Teaching Science? Start With a History Lesson

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For the Teacher's Desk

Written by Lauren Barack; Photographed by Karl Maasdam

Including historical findings can help students understand how science advances—one step at a time, often with a bit of help from serendipity.

In search of a new semiconductor in 2009, Mas Subramanian hardly expected his graduate student to pull from the lab’s furnace the most brilliant blue pigment ever created. The mistake—a remarkable discovery—proved to be the first inorganic blue pigment in 200 years. As the materials scientist and professor at Oregon State University likes to tell his students, "Science is a journey.” You set out hoping to find one thing, but serendipity has other plans.

That unpredictability lies at the heart of how science moves forward—and it’s something many science teachers struggle to convey. Showing students that science is not a static collection of facts but an evolving continuum of discoveries—often born of missteps—means giving them backstory. "Whenever you are going to look for something, you are always going to find something which you didn't expect to happen," Subramanian says.
 

Karl Maasdam

"Whenever you are going to look for something, you are always going to find something which you didn't expect to happen."

Mas Subramanian, professor, Oregon State University

One way to do that: Bring history into the lab. Subramanian’s pigment, for example, gains meaning when students also learn about Egyptian blue, the first synthetic pigment created millennia earlier (see AramcoWorld’s 2021 article, “The Quest for Blue”). The Egyptians weren’t trying to make history. They simply needed a cheaper alternative to costly lapis lazuli from present-day Afghanistan. That calcium copper silicate hue, born of practicality, would eventually lay the groundwork for Subramanian’s work thousands of years later.  

Christine Anne Royce, past president of the National Science Teaching Association, has seen how these connections stick. Framing experiments as chapters in a long scientific narrative does more than humanize discovery. It helps students see themselves in it. “We know from research that students remember content that has a storyline—the beginning, the middle, the end,” the professor of teacher education at Shippensburg University explains. 

“We know from research that students remember content that has a storyline—the beginning, the middle, the end.”

Christine Anne Royce, professor, Valley Forge Military College
Christopher Emdin at Columbia University's Teachers College shares a similar approach. He points to Albert Einstein—not as the distant genius but as a student who fought against traditional schooling, made mistakes and still transformed physics. Such stories, he says, "activate resilience in young people, not by saying, 'Have more grit,' [but] by giving them exemplars of people who have made mistakes," says Emdin, the Maxine Greene Chair for Distinguished Contributions to Education.

That human thread runs through the work of scientists like 17th-century chemist Nicolas Lemery, who pursued his studies despite persecution in an era dominated by alchemy. His persistence helped shape our understanding of acids and bases, knowledge students can explore today with simple, hands-on experiments.  

"Have more grit by giving them [students] exemplars of people who have made mistakes."

Christopher Emdin, Columbia University
As Sibel Erduran of the University of Oxford notes, asking students to classify everyday items—lemons, vinegar, soap—into acids and bases and to model what they look like on paper lets them experience how observations lead to understanding. One student’s jagged lemon juice sketches or bubbly soap drawings become a modern echo of Lemery’s early work. 

Historical links can also light up physics lessons. Ibn al-Haytham’s 10th-century-CE camera obscura experiment, highlighted in AramcoWorld’s "Ibn al-Haytham: Testing Is Believing," can be replicated with a shoebox, a flashlight and a paper cutout. Students see firsthand how light travels in a straight line, testing a hypothesis first posed 1,000 years ago. This approach “give students a chance to reflect on the nature of the scientific knowledge they themselves are constructing,” Erduran explains. 
 

The Institute for the History of Arab-Islamic Science (Istitut fuer Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften) in Frankfurt, Germany, contains a model of a camera obscura, which was first designed by Ibn al-Haitham in the 11th century CE, and is an early ancestor of modern photography devices. The institute's model is based on the explanations recorded by al-Haitham.

Thorne Anderson/Corbis

Today’s students do more than follow instructions. They step into the same story as Subramanian, Einstein, Lemery and Ibn al-Haytham—a story where curiosity, perseverance and even “failure” push science forward.

Linking the lab to centuries of inquiry helps them believe that they might be the ones to make those discoveries. "Today I didn't make something,” Subramanian reminds his students. “Tomorrow, maybe, I'll make one. There are more things to discover."

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