The historical development of vaccine technology: exploring the relationship between science and technology

Abstract

This paper examines the feasibility of using historical case studies to contextualise the learning of the nature of science and technology in a biology lesson. Through exploring the historical development of vaccine technology, students were expected to understand the complexity of the relationships between technology and science beyond the simplistic portrayal of technology as 'applied science' . Instructional scaffolding in the form of Socratic Dialogue and self-reflection was used to engage students in thinking about the difference in the nature of science and technology and their mutual interactions. This was followed by students' reflections on the insights they have gained from the lesson as a means to evaluate and reconstruct their own understanding if necessary. The educational implications of the findings are discussed to explore how technology could be further integrated into the school science curriculum to enhance scientific and technological literacy.

“It's a lot of people in different places working on many ideas”: Possibilities from global history of science to Learning about nature of science

“…Nevertheless, very few accounts of empirical experiences can be found in the field that take into account this more diverse approach to HOS‐based NOS teaching at school level (e.g., Alcantara, Braga, & van den Heuvel, 2020; Lee & Kwok, 2017). As mentioned above, most resources available still focus on limited cases, usually from European or USA history.…”

“…This does not mean understanding scientific knowledge as global (a “universalist” perspective) but seeing its development as a result of global links. This fosters a “more pluralist, more historicist, more localised, less universalist picture of science” (Orthia, 2016, p. 363), while also recognizing the limits of these global collaborations and the place of colonization; as a result, science is portrayed as a product of cultural interactions across the world rather than a solely “Western” endeavor (Lee & Kwok, 2017).…”

“…Most research is still occurring at a “theoretical level,” with not many instances of their transposition into empirical studies. One of the few examples in the literature adopting a similar approach (although not calling it “intercultural model of HOS”) is the experience described by Lee & Kwok (2017, p. 162) of teaching about vaccines to students aged 17–18 in Hong Kong under a cross‐cultural and knowledge exchange perspective, with positive results found around “students' rich, diversified and nuanced characterization of science”.…”