was not possible, we list the attributions in the table below. If no attributions have been given, the photographs, diagrams, and artwork were created by the authors.

### Attributions for figures

### Attributions for figures (continued)

# Contents

# Chapter 1

# Myth, Imagination, and Science

"Dangerous Ener-Gee" by DL (3 years 10 months)

There is an old, basic cultural form of understanding of the world around us, which has been called myth, mythic consciousness, or mythic culture. In concrete form, myth comes to us as stories, often as tales of human and natural Forces. 1 This culture or consciousness has much to do with our direct experience of the world as expressed in oral language.

Mythic consciousness relates reality to imaginative figures that populate our mind. In their early years, as their orality develops, children are expected to display forms of mythic meaning-making that include a number of important cognitive tools such as basic schematizing abstraction, metaphor, analogy, and story-telling. These tools, and our experience of natural Forces, will find their way into more formal approaches to understanding nature that develop later in life.

In this book, we develop an account of how meaning of our encounters with nature and qualitative understanding of physical science2 arise from combining the direct experience of causal Forces with imaginative forms of human expression such as storytelling and mimesis. We write this from two perspectives: mythic consciousness3 and modern continuum physics. 4 This may sound rather strange—ancient mythic culture and modern physics do not seem to mesh. We shall see, however, that there is an interesting connection between the two that may very well help us explore how the understanding of physical processes grows in a child.

The children we are considering here will be between 3 to 4 and 9 to 11 years old. There is good reason for believing that, as they develop, young children are part of a culture that has important elements in common with mythical societies that Cognitive tools first evolved some tens of thousands of years ago; not the least of these elements is oral language and the cognitive tools that come with mythic understanding in general and orality in particular.

> Naturally, this text is not for children but for their teachers and for anyone else interested in what myth and imagination might have to do with our modern physical science and its applications to engineering, medicine, earth science, astronomy, and environmental science; nor is this a book that spells out in detail what teachers should do in their day to day work in kindergarten and primary school.

> However, taking a look at physical phenomena from a mythic and generally imaginative perspective lets us present and explain aspects of physical science in a manner that directly suggests pedagogical and didactic ideas and activities. Simply put, we want to help readers navigate some of the natural scientific and cognitive issues that emerge when they join children in exploring nature in imaginative ways. Let us briefly contrast traditional with imaginative approaches to early science education and sketch what our job will be.

> The tradition in physical science education. Primary level educators are charged with—among many other things—introducing children to science, starting at an early age, maybe as early as kindergarten. This task has typically taken the following form:

Of late, it has become fashionable to center (early) science education around the "scientific method." While this is an important development and certainly influences pedagogy—it shifts our focus a little bit away from information and "bare"

of mythic culture

knowledge toward active involvement with a theme—this does not, in general, impact scientists' and teachers' attitudes toward the status of science, scientific knowledge, and children's developing but basically "lacking" cognitive abilities.

In all, this is a purely top-down approach to early science education: we go from natural science to the child. We accept science as is, with its forms, methods, and products, and take into account the limitations of the child's capacities as an "unfinished" or "immature" adult.7

Note, moreover, that in such an approach, physics, as an important modern cultural product, is given a dominant position. Nature, in contrast, takes the backseat: it is reduced to a source of examples for the science; it is the object rather than the subject in the science-nature relationship. And the child becomes the recipient of wisdom stored in the science.

Engaging imaginatively with nature. In this book, we would like to reverse the direction of flow of the typical argument: we start from nature and the child, or, more radically, from the child-nature relationship that will include, in very important ways, joint activity with caregivers. This relationship is marked and characterized by encounters with Forces such as Wind, Rain, Light, Fire, Water, Heat, Electricity, Food, and many others, and by how the encounters are spoken and generally communicated about. We want to explore

Looked at from the perspective of how children (jointly with their caregivers) encounter and interact with natural Forces, and what this means for the growth of their understanding, science (especially macroscopic physical science) and science education can be re-imagined. First, every science has a mythic core; it will be important to understand what this core is, and what forms of thought it makes available to us in a particular science. Second, as we already said above, there are strong indications that Abstraction and children are members of a culture that has important aspects in common with oral mythic cultures of past and present. Not the least of these aspects are schematizing/abstracting and imaginative mental activity that are vivid and powerful in children of this "mythic culture."

◦ ◦ ◦ ◦ ◦

This lays out the program for the introductory chapter. We shall briefly describe how immediate experiencing of the world in general and of nature in particular mythic beings

imaginative mental activity

creates a mythic mind that grows with the development of oral language; how this mythic mind creates the notion of Forces active in nature, and what this has to do with imagination; in sum, we shall outline a model of how child and caregiver jointly experience, and interact with, nature (Section 1.1). We shall sketch how mythic culture developed as part of human evolution (Section 1.2), and present reasons for believing that children's minds are characterized by mythic awareness, even in today's cultures. Specifically, we want to list some of the cognitive tools of mythic understanding that are used to suffuse the child-nature relationship with meaning (Section 1.3).

Naturally, the child's development does not stop with myth. We should be interested as well in what it takes to go beyond mythic culture so that scientific forms of exploring nature can develop upon the understanding myth provides us Recapitulation of with (Section 1.4). To argue this issue, we shall make use of Kieran Egan's model of cultural recapitulation of mythic, romantic, and philosophic (formal, theoretic) forms of understanding and briefly trace cognitive tools of later stages of personal and mental development (Egan, 1988, 1990, 1997); chief among these are tools of literacy, which will help children and adults to enter upon a journey towards aspects of physical science. Importantly, however, the roots of this development will have been laid in the imaginative structures that grow earlier in mythic life.

Finally, we shall sketch elements of the formal scientific basis of our approach

continuum physics), briefly review what we mean by Primary Physical Science Education and explain how the two are related (Section 1.5). Supporting our approach must include a discussion of two separate but related issues any presentation of physical science will have to face. The first of these issues is which meaning we want to associate with the concept of Force—given the fact that our

understanding of Force is rather different from, and much more encom-

Continuum physics (i.e., and Primary Science Education

cultural forms of understanding

Joint action in and with nature

Debating two issues: embodied What is Force? and... What is physics?

to the philosophical stance8 one wishes to take regarding how physics explains its subject; the decision made has wide-ranging consequences for how physics presents itself and which topics are deemed important for lay audiences. Having made and explained our choices, we can concentrate upon telling the tale of encounters with natural Forces and how experience of such Forces can be developed into a more formal approach to physical science. This will be our task in the

passing than, what is traditionally called force in physics. The second is related

## 1.1 Experience, Myth, and Imagination

following chapters and in the subsequent volume.

Myth is said to be most directly about reality—a form of awareness evolving from immediate experience and meaning-making. It is a symbolic form in which we Mythic consciousness integrate object and phenomenon with feeling and idea. Myth or, rather, mythic consciousness endows things with qualities or characteristics, and this endowment is taken literally, i.e., as real. A new unity (a perceptual unit or gestalt) evolves in which objects and activities are given "personalistic" character—in some sense, they are "animated."

> We shall explore what this means by first studying a concrete example of myth, a mythic tale about Wind. The story can help us understand what is particular about mythic awareness of nature, and in what sense this awareness is imaginative or makes use of tools of imagination. Most importantly, our analysis leads us to a central imaginative figure created in mythic experience of nature, which we call Force of Nature (FoN).9 After briefly describing the meaning of FoN, we shall

outline fundamental properties of myth and then discuss a model of unified direct and narrative experience of nature in joint action of child and caregiver. The historical development of myth and oral language—their origin in the cultural evolution of humanity—will be the subject of Section 1.2.

### Wind in ancient cultures

Among objects and activities in nature, Wind 10 easily presents us with one of the most direct examples of what can be experienced. Wind is very easily perceived and made sense of: we have all been exposed to situations that present themselves as windy or wind-still. In our mind, we recognize Wind, there is no mistaking it for anything else—it is a figure, a perceptual unit that forms easily and unmistakably. If we go back to the origins of human cultures, we see how important Wind has been ever since humans have developed their power of imagination. Wind has served as one of the most important, immediate, and primitive experiences to talk about our origins and about our relationship with nature. Wind Wind in let Egyptians and Babylonians understand how the world began and has been sustained ever since (in Chapter 2, p.64, we shall present a story of the beginnings of the world with Wind as one of its characters). In their cosmologies, Egyptians and Babylonians tell us that Wind separated the Sky from the Earth, and keeps doing so; by doing this, it sets up an "original tension" that keeps life going on the surface of Earth.11 Tales of Wind spirits in North American indigenous mythology give us an impression of the relationship between nature and humans, and they show how language is used to express experience of Forces. There is a story that is titled Why We Need Wind (or Koluskap and the Wind Eagle). Koluskap is a central character, a culture hero, of a number of native peoples. As R. M. Leavitt put it, Koluskap "made the world habitable for human beings and taught them their place in it." 12

Wind Eagle is given a name: Wocawson. However, "The wind's name, Wocawson is not a noun, but a verb, meaning 'it is windy.' Likewise, other elements—such as Rain, Snow, Sunshine, Cold, Heat—are also expressed as verbs, continuing actions or processes rather than independent things [. . . ], allowing speakers the possibility Interacting with Forces of interacting with them and affecting them, just as Koluskap did." 13

### Why We Need Wind

The story14 tells about Koluskap who wanted to go duck hunting in the bay where he and his grandmother lived. He went out on his canoe but was constantly pushed back ashore by the strong Wind blowing incessantly. He finally went to find Wocawson up on the mountain and asked him to stop flapping his wings to make Wind. Wocawson refused; so Koluskap caught him and threw him in a crevice where he got stuck and could not move any longer. Koluskap went back to the shore, went out hunting but soon was bothered immensely by the foul smell of the air and foam on the water that would not go away. So he went back up to the mountain, freed Wocawson, and they agreed for the Wind to blow only at certain times. Here are excerpts of a modern rendering of the story—Gluscabi 15 and the Wind Eagle—from the Abenaki tribe:16

[Gluscabi tried to paddle out into the bay but failed. . . ] But again the Wind came and blew him back to shore. Four times he tried to paddle out into the bay and four times he failed. He was not happy.

ancient myths

In many translations or told directly in modern English versions, the Verbs characterize Forces as actions

[Going to find the Wind. . . ] He walked across the fields and through the woods and the Wind blew hard. He walked through the valleys and into the hills and the Wind blew harder still. He came to the foothills [. . . ] and the Wind still blew harder. Now the foothills were becoming mountains and the Wind was very strong. Soon there were no longer any trees and the Wind was very, very strong. The Wind was so strong that it blew off Gluscabi moccasins. [. . . ] Now the Wind was so strong that it blew off all his hair, but Gluscabi still kept walking, facing the Wind. [. . . ] on the peak ahead of him, he could see a great bird slowly flapping its wings. It was Wuchowsen, the Wind Eagle.

Figure 1.1: Wocawson, the Wind Eagle (artwork by M. Guidetti).

[After meeting the Wind and arguing. . . ] "Now Grandfather," Gluscabi said, picking the Wind Eagle up, "I will take you to a better place." He began to walk toward the other peak, but as he walked he came to a place where there was a large crevice, and as he steps over it he let go of the carrying strap and the Wind Eagle slid down into the crevice, upside down, and was stuck.

[Back at the bay. . . ] "Now," Gluscabi said, "It is time to hunt some ducks."

[After being out on the water. . . ] "Grandmother," he said, "What is wrong? The air is hot and still and it is making me sweat and it is hard to breathe. The water is dirty and covered with foam. I cannot hunt ducks at all like this." "Gluscabi," she said, "What have you done now?" And Gluscabi answered just as every child in the world answers when asked that question, "Oh, nothing," he said. "Gluscabi," said Grandmother Woodchuck again, "Tell me what you have done." Then Gluscabi told her about going to visit the Wind Eagle and what he had done to stop the Wind.

[Back up on the mountain. . . ] "Oh, Gluscabi," said the Wind Eagle, "a very ugly naked man with no hair told me that he would take me to the other peak so that I could do a better job of making the Wind blow. He tied my wings and picked me up, but as he stepped over this crevice he dropped me in and I am stuck. And I am not comfortable here at all." [. . . ] Then Gluscabi climbed down into the crevice. He pulled the Wind Eagle free and placed him back on his mountain and untied his wings.

[. . . ] Gluscabi said, "It is good that the Wind should blow sometimes and other times it is good that it should be still." The Wind Eagle looked at Gluscabi and then nodded his head. [. . . ] So it is that sometimes there is Wind and sometimes it is still to this very day. And so the story goes.

### Wind as a Force of Nature (FoN)

In the story of Koluskap and Wocawson, Wind is characterized in a manner we will encounter again and again as we study other Forces—we will learn to understand what makes Wind a member of the family of Forces of Nature.

Characteristics of Wind—Meaning-making in myth. First of all, we perceive the polarity of windy ↔ wind-still, which creates our experience of intensity of Polarity for Wind Wind. Actually, it does even more: experience of intensities and or tensions, i.e., differences of intensities, is basic for any organism. From this spring other aspects of experience; we might even say that the experience of a polarity is the source of our experience of Forces of Nature (Chapter 2, Section 2.2).

In the story, intensity of Wind is indicated by the progression of blowing hard or Intensity of Wind being strong ". . . and the Wind blew hard. [. . . ] and the Wind blew harder still. [. . . ] and the Wind still blew harder. [. . . ] and the Wind was very strong. [. . . ] and the Wind was very, very strong." This is a linguistic rendering of the degrees of intensity of Wind, which helps us make sense of felt tensions as well (see the introduction to polarities, intensities, and tensions evident in our immediate mythic—experience of nature in Section 2.2).

Second, the story makes very clear that Wind is a powerful phenomenon. The power of Wind shows itself in passages where we hear about what the Wind is Power of Wind doing or causing: "But again the Wind came and blew him back to shore" or "Now the Wind was so strong that it blew off all his hair. . . ". Indeed, the experience of power pervades the entire story and its messages.

There is a third fundamental feature of Wind—its : Wind can be "bigger" or "Size" of Windsize "smaller." This does not come out so clearly in the story, but we know that it is important to Wind: in a hurricane, Wind extends over hundreds or thousands of kilometers; the "size" of a tornado may be just a few dozens of meters. What we see here is the (spatial) extension of Wind. Extension is implied in the story— Extension of Wind we get a feeling for it as we read about the long journey from the ocean to the mountain top during which Koluskap is subject to strong Winds; and when we hear about the size of Wocawson's wings that make the Wind. This is how we measure extension: the extension of Wind is proportional to the size of an area exposed to Wind; the bigger the area, the "more Wind" we can catch. The area is the cross section of an object—a person, a building, sails of a ship, the blades of a wind turbine—facing the Wind.

In Why We Need Wind, the characteristic of extension or size or quantity ("How much wind is there?) appears to us in the form of the body of Wocawson. When the Wind Eagle is large, with its wings spread wide, there is a lot of Wind; if he is small, tied up and stuck in the crevice, there is no Wind. Through its embodiment, Wocawson tells us about the fact that Wind can be big or small.

Wind is experienced as an agent. Wocawson lets an image of Wind as a (more or less) powerful agentive entity or being (an agent) Wind is fierce or gentle, 17 arise in our mind. Wind is either big or small, and fierce or gentle, and therefore more or less powerful. The imagery arising here is a simple example of what myth can be about: it gives us personalistic access to our experience of nature. To mythic experience, the perceptual unit arising in consciousness is as real as the direct (pure) physical activity of wind alone (i.e., Wind as purely physical or material). The character we call Wind is the synthesis of the pure (physical) activity and the image(s) it gives rise to in our embodied mind.

Does calling Wind an agent mean that we give human characteristics to Wind? Remember that what we call the Wind Eagle in modern renderings of the story in English, is, first of all, a verb (Wocawson → it is windy) describing an activity and not a person. Still, in mythic experience, Wocawson (Wind) becomes a character we can interact and communicate with; such experience is accepted as true—Wind, Wind is a being as experienced by a mythic mind, is truly a being, an agent, but not human.

When we speak about Wind, we can use natural everyday language without having to anthropomorphize the agent, and still get the full (mythic) experience of the Natural language phenomenon. Natural oral language has all the tools we need for this task: it is rich in basic human schematic abstractions, metaphors, and analogies which are the building blocks of imaginative accounts of our experience. When integrated in a story, these elements make narrative experience possible that interacts with direct physical experience and so makes rich experience of Forces possible (see Fig.1.3 for a model of the interaction of myth, language, and narrative).

Forces of Nature as created in mythic experience. In summary, we can say that Wind is experienced as an agent having intrinsic characteristics of intensity, Forces are agents extension (size), and power. Causal interactions (such as when Wind interacts in the environment and with us) lead to images of agents which we call Forces. Importantly, the images are in us, but they are taken for real, for existing out there—this is a typically mythical form of awareness. Without going into detail at this point—we will do this at length in later chapters—it should be clear that Rain, Light, Fire, Water, Heat and Cold, Electricity and Magnetism, Gravity, Motion, Food and Medicine, and many more, belong to the family of Forces of which Wind is a member (see Chapter 2 for a first encounter with this family).

### Myth

We shall now extend and deepen our understanding of basic characteristics of myth by describing in more detail what mythic experience and consciousness are about. In doing this, we follow the analysis provided by A. F. Losev in his 1930 treatise The Dialectics of Myth. 18 According to Losev, myth is a personalistic symbolic rendering of immediate experience; it is real to the senses. Before we explain what this means, we shall briefly describe another example of mythic experience—that of color and sound.

Experiencing colors and sounds. Here is another example19 that can inform us about myth and its centrality to meaning-making even today when we have "progressed" beyond primary forms of understanding. The example is about how we experience and understand colors and sound, how we speak about the experience, and how this is different from and yet basic to scientific understanding.

big or small—a more or less powerful entity

and mythic experience

experienced in causal interactions Most likely, we all have used expressions such as warm and cold colors; sharp and dull or heavy and light sounds. Red might appear as aggressive, green as calming, blue as cold, and different sounds have their own qualities. The point is that these expressions report true experience— Mythic experience we do not superficially embellish colors and sounds with some fancy qualities; colors are warm or cold, sounds are heavy or light. This is mythic experience.

In these examples of experience, senses of color (sight) and sound are fused with senses of hotness (or coldness), sharpness, and weight; new perceptual units are formed. Note that the characterizations are made in terms of qualities (rather than quantities or matter). The qualities belong to polarities such as hot ↔ cold or sharp ↔ dull, each of which creates a scale allowing for different "values" of a quality lined up between the poles; in the case of the hot ↔ cold polarity, degrees of "hotness" are anywhere between burning hot and freezing cold. We shall learn how the experience of polarities is central to a scientific analysis of Forces.20

Modern cognitive science recognizes the association of color or sound (and other perceptual phenomena) with qualities from other domains of experience as cases of metaphoric projection from one domain onto another (this is particularly true of Metaphor Conceptual Metaphor Theory in cognitive linguistics; we shall describe metaphor and other cognitive tools in detail in Volume 2). This is an example of modern theoretic work based upon what, at its core, is mythology. A mythic mind perceives a unity, an equality, between sight (of color) and warmth; as we have said, colors are warm or cold or can have other characteristics. In cognitive linguistic research, we create an imbalance; knowledge of the domain of heat is projected onto the domain of (seeing) color. The two are not the same any longer as in myth—our modern mind tells us that green feels as if it were calming.

Three forms of expression. Losev discusses three different forms of expression in which we Connecting inner and create particular relations between two spheres of being: an outer physical realm of object or phenomenon, and an inner mental realm of idea or image. The three forms of expression—allegory, model, and symbol—are distinguished by the type of balance or imbalance they create between inner and outer realms.21 In an allegory, the outer world is "weightier" than the inner one. In a model, the relation is reversed. But in a symbol, there is perfect balance between physical phenomenon and idea or image—the two are equal. Let us see what this means Balance in symbol for our understanding of myth.

Myth is neither allegory nor model. To characterize myth, it is also important to say what it is not. A mythic story is not an allegory even though it may contain one. In a fable, we have animals speaking and presenting us with a message. Nobody takes the speaking animals for real; their task is to point to the message. Wocawson is clearly different from such animals: he (or she or it) is Wind, a character we interact with, and this experience is real for a mythic mind.

Neither is myth a (formal) model in the sense of a schema or blueprint pointing to a particular real object, such as when the drawing or plan of a house allows an architect to have the house built. Wocawson is not a model of wind, Wocawson is Wind. All of this points to the reality of Wind in mythic consciousness. Our mind creates a synthesis of phenomenon and image, forming a new reality.

Myth is a symbol. The clear feeling of a new unity of two separate things arising in mythic awareness is a further indication that a myth is neither an allegory nor a model—it is a symbol. Allegory and model are "unbalanced" relations; in an allegory, idea follows from phenomenon (such as talking animals in a fable), and in a model (such as a blueprint for a machine), object follows from idea. In a symbol, of color and sound

outer spheres of being in allegory, model, and symbol

however, the two sides, phenomenon and image, are united as a new reality; in other words, one stands for the other, they are in balance, they are equals. Wind is the agent as described and perceived in Why We need Wind; it is a character we can communicate with.

yet it can never exist apart from myth, which means that it is always suffused with mythology."24 Third, and most centrally important for the development of a scientific attitude, Myth and basic myth provides us with basic forms of rationality—with specific cognitive tools—that make formal scientific reasoning about, and the creation of theories of, Forces of Nature possible.

### Experiencing and communicating about Forces of Nature

We shall now describe a model of experiencing nature that rests upon two pillars: accepting nature as a partner, i.e., creating a second-person relation between child (or adult) and nature; and participatory sense-making when child and caregiver jointly experience nature. Regarding the former, establishing a second-person relation means that we call nature a you rather than a he/she/it. The second is characterized by child and caregiver communicating in natural oral language and by possibly using other means of communication such as play-acting, drawing, singing, etc.—about their joint experience. Since direct or immediate experience Joint experience of the natural world is an important element of this model, it may be called a modern rendering of mythic participation in the world.

A model of experience. The model is illustrated in Fig.1.2. The green boxes represent "objects" such as the physical world, a primary organism (say, a young child), a second organism (maybe a primary caregiver), cultural artifacts (such as written texts and materials for simple experiments). If the texts are stories, they can be read directly by a child having achieved some literacy; or it can be mediated indirectly by another human: a storyteller. Naturally, the primary caregiver can take the role of the storyteller.

Figure 1.2: A schematic rendering of a model of human experience. In its most extended or general form, experience is the result of the synthesis of several forms of interaction (feedback loops) between entities (boxes) in the world (physical world, persons, and artifacts). Only a selected few possible types of interaction are shown.

A loop denotes the unified process of action and perception, i.e., an interaction. Its form calls attention to the nature of experience: it is the result of Feedback loops of feedback loops such as those acting between a human and the natural world. Unfortunately, quite often, experience is taken in the restricted sense of perception alone—let's call it impression of a person by the world—which is a one-way flow of information (which

action and perception

forms of rationality

then is worked upon by a computational mind, just as what would happen in a computer). Often, we speak of sense impressions and treat them in the manner just described—as one-way flows of data. Naturally, there are also material objects flowing toward and into the human organism; natural scientists would add that this also includes energy. However, we are interested in what we usually call information: what we gather by sense-impressions.

In contrast, it should be clear that a living organism such as an animal or human acts upon the environment, not just the environment upon the organism. While we might do this in response to sense-impressions, the two, perception and action, are not normally seen as constituting a unity of experience—but in fact they do.25

### Learning about Wind

narrative experience

Experiencing Wind and learning about it

Let us briefly outline what experiencing Wind could mean for early education. According to the model of experience just described, we need a child, nature (a windy day!), a teacher, some more children, and a storyteller. The only interactions or communications are those between child and nature, teacher and nature, teacher and child, between the child and his or her peers, and between the narrator of a story about Wind and the group of children. This limits Direct physical and the experiential interactions to direct physical interactions between humans and nature, and oral narrative communication between humans. In such a system, we believe, mythic awareness will arise. It can, if properly developed, support later more scientifically oriented explorations of the natural world.

> If you are a teacher, take your young students out into nature and let them experience Wind. Speak with them about what they and you experience—in the widest sense of the word—and, at one point, tell them a story about Wind, maybe the one we have seen here or one you have written yourself. Make sure that you and the children speak about how intense Wind can be, how "big," i.e., spread out it can be, and how powerful it may be as experienced through what it does to them and you and the things around you. Use the simplest, clearest, everyday, non-scientific and non-formal language you can find. Observe mythic consciousness arising and be sensitive to how it may be strengthened and developed.

as causal loop

Experience is active/dynamical. In contrast to the limited view sketched above, we shall describe interactions between the participants in our model (natural world, Experiencing child, caregiver, etc.) as feedback-loops, as closed loops of influencing and causing. Researchers working on some of the modern approaches of cognition and mind have demonstrated how, for example, visual perception and action—getting the body ready to visually perceive—form a unified whole that is best understood as feedback in a dynamical system.26 In other words, an interaction between two entities is a "give and take;" interaction is a form of communication in a deep sense, not a one-way transfer of information. This applies not just to our interaction with nature but with all other entities as well. In particular, talking to each other is a feedback process of hearing (perceiving) and speaking (acting); even just hearing is an active loop of perception and action.

> If we consider the example of hearing and speaking, i.e., interaction through oral language, it becomes clear that there is more to the experience of (human) com

munication: something happens in our mind. If we are aware of it, it is clear that we are thinking (in a very general sense of the word) as a response to the loop of hearing and speaking (or simply orienting ourselves to the speaker—to get ready to listen). What happens in the process we call thinking can be described as an inner feedback loop of experiencing. Models have been developed that speak of simulated experience, such as the response one has to hearing or reading a story (see Volume 2 for a discussion of narrative experientiality27).

Enactive models of cognition. In enactive or embodied models of human cognition,28 the mind is assumed to arise as a result of human-world interactions, where a person's world is made up by nature, other humans, and cultural artifacts. Forms of interaction can be action-perception loops between people and nature, orally linguistic with other people, literary with books, artistic (when we use paint and canvas, or our body in performances), or technical with machines and buildings. Importantly, in a human organism, these interactions are accompanied by (and they communicate with) inner simulated forms of experience.

In summary, we use the term experience in Dewey's (1925) sense, as the result of feedback in action-perception loops occurring between an organism and its physical, social, psychological, and cultural-linguistic environments. Alternatively, we might call experience the unified action of perception and conception.

Our model is one of mythical consciousness. In research on modern cognitive science, myth is rarely a theme. However, if we restrict our attention to the most direct or immediate experience of nature by a human, accompanied by communication with other humans in an oral society, the model presented in Fig.1.2 may offer a good image of mythic experience.

## 1.2 The Development of Myth and Orality

Some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, and possibly earlier, modern humans started populating our planet. The designation (early) modern is referring to people who possessed fully developed (oral) language. They were anatomically modern and developed cultural features that went very much beyond what had come before. These humans and their culture(s) and societies seem to have developed over a time span that may have started 400,000 years ago, during the decline of what was the very long lasting (1.5 million years or so) culture of Homo Erectus. It is assumed that the mythic culture(s) of early modern people have survived up to today in some hunter-gatherer societies.

We are interested in the development of both orality and myth, and in the question of how they relate to each other. In order to understand this relation and the forms of consciousness they afford us even today, it may be helpful to briefly look further back to what has been termed mimetic culture, and forward to the cultures of literacy. This may give us a clearer impression of why and how myth and orality are important. How they are important for modern educational models will be explored in the following section.

### Before myth: Episodic and mimetic cultures

Scholars exploring the history of the human species and our evolving mental powers typically divide the entire historical period from early hominids up to today into (more or less) distinct phases.29 This development or, rather, evolution, is said to by phylogenetic, in contrast to the development of an individual from birth to death which is called ontogenetic.

When discussing the human mind and forms of understanding, we can find models Phases of human of a small number of such phases (Table 1.1) that can be called episodic, mimetic, mythic, romantic, and theoretic in phylogeny, and somatic, mythic, romantic, and philosophic in ontogeny.30 Sometimes, scholars add very recent cultural developments on top of the list and speak of ironic or some post-X phases (post-industrial, post-modern. . . ). Different researchers use different sub-divisions, but, very inter-Mythic phase estingly, they all seem to agree on a phase they call mythic, both for phylogenetic and ontogenetic developments. For education, the idea that, in ontogeny, we recapitulate cultural stages (Egan, 1997), will become important (see the rightmost column in Table 1.1, and Section 1.3). In the rest of the present section, we follow mostly Donald's (1991) description of the evolution of the human mind.

Table 1.1: Phases of the human mind

(\*) M. Donald (1991). (†) Ma: million years; ka: thousand years. (‡) K. Egan (1997); age of an individual in years.

Different types of memory. Before we sketch aspects of the evolution of the human mind, it pays to briefly mention models of animal and human memory, since memory is an element of what allows an animal to function intelligently in its environment. A particular model of memory introduces three distinct types: procedural, episodic, and semantic memory. Memory systems 31 Distinguishing between such memory systems will help us understand aspects of a model of human cognitive evolution.

Procedural memory Procedural memory is hypothesized to be the earliest to have formed in birds and mammals. It serves the performance of physical procedures such as walking and grabbing and throwing objects. It is highly schematizing, i.e., abstracting, since it would not serve us well if we had to remember every step we ever took or every type of motion of the hand we ever performed. Note that the idea of abstracting from the details of physical procedures—which animals and we must obviously do—is not far from the notion of the formation of embodied schemas that result from recurring experience of the (physical, embodied) interaction between an organism and its environment. Embodied schemas, particularly in the form of image schemas, serve a foundational role in models of figurative understanding that have been developed in cognitive science in general and in cognitive linguistics in particular.32 It seems that embodied schemas generalize the notion of procedural schemas to all results of learning having to do with our sensorimotor interactions with our physical environment (for example, see Section3.8).

cognitive evolution

Episodic memory, on the other hand, is believed to store episodes in relatively great Episodic memory detail, allowing us to have memories of things we have done and encountered. This is important in navigating a concrete physical environment and for functioning at a highly sophisticated level in social setting—being able to function physically would not be enough for social animals if we could not remember who we met the other day and what their and our roles are in a given society.

Semantic memory, finally, is said to be unique to humans: it is a memory system Semantic memory for symbols, and only humans are believed to have a fully functioning symbolic mind. Symbols are physical objects or immaterial signs (including speech) that relate to an idea or meaning—remember what we explained about the meaning of symbolic activity in the context of myth (see p.9). Art, music, dance, and human natural language are all described as symbolic systems. Having a semantic memory means that we are capable of storing and retrieving symbols—this lies at the root of the human form of meaning-making.

Episodic culture. The Hominids Great Apes are masters at episodic perception (event perception), recall, and corresponding understanding of a given situation.33 This means that they are able to recognize meaningful episodes, store them in memory, and recall them for important purposes. Meaningful episodes for a primate might include a foraging trip where food was found, who wronged him or her, and generally, who is who in the group the individual is living in. All this is important for survival and cohesion of a group of primates. "Complex societies demand a tremendous memory capacity, and the type of memory that is important in social relationships is, above all, episodic memory. Episodic memory is little else than a storage system for event perceptions, and thus there is a close tie between episodic Event perception memory and the capacity for social event perception." 34

We can expect early hominids (whose ancestry goes back some 6 million years) to possess similar cognitive abilities. Importantly, all hominids, archaic humans, and modern humans (including us) still possess the ability of event perception and episodic recognition and recall—without these functions we would not survive day one. This leads to an important message: we still have fundamentally primitive (original, primary) abilities, and we need them; what we call Event perception has "advanced" cognitive powers will have been built on top of older and simpler ones. New capacities do not replace older ones!

Mimetic culture. About 2 million years ago, a group of humans evolved whose culture would survive for another 1.5 million years or so: (HE). Homo ErectusHomo Erectus These archaic human groups developed a culture that is clearly distinct from what went before. Unlike primates and early hominids who basically stayed put in their environments, HE migrated out of Africa over large areas of the Eurasian continent. They developed tools and materials much more sophisticated than what their ancestors had. HE used fire (and probably cooked food) and engaged in seasonal hunting. Anatomical change included an increase of brain size to about 80% of today's humans.

On hard evidence from sophisticated tools and weapons—considering that there were no advanced and refined tools for producing these tools—we can hypothesize that HE needed social and cognitive skills that would allow for such tool manufacturing; this includes, importantly, skills for passing the mastery of toolmaking to the next generation and so maintaining the culture of HE. If we think of human cultural and cognitive evolution as adding layers upon existing abilities, it seems that what enabled the new culture is a new ability of re-presenting (modeling, enacting) episodic knowledge and memories. All of this had to happen without

and primates

not disappeared in us

natural (spoken) human language (there is no evidence that language in this sense could have evolved before about 100,000 years ago).

We still possess the ability to (re-)enact what we might call direct experience without making use of language per se—this is called mime (mimetically enacting experience). We do this to a large degree and in a very refined manner in all the arts (drawing, sculpture, pantomime, dance, music, film, opera, and theater) and in technical apprenticeship. It is certainly true that having language greatly facilitates passing skills from one person to another but, fundamentally, language People without language is not needed. Moreover, there are or were fully functional people who do not possess language: pre-linguistic children and deaf-mutes of the past (who did not receive education enabling them to develop a form of language). This tells us that there must be a cognitive layer between episodic culture and mythic understanding (where the latter depends upon our modern form of language).

Mimetic skill Mimetic skill can be very sophisticated. It can create elements for enacting episodes that are part of our modern natural language as well. "Mimetic skill or mimesis rests on the ability to produce conscious, self-initiated, representational acts that are intentional but not linguistic." 35 Note the reference to conscious and intentional acts. We can think of the importance of intentionality in how a prelinguistic child detects the intentions of a parent in participatory sense-making. Apparently, other primates mostly lack this ability, at least in its sophisticated form.36 A list of properties of mimetic acts can give us a feeling for what is involved: mimesis is intentional, generative, communicative, referential, auto-cueing, and allows for enacting an unlimited number of events. Being generative means that mime includes symbols that can be re-combined in different sequences for expressing different situations and intentions; auto-cueing refers to an individual being able to prompt himself or herself for mimetic acts and to recall how specific episodes were mimed before and by others. All this may have led to a cognitive ability we can call an early form of thinking. In sum, "Mime is intentional; its objective is the representation of an event." 37

> Mimetic ability can explain some social sophistication that must have been in place with HE, such as representing social structure, coordinating group actions (such as hunting), simple pedagogy, including apprenticeship, and games. HE set itself apart from the other primates, and with mimesis, set the stage for the next phase of human cognitive evolution.38

### Mythic Culture and Oral Language

The next stage in the evolution of our mind may have started a couple hundred thousand years ago but was not fully in place until about 40,000 to 50,000 years before present. We refer here to what has been unanimously called a mythic phase of human development. The humans emerging during the transition from mimesis Homo S. Sapiens to myth are what we now call modern humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens).

Judging from archeological records, especially those showing us the artistic achieve-Indigenous societies ments of modern humans (see p.18), and surviving mythic indigenous societies, social structures and oral language developed much more profoundly and earlier than technology. Toolmaking did not progress beyond HE levels as fast as social and cognitive inventions must have.39 Therefore, looking to tool-making as the driving force in the development of the modern mind in general and language Technology lagged in particular, might be the wrong place for us to search. It seems more likely that a general trend towards greater, more intense, and longer lasting episodes of

behind linguistic skill

conscious awareness, both in individuals and shared in social groups, must have been the force that led to change. In some mythical stories, we can interpret a recurring theme of moving toward the light and fear of falling back into the dark as an expression of the meaning and emotional power of becoming conscious.40

One of the most powerful examples of experience early modern humans may have become conscious of is the certainty of personal death. Becoming conscious of this, maybe through the practice of killing animals, may very well be a powerful reason for needing to understand our place in nature and society41—something myth is predestined to help us with. Myth originates as a response to emotional and psychological pressure that needed to be dealt with socially—it could not be dealt with in an isolated mind. Inevitably, myth creates a new form of understanding upon the existing mimetic mind.

There is much to learn from the studies of myth and mythic societies that have been undertaken to date—too much to deal with here. We shall discuss the importance of art for myth, and of myth for education, further below. At this point we just want to describe a model that may help us understand the Co-evolution of myth, co-evolution of mythical consciousness and oral language (see Fig.1.3), which will be a recurring theme in our subject of primary science education.

Figure 1.3: A strongly simplified dynamical model of the development of myth (mythic consciousness, culture, and mythic stories).  The feedback cycle may have been initiated by the emotional need of late Homo Erectus or early modern humans for expressing intensifying (self-)awareness of their place in the world. Small cycles symbolize mutual development of consciousness and product (such as symbolic understanding and language skill).

For myth(s) to develop, three capacities needed to be in place or, rather, to coevolve: mythic consciousness or understanding, symbolic understanding, and the general understanding of narrative (a narrative mind). Let us take a look at language which is a symbolic form of human expression. On the surface, language consists of linguistic symbols—parts of words, words, utterances, and whole sentences. More fundamentally, these symbols consist of a physical part—the spoken and heard sound—and a meaning. These would be the units our Myth and language semantic memory keeps for us to be retrieved upon cueing (when we hear or read a linguistic symbol). In other words, language is symbolic in the same way myth is (remember how we described the meaning of symbol above on p.9: a symbol unites two spheres of being, physical and ideal, in a new perceptual unit or gestalt).

Myth to language. Starting the model of co-evolution of myth, language, and narrative with myth (we can actually start at any point in a loop like the one seen in Fig.1.3), lets us hypothesize that myth drives language development. Mythic are both symbolic

language, and narrative

consciousness creates the need for expressing the particular mythic experience the unified image arising from a phenomenon such as wind and the emotion, feeling, idea it give rise to, i.e., the character of Wind—in a different way, so one can re-present it to oneself, or maybe share it with others who have the Mythic and same mythic experience. linguistic symbol We can assume that the mythic symbol—Wind—will be modeled and expressed in terms of another symbol such as the linguistic symbol wind. The linguistic symbol is the object that is created by fusing the sound wInd (this is the phonetic rendering of the English word wind) with a meaning. This meaning could be borrowed from the meaning associated with the (mythic) experience. If it is, we have an explanation of how linguistic signs are understood: their meaning should coincide with a non-linguistic meaning created in experience: we understand something through language if the linguistic sign gives rise to the feeling and meaning of the original experience. Language to narrative. This brings us to the next point: experience is experience of something going on, an event. An event can be "microscopic," a very brief incident such as you noticing all of a sudden that there is wind (the awareness of wind popping up in your mind); it can be a "meso-scale" episode such as wind Story for large- blowing a leaf along a street; or a scale experience large-scale phenomenon such as a storm hitting a beach, creating giant waves that destroys a town.42 The human way of reporting and recording the event is to tell or recall a story. A story—the prototype of narrative—includes all of the following elements: (1) events; (2) (conscious) Story: Elements experiencing of events by agents; (3) tension for creating events; and (4) reason or occasion for telling by a narrator.43 This short list already hints at a strategy for understanding Forces of Nature: tell stories about them! "Narrative skill is the basic driving force behind language use, particularly speech: the ability to describe and define events and objects lies at the heart of language acquisition."44 Narrative in general and stories in particular tell of a narrative mind, a way of understanding the world around us with the help of narratives. Stories are more than the reporting and recording of an "atom" of experience ("there is a leaf on the street"): they give form to a unified experience that includes the perception of agency and explanation of what is going on in terms of such agency; explicitly or implicitly, they are telling us about the meaning of the experience. Note, that "narrative imagination can be supported in a purely oral, or preliterate, tradition;"45 we know this from indigenous hunter-gatherer societies that existed until just recently (or are still existing), and we know this from young children before they become fully literate. Narrative to myth. This bring us back to myth and concludes the cycle we use Concrete myths as our model of how myth, language, and narrative co-evolved (Fig.1.3). are narratives Concrete myths are presented in story-form. We need a narrative mind in order to put mythical experience into proper linguistic form. In their totality, and if they are developed to a high degree, language, narrative, and myth are "the prototypical, fundamental, integrative mind tool. [They try] to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework. [They are] inherently a modeling device, whose primary level of representation is thematic" 46 rather than episodic.

### Mythic art: Abstraction and imagination

While oral language is a premier mythic cognitive tool, we should not forget all the other possibilities of human expression that must have shaped, and were shaped Art is symbolic by, mythic culture as well: drawing, sculpting, acting and dancing, and making music. They all represent symbolic capacities that grew out of mimetic culture. Of all these, the products of visual art have survived the tens of thousands of years since their invention (Fig.1.4).47

There is much controversy as to what meaning the various artifacts might have had for their creators and owners. If we do not want to impose our modern way of thinking and understanding upon these ancient artistic expressions, we have to admit that it is difficult to answer this question. A few things are certain, however. The art was produced at a time when oral language had developed to a very high standard (judging from oral cultures still existing today), and it was a part of mythic society (again judging from today's oral civilizations). One more thing we can say with certainty—and it is important for the theme of this chapter and the book as a whole—the art speaks of a mind capable of extraordinary feats of abstraction and imagination.

Figure 1.4: Drawings of ice age art by RF (photographs of these objects can be found online or in Cook, 2013). Left: Female figure. Center: Abstract ornaments on a mammoth tusk. Right: Lion Man. The Lion Man is about 40,000 years old; both the female figure and the mammoth tusk engraved with geometric forms are roughly 25,000 years old.

Consider, Ice age art is the abstract rendering of a female figure (Fig.1.4, left). Here, a human body is composed of idealized geometric volumes as in a modern cubist panting. Simple schematic elements are used for representing a real object, a human body, in a highly abstract image. The engravings on a mammoth tusk (Fig.1.4, center) are schematically abstract in the same basic sense. Whether or not the image is purely ornamental or may be a kind of map, as has been suggested, of the area where the object was created, does not change our judgement that the art is highly abstract, a result of the schematizing action of the human mind (see p.23 below, and Fig.1.5).

Now, take a look at the statue of the Lion Man (Fig.1.4, right) discovered at the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany in 1939. Here, our focus is on the imaginative activity of the artist: whatever the meaning or use of the figure may have been, a being of this type does not exist in physical reality, but it may so quite easily in mythic reality. Artistic creation and enaction of beings that do not exist physically is one of the great powers of imagination that have shaped important aspects of understanding the world, starting at least with the mythic age.

### Orality and Literacy: Development of writing

Let us add a very brief outline of the cognitive evolution that came after myth, the invention of linguistic symbolic enacting of experience, and the growth of literacy. abstract and imaginative

memory, judge, what [the] use and powers [of the oral tradition] were, at a time, when all a man could know, was all he could remember. To which we may add, that, in a rude and unlettered state of society the memory is loaded with nothing that is either useless or unintelligible; whereas modern education employs us chiefly in getting by heart, while we are young, what we forget before we are old."

Poets and bards would use the overall arc of a story plus the power of rhythm and rhyme to produce the story and its verses anew every time they recited an epic for the public; in other words, a bard would improvise, in the best and deepest sense of the word. Being able to do this would have taken a lot of training of a type we no longer use.

## 1.3 Children's Oral Mythic World

Myth is the first "modern" form (modern in the sense of modern humans) of relating to nature that is still with us today.49 We are not usually aware of this, particularly not in scientific approaches to the world around us; so, part of our goal for this book is to show how myth—even though it is not science or scientific in any sense of the word—helps us enter the world of scientific studies of nature.

We owe much of our knowledge of the importance and meaning of mythic culture for primary education to Kieran Egan,50 a philosopher of education who suggested how specific cognitive tools Cognitive tools 51 such as play, metaphor, story, sense of agency, tools of literacy (forms, lists, maps. . . ), the search for authority and truth, and metanarrative understanding, develop through ontogenetic phases of cognitive growth he calls Mythic, romantic, mythic, romantic, and philosophic (Table 1.1) in a manner resembling cultural development. When children first enter and develop an oral culture, they are said to go through a phase of mythic consciousness. Only later would they become capable of using the tools we usually associate with a scientific attitude, practice, and understanding.

If we apply Egan's idea to education, we might speak of a scheme of recapitulation of cognitive cultural stages. 52 After briefly touching upon this idea, we shall describe examples of early emergence of abstract and imaginative forms of understanding in young children. Finally, we list some of the cognitive tools of mythic culture we can identify in today's children. In general, we choose and emphasize aspects that refer most directly to our theme, to nature education.

### Cultural evolution & Cultural Recapitulation

While there seems to be a relatively straightforward line of ontogenetic development from mimesis, to oral language, and to early and refined uses of literacy (especially influenced by print53), cognitive stages relating to this evolution do not follow a simple historical sequence. Take the example of romantic understanding which can be associated with at least three historical phases in European cultures. There is a first occurrence of "romance" in the historical writings of Herodotus who, after the oral history of early Homeric Greece wrote about the wonders of Egypt; his writings differ sharply from a modern analytical and intellectual approach to history (which, by the way, was already achieved by Thucydides shortly after Herodotus' writing in his analysis of the Peloponnesian war). We can again recognize a romantic attitude in the early Renaissance, which brought us a modern sense of space (rather than just an understanding of spatial relations); we can see this in Francisco Petrarch's description (1336) of himself climbing to the summit of Mont Ventoux and seeing the Rhone valley lying below.54 And, naturally, there is the modern age of romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, where poets tried to give nature and science a new (old?) meaning after we have already had a phase of philosophic/theoretic development in Newton's physics and Descartes' philosophy.

and philosophic phases

Maybe the simplest way of characterizing cognitive cultural (not historical!) stages is in terms of forms of language use (Table 1.1, column 3). In a very crude form, directed by our focus on nature and science, we can associate myth with a sense of nature being populated by "animated" entities; romance denotes a form of enhanced awareness of a distance between self and world which makes it possible to see nature as consisting of a great number of wondrous and awe-inspiring "things" we might want to get to know; and philosophic understanding gives us a sense of the meaning of analysis and theory, of formal schemes and theoretic knowledge. Clearly, cognitive tools of early and "high" literacy take time to develop.

In sum, recapitulation of cognitive stages must mean something different than retracing either biological, psychological, or historical phases. In particular, we should not want to compare today's children to adults in past oral mythic societies. Neither do children have the experience of a long life nor are they part of a purely oral society—today, they are part of a culture that values and employs tools of literacy. Therefore, "[the] basis of the comparison [between past oral cultures and today's children], however, is neither knowledge content nor psychological development but techniques that are required by orality." "Orality entails a set of powerful and effective mental strategies [. . . that] should be conserved as foundations for more sophisticated forms of understanding." 55

Repeating what we said before, children should not be treated as incomplete adults but as complete human beings in a phase where they develop (or are already in possession of) a certain set of mental tools. Among their most important abilities are powers of abstraction and imagination (see p.23).

Children and their learning. If we now turn to the question of how all of this relates to children and their learning, we first have to ask when is a child not a child any longer? If we are interested in primary science education, it probably makes sense to put the transition of where children become adolescents at an age of 11 to 12 years. Yet, this leaves us with a very long period indeed during which Children's mythic children develop in major ways. We will therefore, for our present purpose, choose an age range between about 3 or 4 to 8 or 9 years when, as has been pointed out by Egan, children go through a developmental phase he calls mythic. 56

> The mythic phase of children—a recapitulation of cognitive aspects of mythic culture in the history of human development—is characterized by the development of cognitive tools chiefly associated with oral language; to these we should add mime, art and music, rhyme and rhythm, games, and story.

By age four, most children master much of spoken language. Then, by age 8-10, they will have acquired some facility with early literacy (in Egan's terminology, Romantic culture this is the beginning of romantic culture and understanding57). This move greatly changes the type of cognitive tools available to children, not to mention important changes in their psychological makeup that will occur soon after. Therefore, when we want to discuss how children encounter Forces of Nature, we need to consider the age of the children and the cognitive tools available to them.

> The reader will have noticed that we assume phases to overlap and merge into one another. It would be wrong, for example, to assume that if we wish to develop mythic understanding and the cognitive tools related to it, we should refrain of developing literacy. Not only would this be impossible to do—in our school systems, children begin reading and writing rather early—it would also rob us of the opportunity to use some tools of literacy for working on mythic understanding. If stories are an important ingredient of the mythic phase, why should children not be taught to read them by themselves? The point is simply that the stories should

understanding

be of a form that supports myth; in our view, this is particularly important if we create and use stories of Forces of Nature.

These issues will accompany us throughout our book and will come up prominently again and again. Different issues in Primary Physical Science Education and different ways of dealing with them will call for new perspectives for learners at different stages of development. Let us start with a couple of issues relating to the younger group of children. We shall discuss how steps toward science could be taken in Section 1.4.

### Children and the power of abstraction and imagination

A first basic question that will concern us here is about how small children experience nature. We have claimed that body and mind provide us with experience of a perceptual unit we call Force of Nature (FoN), and that concrete Forces are understood in terms of schematic structures developing in us through recurring sensorimotor activity as we interact with the world around us (see, in particular, the sub-section starting on p.7). Can we recognize young children's minds in our description of how we understand Forces of Nature? After all, the description is made from the perspective of adults for other adults in literate societies.

A pertinent point in our discussion concerns the issue of abstraction. Depending upon which developmental psychologists and educators we listen to, we may be told that children and adolescents develop through stages called sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational. This is sometimes abbreviated as saying that children are concrete thinkers who, much later in life, develop the ability of abstract thinking.58 We shall take a different perspective in this book.

Abstracting as schematizing action of mind. Before we continue discussing the development of cognitive tools of young children, we should describe what we mean by abstraction. In fact, abstraction can be taken to mean quite a few different things (Fig.1.5). Sometimes, we say that abstract is what is not concrete, but then we need to explain what we mean by "concrete." Sometimes the distinction is made between physical and nonphysical, such as when we refer to a house or a tree as (physically) concrete and to justice or anger as (non-physically) abstract. In our view, it makes a lot more sense to keep the designations physical and nonphysical rather than concrete and abstract in order to make this distinction.

Figure 1.5: Possible meanings of the words "abstract." There are some uses (such as for complex/difficult of formal as in mathematics) that should be rejected—they do not mean abstract in any sense. We prefer to use "abstract" in the sense of schematizing.

There are other uses of the word abstract that do not make much sense. In everyday life, we quickly use the designation for things and situations that are complex and difficult or formal (as in mathematics and formal logic); see Fig.1.5. To the extent that mathematics is formal, it does not create or deal with abstractions per se—which does not mean that mathematics would be incapable of creating its own new abstractions.

However, as we shall discuss shortly, abstract may make sense if we use it for not-concrete in the opposition of concrete – generalized, i.e., if we mean a concrete specimen (which can include a "specimen" of justice or anger) as opposed to the abstract category made of all possible cases of buildings or instances of the perception of justice.

The verb to abstract stems from Latin (abstrahere) and means something like drag away from, remove (forcibly), split, keep away from, exclude. Its root, trahere, means pull, draw, or drag. This comes close to how we shall use the term here: it Abstracting as describes the power of the human mind to schematize, to create shapes, figures, or schematic images (which do not have to be visual at all) from concrete experience (Fig.1.5). Concrete experience—and this includes the experience of emotions and feelings that lead us to phenomena we are inclined to call purely abstract such as love or justice—is transformed through recurrent activity of body and mind into schemas which we are able to put before us in imagination, manipulate, and work with.

> This sense of abstract does include its use for distinguishing between concrete and general (i.e., general in the sense of not concrete). However, it is best described by an example of schematizing action which we can see happening in Fig.1.5: if you look at it carefully, you may see an oval around the word Abstract at the center of the spatial arrangement of the terms and lines: the straight lines end at the periphery of a non-existing oval and so let the oval appear in our mind it is imagined. This is an example of what is called (visual) gestalt perception. Importantly, gestalts do not have to be visual or graphic—they can be auditory or related to any of the other kinds of our senses.

DL's language and stories. Here are some examples of early linguistic, narrative, and artistic development of a boy we had the privilege to observe. When DL was one and a half years old, he started speaking. Observations of the development Image schemas of his language are quite revealing of how schematic structures become accessible early in life. Binary opposites and polarities became evident as soon as the first words emerged and were expressed as single terms: up for up ↔ down, open for open ↔ closed, cold for cold ↔ warm are among the most important examples.59 What appeared to be names for some objects actually denoted fairly large-scale experiential units: coffee stood for the action sequence consisting of being carried to the coffee machine, turning it on, opening the lever (for which the term open was used), inserting a capsule, closing the lever (when DL again uttered open), placing a cup, and pressing the button for the espresso; a second uttering of coffee called for his grandfather to sit on the couch and drink the coffee. The term jacket meant that he wanted his jacket, be carried downstairs to the terrace door, be lifted so he could insert the key and open the door (this sequence was called key), and then go outside.

> Logical conjunctions came early as well: not was first, then came and; or actually took quite a bit longer, until DL was maybe three or even three and a half. Naturally, he had nouns for objects as well, but they did not seem to be particularly dominant in the totality of his use of language.

schematizing action

in early language

When DL was exactly four years old, Stories told by rather than having a story told to him, he told his father a bedtime story about Baby Wolf:

DL: Eines Tages war dort ein Baby Wolf. Der hat so haauuu gemacht, und der ruft nach seiner Mama. Und dann bin ich angekommen zu dem Baby Wolf und habe ihm geholfen.

Und dann bin ich in einen Abfluss rein gegangen, da bin ich hoch und runter, rechts und links, hoch, runter, rechts und links. Und dann bin ich bei der Wolf-Mama angekommen.

Dann bin ich wieder hoch und runter, rechts und links, hoch, runter, rechts und links, gegangen. Dann sind wir rausgegangen aus dem Abfluss.

Und dann bin ich wieder nach Hause gegangen.

Father: Da hast Du eine gute Tat gemacht.

Father: Der Baby Wolf ?

[English translation: DL: One day there was a baby wolf. He made so haauuu, and he calls for his mama. And then I arrived at the baby wolf and helped him. And then I went into a drain, I went up and down, right and left, up, down, right and left. And then I arrived at the wolf-mama. Then I went up and down, right and left, up, down, right and left again. Then we went out of the drain. And then I went back home. Father: You did a good deed there. DL: And it was very small.... Father: The baby wolf? DL: No, the story...]

As a unit, the story is generated by a tension derived from a polarity (insecure Polarities in stories ↔ secure, fearful ↔ consoled, or similar)—the little wolf is lost and fearful; DL is ready to help and reunites the little wolf with its mother. For DL, we might also postulate a polarity expressing his willingness to help (helpful ↔ unhelpful) which accompanies another feeling expressed by good ↔ bad. The structure of the story is conventional: there is a beginning where the tension is set up, a middle where the challenge is addressed, and a resolution at the end telling us that all is good again. In the story we find words using spatial schemas that help us develop a sense of what it meant for DL to search and find the little wolf, deliver it to its mother, and return home.

DL's drawings. When he started drawing, his productions were typical of those of children his age—scribblings60 and non-figural colorful shapes. Before he approached his fourth birthday, he started representing ideas, objects, and experience in rather Abstract (image) abstract schematic manner (Fig.1.6). After a prolonged period of being fascinated by volcanoes, he drew "Dangerous Ener-Gee," as he called it (Fig.1.6- 1). Apart from this being a representation of an idea—not a material object—the drawing is highly schematic: there is a container with some stuff (dangerous energy) inside and flowing violently out at the top.

His monthlong activity of constructing bridges—which he would destroy to the song London Bridge Is Falling Down—led him to draw "Bridge Over Water," a highly abstract sketch of a concrete situation, on a blackboard (Fig.1.6-2). Finally, a little later, when he was around four and a half years old, he drew two electric towers (actually put underground below buildings; Fig.1.6-3) with cables between them.61About the drawing he said "in the middle is where the electricity acts."

young children

schemas in early art

A couple of months later he repeated the drawing but replaced the schematic figure at the center of the connecting power lines by a colorful (yellow-orange) and schematic rendering of a fire (inset Fig.1.6-3B). Ornaments developed and were used repeatedly for different objects and situations when he was about five to five and a half years old (Fig.1.6-4).

Schematizing action DL's activities provide evidence of the schematizing—abstracting—action of experience at an early age.62 If we accept the model of embodied and enactive experience, it should not come as a surprise that the production and use of schematic structures, both in language and art, must start when the life of a person begins abstraction in the sense of schematizing action of the mind happens early.63 What we call rich concrete knowledge of the world around us takes time to develop years of encountering and hearing and learning about lots of "stuff," and acquiring cognitive tools for dealing with all that "stuff," which, among other things, involves the use of literacy. Part of our job is trying to understand how the power of primary abstraction can be used by children for learning about forces of nature.

Figure 1.6: Drawings by DL when he was between a little less than four years and four and a half years old. (1) "Dangerous Ener-Gee." (2) "Bridge Over Water." (3) "In the Middle Is Where the Electricity Acts." The names or descriptions of the drawings are those given to them by DL.

### Cognitive tools of mythic understanding

We know what children—in the age range we have associated with the mythic phase (from 3 or 4 to 8 or 9)—are capable of and what they love to do. They play and invent games, they use mime and props for these games; they use simple materials such as cardboard boxes, strings, sticks, etc., for building something that may never have existed before; they sing and are able to memorize lyrics; they sing and talk to their stuffed animals, dolls, and other toys (when they are a little older, they also read to them); they might have imaginary friends and they "see" ghosts; they love to hear stories and are obviously able to invent simple ones themselves; they use abstract schemas in art; and they use metaphor and analogy64 when they recount and explain events.

The stories they like to hear or the movies they love to watch are full of fantasy the more, the better. The Disney Ice Age movies are a great example of what kind of stories and fantasy kids go for. They also love dinosaurs, but if we want to bore them out of their minds, we simply need to make them watch a typical "explanatory" tv show on dinosaurs that employs what we adults call "realism." 65

of mind at an early age

All this tells us something about the mind and the abilities of children. They abstract from the direct flow of experience and think and act imaginatively; they have great episodic memory; they use sophisticated oral language and understand metaphor and analogy; and they are able to get deeply involved in stories and play where narrative experience is created (Fig.1.2).

A list of cognitive tools. Based upon such observations, Egan proposed a list of important cognitive tools of what he described as a child's mythic phase: Cognitive tools Story; metaphor ; binary opposites; rhyme, rhythm, and pattern; jokes and humor ; mental imagery; gossip; play; and mystery (and, not to forget, embryonic forms of literacy).66 The list is strongly influenced by what is made available to us as a consequence of oral language use. Egan's general claim is that if we wish to go after the holy grail of modern education—literacy of various forms and formal reasoning—we need to create a solid foundation upon which a child can securely stand; this foundation can be found in the cognitive tools of a mythic phase.

The list of cognitive tools contains elements that may be seen as belonging to different categories or, rather, abilities present in mythic culture. Moreover, it makes sense to add important abilities to this list, particularly those that involve a more active use of our body than will be needed by just employing spoken language. This allows us to create an overview as follows (Fig.1.7): some of the cognitive tools, such as rhythm and narrative experiencing and sense-making have to do with our ability to experience (in the very general sense of the word expressed in Fig.1.7); others, not mentioned explicitly in Egan's list but certainly implied, such as miming and speaking, are part of the category of creating symbols; still others, such as play, are part of a person's or a group of persons' creations.

Figure 1.7: A feedback model of cognitive (experiential, symbolizing, and "embodied" and "manipulative") tools ordered according to our abilities to experience (in the sense of sense-making), symbolize, create, and imagine. The ability to use mental imagery underlies which symbols we create and how we play, build, and tell stories, and, finally, how we experience.

Experiencing as sense-making. Experiencing includes our ability to feel, use, and understand patterns we can see, hear, smell, taste, and perceive through direct of myth (a list)

touch. They include the sensation of temporal patterns, which is fundamentally important for our understanding of dynamical phenomena in which Forces of Nature (and other Forces) are involved.

In such patterns, we can discern differences—we can distinguish between feelings of differing intensities. More specifically, this may be the source of a prominent feature of mythic consciousness which we find expressed in much of children's activities, communication, and preferences as well: the sense of polarity or of binary opposites, 67 which are a special case of polarity (see below for a more detailed discussion of this point).

Children quite obviously understand and use metaphor, and the same is the case with narrative. Note that metaphor and narrative, listed as forms of experience and means of sense-making, do not refer to specific metaphoric expressions or par-Metaphor and story ticular stories—the terms describe our sense of, or sensibility for, seeing one thing in terms of another (in metaphor) and being sensitive to narrative experiential units that include certain specific forms, schemas, and patterns (such as events, agency and causation, and time).

> Basic symbolizing and Creating. The next two boxes in Fig.1.7 list two groups of cognitive tools that have to do with expressive acts. We have explicitly added miming (basic acting), drawing, singing (or, generally, using instruments), and speaking to the box in the middle; these are obviously implied in Egan's list, particularly speaking, but it makes sense to list them separately as tools to be used and nurtured during primary education. The abilities are among the ones that allow us to express ourselves symbolically.

as part of experiencing

### Myth & imagination Myth and imagination, imagination and myth

It is possible to interpret imagination and imaginative activity as a mental power that enables mythic consciousness. Myth relates two spheres of existence: the inner with the outer; the idea (image, shape, or figure) to the real object or phenomenon (which includes what is felt of body and emotions, such as joy, anger, pain, justice and injustice, clarity and confusion, etc.).

The role of imagination in the concrete creative activity of a person or group of persons is exactly this: it enables the purely physical of the activity to be related to its meaning. By presenting images of the real to consciousness, we create the symbols which are the essence of myth.

Therefore, educating the imagination is part of nurturing and forming the cognitive tools of myth (and other phases). Imagination is not just one of a number of cognitive tools—it is entwined with each of these tools.

Miming, drawing, singing, and speaking may be understood as basic abilities whereas art and music, crafts (building, designing), playing and acting, and storytelling clearly refer to what we see children do, often and over longer periods of time—these are the actual activities children create. Even though symbolic acts such as miming and speaking can appear spontaneously on their own, seemingly out of a larger context, they usually are integral parts of the creative activities listed in the box on the right in Fig.1.7.

Imagination and imaginative activity. Children demonstrate how creative they can be through their acts and products: the songs they sing, the objects they build, the games they play, and the stories they tell. These activities are imaginative in the sense that they create and use mental images.

Before we continue, three things need to be explained about mental images. First, they do not have to be visual—they can be auditory or olfactory or generally related to any of our senses (including that of temporal patterns). Second, mental imagery is visible not only in creative activity but also, and very importantly so, in symbolizing and experiencing. How we understand metaphor and narrative, or mime, draw, sing, and speak "speaks" of mental imagery, i.e., of structures of imagination. The symbols we create are imaginative in a fundamental embodied sense: we might say that enactive/embodied experience supplies our mind with schematic (abstract) images, which we then use to create symbols, which, in turn, are integrated in our activities. Finally, mental imagery (or, more generally, imaginative activity) feeds back to experiencing, symbolizing, and creating. This closes several cycles of the dynamical system sketched in Fig.1.7.

Third, imaginative activity, like experiencing, takes place at Experiencing at different scales: small, medium, or large; scales can be temporal (short to long), spatial (small to large), or systemic (simple to complex).68 A mental image can be about a short incident, a medium-sized spatial scene, or a large-scale (long lasting and complex) event.

The feedback model presented in Fig.1.7 can help us understand, at least to some extent, the meaning of imagination in general and Meaning of and educating the imagination in particular.69 The most compact summary of Egan's model of educating children and adolescents might be this: we should focus upon nurturing and shaping students' power of imagination. In our model, imagination is that which mediates between the different groups of cognitive tools thereby enabling them in the first place. Think of a group of children playing and telling stories; this creative activity involves mental imagery. The structures of imagination present in this case will feed back to symbolizing abilities such as speaking and miming. If speaking, for example, is more than just the physical act of producing sound, we should assume that orality is nurtured not simply by "sounding a story," but rather, indirectly, through the images that arise in play and storytelling. We might say that the power of oral language as a symbolic activity grows out of, and Imagination as part feeds back to, the imaginative structures being symbolized (see Fig.1.3). Note that there is no arrow in Fig.1.7 that directly feeds back from creating to basic symbolizing—our mind passes through imaginative activity to complete the loop.

In the above model it appears simple to educate the imagination: make sure that mental imagery (in its broadest sense) becomes a conscious part of the activities used to train cognitive tools. We should not really have to say this but, sadly, science is the realm where imaginative activity is often viewed with suspicion. In this book, we hope to show how fundamentally imaginative any engagement with physical science must be, no matter how advanced a form it takes. The meaning of a Force of Nature, to use an example, is mythic and therefore imaginative, and so is our basic understanding of it.

### Pattern, polarity, metaphor, and story

Of all the cognitive tools mentioned here, only four—pattern, polarity, metaphor, and story—shall be discussed in more detail because they play a particularly prominent and foundational role in the pedagogy of Primary Physical Science different scales

educating the imagination

of a feedback loop

Education that we are developing here. We deal with these four again in Volume 2 where we want to sketch what has been developed, over the last few decades, in cognitive science in general and in cognitive linguistics and narratology in particular. Here, we only say a few words relating the cognitive tools to the issue of mythic understanding and primary education.

The cognitive tools in this short list are forms of experiencing or sense-making (see the model in Fig.1.7). Naturally, pattern, polarity, metaphor, and story are observed in the symbolic and creative acts children and adults are capable of; this is where—rather than in experiencing itself—they find their expression for everyone to see. Nevertheless, the four represent a group of theoretical concepts that should make it possible for us to make transparent how we experience our encounters with nature in general and Forces of Nature in particular.

From pattern to polarity. Patterns appear allover in all forms of experience; when speaking or singing, they can be experienced as rhythm and rhyme, two forms of expression that help children make sense of and remember what has been said or sung. We get visual patterns when drawing or creating objects. In general, patterns speak of felt spatial and temporal differences and similarities and their repetition.

Discriminating Without the power of degrees of a quality discriminating perceived values or degrees of the same quality—such as color, pitch and loudness of sound, temperature, sweetness, etc. we would not have patterns. Moreover, the ability to discriminate, or to distinguish, gives us another basic sense—that of binary opposites and polarities. The Binary opposites binary opposites term is used for a perceptual pair that is felt to be in tension: good and bad, happy and sad, light and dark, hot and cold, etc. For immediate social, emotional, and physical sense-making, such pairs are important. They appear prominently in understanding of the world as well, which makes them important for education. Binary opposites are organizers of meaning and can be seen as entry points to knowledge: good and bad let characters (the Good and the Bad) arise in the mind and help a child to judge social situations; light and dark, and hot and cold, give us initial access to two primary Forces of Nature—Light and Heat. We recognize the fundamentally important role binary opposites play for children if we consider the stories they like that are driven by tensions between good and bad, heroic and timid, secure and insecure, and so on.

> Binary opposites are easily perceived as acting in children's early imaginative life. It appears to take longer, though, for a sense of degrees (or characters) to emerge that are intermediate between the two elements in a perceptual pair that is in tension. Are there story characters that are placed somewhere along the distance that separates the Good from the Bad, the Hero from the Coward, etc.? More importantly for our theme, what does it take to learn that there is a continuum between extremes of hot and cold or light and dark?

Polarity This is where the concept of polarity comes in: in a polarity we have, in general, a continuum of different degrees of intensity between two poles given to a perceived quality. We are all familiar with the polarity called hotness which spans the distance between "hellishly" hot and "freaking" cold (which are taken as the poles of this polarity), and the words we have in our language for intensities that lie in between: burning hot, very hot, hot, warm, tepid, cold, very cold, freezing cold, and so on. It seems that, at least as far as knowledge of, and easy facility with, linguistic terms is concerned, education has an important role to play. Children will profit from an educational approach that places value upon learning words for different positions along the path that forms between the poles of a polarity.

Learning to understand the meaning of degrees of intensity associated with a polarity is a case of Mediating mediating between the extremes that may come to our attention first. Learning about such mediation through examples drawn from nature may very well be helpful for learning about ourselves, others, and social situations in general. Maybe, working on natural and social phenomena in an integrated educational approach where no strict distinction is drawn between the experience of hot and cold and that of good and bad will help children to mature emotionally and intellectually in tandem. We do not have to go far to see how to do this: remember the story Why We Need Wind in Section 1.1 where Koluskap and Wocawson negotiate (mediate) a value of the intensity of Wind that serves both of them. In turn, learning about social mediation may serve as an analogy to how a hot and a cold body brought in contact "negotiate" a intermediate value of temperature.

Returning to binary opposites: we have said that the perceptual pair in a binary opposite is in tension. It will be very important for our educational scheme for physical science to nurture the understanding of a feeling of tension for two different values of intensity of a physical polarity such as hot ↔ cold, high ↔ low, light ↔ dark, fast ↔ slow, and, generally, tense ↔ relaxed. Such tensions will be Tension as drive understood as the causes for Forces of Nature to be or become active.

Metaphor and story. We usually speak of a metaphor and a story, or metaphors and stories, by which we mean Metaphors & stories concrete (linguistic or visual) products. Examples of concrete metaphoric expressions are "he went over to the dark side," "my mood is up," and "the cold slowly crept into his bones." Concrete stories are Why We Need Wind (p.5) and Baby Wolf (p.25), and all the stories we have heard as children and still hear every day. As these are concrete creations, they belong in the box on the right in Fig.1.7.

What we call metaphor and story, however, are powers of experiencing and sensemaking—they are Metaphor & Story forms of understanding and thinking; more generally, they are examples of how we imagine, similar to pattern and polarity. Metaphor is said to be our ability to see one thing in terms of another (good as light, bad as dark; quality of feeling as being a vertical scale on which happy is up; or cold as a fluid capable of flowing and creeping). Story, on the other hand, is our narrative skill, our capacity to see events in complex settings caused by tensions and undergone by characters. We experience them as wholes we tell about in the form of stories that not only recount the events but create their meaning; in particular, they tell us how we should understand what happened and how we are supposed to feel about the whole affair the tale is about.

Metaphor must be a symbolic activity just like myth itself. Remember the basic Metaphor as symbol principle of myth: it brings together, unites, two spheres of being; myth is a symbol where the two elements are equal partners: one points to the other and vice versa. Metaphor does this too: it combines what in modern cognitive linguistics are called two domains (Volume 2). A modern mind, though, will tell us that the two are not on equal footing: good is not light, happy is not up, and cold is not a fluid. However, for a mythic mind, no such distinction exists. Colors and sounds are experienced through other senses (p.8): red is warm, blue is cold, a sound can be heavy, and the feeling of being secure and comforted is warmth. Interestingly, modern research70 shows that we interpret the relation in a metaphor literally upon direct, fast, and unconscious understanding, and that the domains are considered on unequal footing only upon conscious analysis. So, after all, cold is a fluid, temperature goes up when it gets warmer, and Wind is an entity we can communicate with—at least this is so for a mythic mind.

between extremes

as linguistic products

as mental powers

Children work with stories and metaphors, which tells us that they partake in the powers of metaphor and story. We do not have to assume that they are born with these capacities, nor do we need to think that they will understand metaphors and stories only if we explain them to them, i.e., if we teach them these powers. We Growing up in can think of children as beings growing up in a mythic culture where they develop their abilities of wielding symbol, narrative, and myth according to the feedback model described in Fig.1.3. Certainly, the strength of the interactions in this cycle will go up if we find proper ways of educating young students' metaphoric and narrative skills, if we, as caregivers and educators know that metaphor and story are cognitive tools worth nurturing and making good use of.

> Cognitive tools involved in experiencing Forces of Nature. Sensing spatial and temporal patterns, feeling tensions related to particular polarities, experiencing one thing in terms of another, and knowing that phenomena and the characters active in them are tied into a unit we can tell a tale about, are important elements of our meaningful encounters with Forces of Nature. These are not fuzzy, squishy, feeble "mythic" abilities alien to rationality; rather, they are the foundations of rationality: patterns and tensions are the start of sentient life, and metaphor and narrative have in them structures of rationality. They are foundational to scientific rationality as well.

> In Why We Need Wind (p.5), there are temporal and spatial patterns (differences and repetitive occurrences) and, related to them, the tension of strong vs. calm Wind that drives the story; there is Koluskap's metaphoric movement up the hill as the Wind (Wocawson) gets stronger and stronger; there is Wocawson as a more or less powerful character, entity, or spirit who interacts with Koluskap; there is mediation of the intensity of Wind on the scale of stormy to calm; and we finally have the story as a whole that tells us about how Wind works and how we are to feel about the importance of Wind for nature and us. Tensions, Wind as an entity, power, and concrete courses of events tied together and explained through the story are all elements of rational understanding that are centrally important if we wish to create a scientific approach to causal phenomena.

> > ◦ ◦ ◦ ◦ ◦

This concludes a very brief description of some of the elements of understanding and some of the cognitive tools available to children growing up in an oral world. We are well advised to nurture and work with these tools, not because they are scientific—they are not—but because they are foundational for understanding of life in general and our encounters with nature in particular; this makes them foundational for science as well. Emotion, metaphor, and story provide us with tools of rationality we would be lost without once we take steps towards scientific rationality.

### 1.4 Taking Steps Towards Physical Science

If children initially grow up with mythic consciousness, and if myth is not science, as we have said, then how do we help them develop some scientific practices and understanding? Part of the answer, in the scheme we borrow from Egan,71 will surely have to do with forms of consciousness connected to new cognitive tools developing as children move toward adolescence.

Here, we will be very short and just briefly mention the cognitive tools of literacy and the important element of psychological development toward a sense of self as

a mythic culture

Myth as foundation of rationality and science distinct and distant from others and the world, both of which we believe will have much to do with how more formal scientific attitudes, activities, and topics can be approached in later primary school.

In this section, we shall briefly touch upon the difference between science and myth, list tools of literacy useful for approaching science, and the meaning of a romantic sense of a reality "out there." We conclude the section by outlining an approach to early science education, and by presenting a short story of a storm for somewhat older learners.

### What makes science different from myth?

When we consider modern practices and products of science and engineering, we realize that we are light-years away from how mythic people engaged, and still engage, with nature. In societies whose fate is entwined with science and technology, people by and large lack a sense of participation in the affairs of nature. Nature no longer is a partner we communicate with in any meaningful sense.

On the upside, by creating a distance between us and nature, we can analyze what is "out there" in great detail and depth, which fosters a new A new and different sense of realism. Remember what we, however sketchily, said about science (above on p.10): In science, we organize and categorize observations differently, we measure and calculate, we create formal models and complete theories. We experiment and measure, observe and write down; we collect, list, map, and put into diagrams what we see and measure. We experiment, analyze, and synthesize, and we bring great and powerful mathematical tools to bear upon all the data we amass.

### Ways of doing physics as a professional science Doing physics

In the past, physics was characterized by two major forms of practice: experiment and theory. A few decades ago, with the advent of computers, computational physics joined this very short list of fundamental ways of working in the science of physics.

The major practices can tell us, as spectators, a little bit about how physicists work, and what kind of tools they employ. Experimentalists build (new) equipment, run experiments with this equipment, measure and do a lot of data analysis. Theorists, on the other hand, create concepts and relations which they assemble into theoretical structures from which results are derived with the help of sophisticated mathematical tools.

Computational physicists write computer programs that represent models of complex systems for which results could never be derived by hand on a piece of paper—such systems and processes include stars and their lives, the dynamics of our atmosphere and oceans, and the interactions of myriads of subatomic particles in the great machines that have been built for their study.

These days, the borders between the three major methods are blurring. Theorist use computational models since they cannot simply derive results of theories on paper any longer. And computational physicists can use their models to run simulations that are a kind of virtual form of experimenting.

sense of realism

Here, we already find strong hints at what type of cognitive tools might have to be developed if we wish to enter the world of science (and technology). We need Tools of literacy tools of literacy: we need to be able to write, graph, and map; and we need to be able to employ formal languages, particularly mathematics. Clearly, most of this by far surpasses, in quantity and formal sophistication, what children would be able to learn through the phase of primary education, and even through middle school. But we get a feeling for what type of cognitive tools we might want to develop together with our students.

> In sum, there are at least two elements that distinguish mythic persons from those exposed to science: (1) a growing sense of distance, even a separation, between us and nature, i.e., a new sense of realism, and (2) a certain mastery of tools of literacy. Are the two related? This seems at least reasonable to assume: how we think has a lot to do with the "thinking tools" we have available; and, naturally, how we are led to think—growing up in a culture permeated by science and engineering—will push us in a certain direction, favoring certain cognitive tools over others.

Science starts with, and falls back upon, myth. Modern science gives us the impression that having acquired the two elements just described, i.e., having developed tools of literacy (plus what they entail for a formal theoretic culture) and a sense of distance between us and nature (making nature an object), will be sufficient for developing a science. Somehow, after these two elements are in place, science is assumed to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. However, this misses Grounding & explaining two important points: how do we create fundamental images (ideas) about what to expect "out there," and, once we have a science, how do we explain in very basic terms how the world "out there" works? This brings us back to myth: we still need mythic capacities if we want to create the foundations of an approach to a particular filed of science and make sense of how that science explains phenomena. Meaning-making, i.e., creating understanding, requires us to connect formal scientific results back to our mythic understanding of nature.

### Tools of literacy in emerging science and theoretic understanding

Simple "scientific" practice that might rightfully take place in later years of primary school, but more importantly, in middle school and in high school, tells us quite a lot about new tools required: we need to be able to write, list, map, sketch on paper, create diagrams, measure and calculate, and we need to be able to put it all together in writing, telling others what we have learned.

Let us not get into details concerning all these specific tools of literacy—this is not our place; we are not experts on how to teach children how to read and write and do arithmetic. We only want to point out that new tools are needed, and that their development quite obviously takes time. Suggesting that we "do science" starting in kindergarten will therefore miss the point (see the final discussion in this volume in Chapter 6). It will definitely miss the point if we have missed out on meaningfully fostering the cognitive tools of myth during the years leading up to when children have achieved a certain mastery of literacy.

Instead, let us just discuss the observation that the initial development of tools of literacy coincides with a number of changing "senses," "attitudes," and "habits" of children; Egan lists these as part of the category of cognitive tools of romantic understanding. 72 We can think of a growing interest in extremes, boundaries, and limits of experience; an association with heroes; a sense of wonder; development

requires mythic images

of hobbies and an urge to collect "stuff;" being able to change a topic and, importantly, a viewpoint; and, above all, a heightened sense of a reality "out there" (we shall come back to this last point in the following sub-section). In our cultures, some of these senses, attitudes, abilities, or tools of understanding will develop fairly early. Such change is driven, in part, by the wide-ranging availability of and exposure to visual media (photographs, picture books, and film), and by access to a great many technical toys. Media and toys can be made use of for a more scientific and formal engagement with physical processes.

It would be strange if the availability of all these tools did not change the way children think. It is this change we want to be aware of and sensitive to; it is this change that provides us with an opportunity to "do science" already in primary school classrooms. In turn, a well-crafted and gentle scientific approach to encounters with nature and machines can help the cognitive tools of the new romantic consciousness to develop more solidly. And, at the same time, we want to remain sensitive to mythic understanding of our encounters with nature.

### A sense of reality "Out There," romantic realism, and theoretic culture

Here is a brief outline of what romantic realism is about: a strong sense of an independent outside reality that can be listed, mapped, measured, and experimented with; the concept of space: the abstraction of (empty, dark, infinite) space; and an interest in its beauty and rich detail.73 The first and the second of these are intimately related, and we shall say a little more about them right below. At this point, let us state what is important about an interest in the outer world's beauty and, particularly, rich detail.

Rich detail of reality. People in a mythic society, and today's children for that matter, cannot and need not know every object in the world out there; having only oral language and its tools at one's disposal for listing and memorizing objects creates a heavy cognitive burden. One needs to be judicious about what one wants to know (harking back at the theme of our book, phenomena or Forces pertain to knowledge one would want to have). For example, when it comes to food, we need to know the difference between edible and inedible, and we need to know the most important foodstuffs in our environment. With Writing makes recording literacy, however, it becomes possible to build a repository, a list, of every single plant and animal one is able to come across. Slightly older children can easily get engaged in such an activity: collecting everything of a certain kind that is fascinating (beautiful to one's mind) and wondering if there is more of it in the wide world.

This changes everything, and it may present us with a partial answer to how the sense of romantic realism arises. It is clear that, in the course of cultural development, its aspects grew in parallel with literacy, and it makes sense to claim at least some causal force on the part of the techniques of writing. Science is Causal Force of writing definitely a child of literacy and its techniques that include formal languages (e.g., mathematics), the printing press, and now, the Internet.74 Without the tools of literacy we would not have the means of listing, mapping, measuring, and graphing the sheer infinite diversity of material reality; we would hardly have the means for experimenting in a manner that would go beyond what is needed for making tools and simple machines.

Distance between us and nature and the abstraction of space. This, however, is only half the story. Another driving force, which interacts with the first, is psychological: it is the experience of self that grows as consciousness developsdetails of reality possible

both historically and in the individual. This feeling of the independence and power of my own mind or my own soul—the self vis-a-vis an outside reality—is the result of an increasing distance between the self and its unconscious.75 This distance is responsible for sensing the reality of the outside world and is reflected in the historically recent abstraction of infinite, empty space.76

Something important must have changed in the modern mind. Francisco Petrarch presents us with a beautiful example of how a romantic feeling for the reality of the outer world combines with a feeling for space as an entity. In his letter of 1336 to a philosophy professor he writes:77

Today I ascended the highest mountain in this region, which, not without cause, they call the Windy Peak. Nothing but the desire to see its conspicuous height was the reason for this undertaking. [. . . ]

The day was long, the air was mild; this and vigorous minds, strong and supple bodies, and all the other conditions assisted us on our way. The only obstacle was the nature of the spot. We found an aged shepherd in the folds of the mountain who tried with many words to dissuade us from the ascent. He said he had been up to the highest summit in just such youthful fervor fifty years ago and had brought home nothing but regret and pains [. . . ] While he was shouting these words at us, our desire increased just because of his warnings; for young people's minds do not give credence to advisers. [. . . ]

And now [. . . ] listen also to what remains to be told. [. . . ] At first I stood [at the summit] almost benumbed, overwhelmed by a gale such as I had never felt before and by the unusually open and wide view. I looked around me: clouds were gathering below my feet [. . . ]. The Alps were frozen stiff and covered with snow [. . . ]. They looked as if they were quite near me, though they are far, far away. [. . . ]

Then another thought took possession of my mind, leading it from the contemplation of space to that of time [. . . ] I had better look around and see what I had intended to see in coming here. [. . . ] The sun was already setting, and the shadow of the mountain was growing longer and longer. [. . . ] I turned back and looked toward the west. [. . . ] one could see most distinctly the mountains of the province of Lyons to the right and, to the left, the sea near Marseilles [. . . ]. The Rhone River was directly under our eyes.