Exploring mirrors, recreating science and history, becoming a class community

Abstract

A teacher narrates from activities and discussions that arose among undergraduates and herself while doing critical explorations of mirrors. Surprised by light's behaviors, the students responded with curiosity, losing their dependence on answers as the format of school knowledge. Inadequacies in how participants supposed light works emerged in the context of reinventing historical discoveries, including Ptolemy's second century AD account of how curved mirrors reflect, Chinese burning mirrors reported in the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), and a ninth century AD Arabic translation of Euclid's surveying proposition. Using historical accounts only as a starting point and motivation, students' improvisational experiments explored personal interests and provided grounds for synthesizing new understandings of light and learning, and for forming relationships of community among each.