Michael J. Barany, University of Edinburgh

At the University of Edinburgh, the introductory history of science course is a one-semester elective option taken by students from more than a hundred degree programs and nearly every academic division. In a British undergraduate system that tends to emphasize specific disciplinary pathways, the course gives students an unusual chance to study alongside peers from other fields while learning to think critically about the multifarious disciplines that define their university experience. Since 2020, I have been remaking the course to ask students to reckon deliberately with what makes the course unique for them, and to make the course their own.

The course dates to 1972, when the formulators of the Edinburgh School of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge began teaching the social history of science to the university’s science undergraduates (Shapin 1980). Then, as now, the course assumed no prerequisites and aimed to bring students quickly to the themes and insights of current scholarship. Then, as now, students encountered an expansive view of science, engaged with many forms of organized knowledge in world history, with a certain bias toward modern Europe and specifically toward Edinburgh. Then, as now, students were not being trained for further study in history of science, but for the many ways history of science could inform their lives as scholars and citizens.

I rechristened the course Themes and Perspectives in the History of Science. A more colorful title might have invoked the kaleidoscope, patented in 1817 by Scottish scientist, encyclopedist, science historian, and later University of Edinburgh Principal David Brewster. A philosophical instrument at the intersection of science, art, and industry, Brewster’s kaleidoscope embodied the dynamism and diversity of modern institutions of learning and their outward connections.

Across the eleven-week semester, I guide students to identify and assess how the history of science matters to the knowledges and contexts that matter to them. The emphasis is not how to write history of science analyses, nor even how to read them with disciplinary sophistication, but rather how to recognize expert history of science and to make it personally meaningful. In place of set readings, students cultivate their own selection from a curated resource list of more than 300 books and articles emphasizing recent contributions to the field. At the end of the course, they submit a self-evaluation and determine their own final grade, supported by a portfolio of self-directed activities in a wide range of possible formats that demonstrate their engagement across the course.

This model challenges students to make sense of the history of science in the forms they will encounter it beyond the course, driven by situational concerns and interests and embedded in a broad matrix of information from which they must identify the most relevant scholarship. Students learn to tack between paces and angles of reading, adopting a level-appropriate variation on reading methods that historians tend to develop during graduate training. Indeed, I use the same resource list for a parallel weekly clinic for graduate students, preparing them for teaching and participating in the profession by considering each week’s theme historiographically while the undergraduate students encounter it historically.

Flexibility and self-direction allow the model to work for a large student cohort with highly varied needs, inevitable interruptions, and competing priorities. I can help students mitigate pandemic risks and respect university picket lines, to name two sources of disruption that have dominated my teaching experience since 2020, without compromising the course’s coherence and effectiveness. Students who are initially daunted by the lack of a prescribed pathway generally come to value what they can achieve when asked to chart their own itineraries.

Lectures and course materials are arranged in a thematic sequence. I start with Cosmologies, inviting framings about the goals and uses of systematic knowledge and presenting the course design as a kind of pedagogical cosmology. The sequence continues to Abstractions, Collections, Lives, Bodies, Quantities, Measures, Particles, Worlds, and finally Objectivities, which includes reflections on historiography, methodology, and the uses of histories of science.

Replacing the previous chronological structure (see Henry 2011), this thematic organization makes room for each unit to incorporate a variety of geographies, chronologies, and ways of knowing. It accommodates accounts of the expected set-pieces of a history of science survey—heliocentrism, calculus, evolution, atomism, energy, revolutions, and so on—that draw freely from recent critical scholarship and comparative perspectives. Topical echoes—tabulation as abstraction then quantification; alchemy as a science of life then of measurement—show students the kinds of polyphonic resonances that make the historiography of science exciting.

Brewster’s kaleidoscope patent describes the infinity of patterns that a skillful artist, with practice, may generate. For Brewster, the instrument’s beautiful effect derived from the combination of a harmonious construction with the deliberate and adaptable application of diverse artists’ materials and arrangements. I have tried to make the course into just such a structured invitation to cultivate a practice of infinite variety.

Course materials are freely available under a Creative Commons license at https://study.histsci.scot. I created the site with an open-source wiki platform to support multiple contributors and a flexible, interlinked structure. I hope to see the site grow as a shared curricular resource for our field, and welcome community contributions.

References

Brewster, David. Patent A.D. 1817, No. 4136, Kaleidoscopes. https://web.archive.org/web/20040708111509/http://www.brewstersociety.com/brewster_patent.pdf

Henry, John. A Short History of Scientific Thought. Bloomsbury, 2011.

Shapin, Steven. “A Course in the Social History of Science.” Social Studies of Science 10, no. 2 (1980): 231–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/284566.