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Ted wrote:
> For all the good intentions of the written statements on science and 
> evolution, they strike me as similar to some of our explanatory
> exhibit labels. We
> struggle to make them correct and concise, yet in the end they have  
> meaning
> mainly for those who already know what they mean. The problem is that

> we are
> reverting to teaching by telling, and many of us are in the science  
> center world
> because we thought there was a better approach--learning by doing,  
> developing
> understanding from one's own experience.

Then Clifford wrote:

I agree inquiry based learning is almost always a better approach, much

our first choice.
But does that mean teaching by telling is never valid?
How can we show through inquiry based learning that a whole field of  
scientific knowledge is valid when someone comes along to claim that it

isn't?

The possible effectiveness of telling depends sensitively on the
receiver.  You can tell me all day that science centers need to just
tell people some things are facts, but that does not fit with my
conceptual models of learning or of science and so I am very unlikely to
integrate what you are telling me into my view of the world.  I may just
walk away, or I may actually indicate some level of agreement, or I may
even be able to give you back a cogent explanation of your argument.  In
most cases, people would count this as learning, but if you really
probed, you would find that this knowledge is superficial, that what I
have learned is how Clifford Wagner thinks the world works.  I have not
integrated it into my own views of how the world works and I would
argue, therefore, that I have not actually learned it.  Most
importantly, it is fragile knowledge, once I no longer have a connection
to you, I am likely to forget what you have told me.  This happens all
the time in science teaching - Eric Mazur at Harvard tells a wonderful
story of one of his Harvard physics students taking a conceptual test
and asking him, "Dr. Mazur, should we answer this the way you taught us,
or the way we know it works in the real world?"  When that students is
filmed at graduation (In Private Universe, for example), 3 years later,
she will be very unlikely to recall the physics teacher's model.  

On the other hand, if my world view is aligned with yours, then what you
tell me will make strong conncetions and be integrated into my
understanding.  So the goal, if we want people to accept the scientific
evidence and explanation about evolution is to change their conceptual
structures and epistemologies.  Changing people is extraordinarily
difficult.  They old light bulb joke is all too true, the person really
has to want to change.  This is where telling completely breaks down.
Nothing you tell me is going to make me want to change.  The only thing
that will make me want to change my ideas is when I have experiences
that cause conflicts within my own conceptual models.  These experiences
do not cause change overnight, either.  Change happens in stages and
regression is common.  New research suggests that it takes ten weeks
worth of experiences to move 8th graders to actually adopt a scientific
concept of conservation of mass.  We need to be cognizant of this as we
set goals and objectives for our expereinces, which intersect with
learners for only an instant in their learning career.

Eric wrote:
>   As John Dewey said about 100 ago: <<Surely if there is any knowledge
> which is of most worth it is knowledge of the ways by which anything
is  
> entitled to be called knowledge...<snip>

Clifford wrote:
Dewey is fabulous.  That is a great statement.

But Clifford, that statement of Dewey's explicitly contradicts what you
said before about telling.  It says that the learner has to create her
own understanding out of experience and moreover, needs to be reflective
about how she comes to know.  When you follow what Dewey suggests, you
must be willing for the learner to arrive at a different understanding
than you did.  Otherwise, you do not have inquiry, you have a game where
the learner is trying to guess the teacher's ideas.  Much of school
"inquiry" unfortunately falls into this mode with teacher's being
deathly afraid that the student will "get it wrong."  If you are really
implementing inquiry, you need to find another way of assessing
knowledge than right or wrong.  

To insist on right and wrong creates false dichotomies that are very
destructive ("you can't be religious is you are scientific," for
example) and unscientific.  We do our visitors a great disservice when
we pretend that all of science is about one accepted explanation that
sits atop the heap of discarded ideas.  At one scientific society
meeting I attended, my advisor and another geologist ended up screaming
at each other across a packed room, while the speaker stood quietly up
front.  They were both very highly regarded scientists working on the
same data sets, but I can assure you that they were not dispassionately
engaged in a search for truth and also that neither convinced the other.

I would suggest that it is far better to engage our visitors in pursuing
fundamental questions, especially those for which there is no known
answer.  We should show the very human face of science, work to infuse
the idea that anyone can be a scientist, act on the thesis that children
are born scientists and that science is a fundamental aspect of the
human condition, and ecourage a mode of discussion that critically
probes and evaluates the lumpy, bumpy, imperfect science that our
visitors and our scientists generate at the same time that it afirms and
values every contributor to the discussion regardless of the quality of
their explanation.  Having tried to do this in my own classroom, I know
that it is extremely difficult to do well and that the critical first
step is to separate the person from the ideas.

Clifford also wrote:

>>No.  Just like you can't learn the periodic table from inquiry on the

museum floor, no one is going to understand the evolution -creation  
controversy without statements made about it.<<

This is getting too long, but here I have to part ways with my all my
previous discussion and tell you that you are just wrong about this.  No
one handed Mendeleev a Periodic table and said "Here, you need to know
this!"  We got a periodic table because scientists started noticing
things about the elements, especially that there were patterns to their
chemical interactions, they tried to see if the patterns extended to
other elements, they had the insight to arrange elements in rows and
columns (but not in the form we all know, at least not at first)
according to the patterns they saw.  In other words, it was deeloped by
inquiry.  Visitors cannot and should not recreate all this work, but
they can be given access to the data or to model analogs and asked how
they would make sense of it themselves.  The various patterns that they
develop could be shared with others.  See
http://www.sci.tamucc.edu/txcetp/cr/science/periodic/IntroductionToPerio
dicTrends-Activities.pdf for one possible example and
http://he-cda.wiley.com/WileyCDA/HigherEdTitle/productCd-0471220876,cour
seCd-CH0600,pageType-copy,page-tableOfContents.html for an entire
undergraduate chemistry course through inquiry.

The same thing is true about creation-evolution.  You can't just say it
and presto! have everyone believe.  You can, however, share the data.
How many of our visitors have ever seen chimpanzee, gorilla, and human
DNA sequences side by side or seen the data from Hawaii and other
islands about island biogeography and speciation?  We can show them the
data and try to tell them what we think it means, but it may actually be
far more effective to accept a wide range of explanations, including
some "unscientific" ones and to hold our position in the question rather
than the answer.

Dave Smith, whose five year old daughter routinely mixes magical and
scientific explanations of the world together in the most wonderful ways

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