Stories
The narrative approach is the keystone of the STM project. In this section, you will find some narrative approaches to stories that describe historical developments in science. The stories, while authentic, need not be fully historically accurate. The dialogues you can find here are, indeed, entirely fictional, and the motives of acting persons in the stories are our interpretation of assured historical information. Hence, our stories stress certain aspects of the story so to highlight occurrences which are basic characteristics of the daily work in science.
The stories provided need not be learned by heart by the storyteller. Our idea is rather to incorporate a certain amount of improvisation so that a teacher will be able to adopt the story as his own (see also our Storytelling HOWTO). The person telling the story must develop a version of his or her own and present the personal narration without the feeling of restriction or being bound to the story provided here. The words of our story, combined with other complementary materiel to be found here, shall be the basis on which the personal story can be developed and presented.
Not only you will find the basic stories behind the menu on the left-hand side but also further readings concerning historical classification, as well as didactical and pedagogical problems. All stories are supported by videos, in which the stories are told by a professional narrator. Also, the stories are supported by educational resources, including classroom scenarios with learning activities for students and guidelines for teachers (aims and objectives and suggestions, etc.). There are also some videos where reconstructions of historical instruments can be seen in action.
To enable access to the stories from different points of view, we decided to categorize them into topics (e.g. energy, radioactivity, which cannot be restricted to any one single school subject), different aspects of the Nature of Science, and school subjects, of course.
There are two other projects in science education which employ a storytelling approach for teachers. Even though their approach does not exactly correspond to ours, it may be useful to visit their project websites: