I'm very keen on using natural curiosity as a motivator. There is an increasingly wide-spread feeling that our current approach to science education is too focused on the transmission of facts, resulting in the gradual atrophy of students' natural curiosity, and perhaps even their creativity.
What is a science teacher to do?
Well, we can stop glossing over/ignoring completely the outright mysterious facts and experimental results which abound in science. Instead of giving students the impression that we understand the world around us, we could incite them to explore the chronic anomalies that plague our theories. Or just focus on thought-provoking observations of the natural world.
So this is the sort of thing I envision: here's a video of a demonstration on the geometry of sound. It can be used to talk about vibrations and energy, the nature of sound, and has implications for the relationship between energy and form. It engages people on a variety of levels: for some it will be the geometric patterns themselves, for others the connection between sound and those patterns, and for others it may be the idea of forms as patterns of energy. The idea is to get away from the model of the teacher supplying answers, to a model where the teacher facilitates exploration.
Every subject is full of poorly-understood and/or awe-inspiring phenomena. With a little digging and creativity, science teachers could use these to reignite the natural curiosity in their students, while at the same time giving them a more balanced view of the state of our knowledge. A generation of independent and creative science minds will result - isn't that the goal of science education?
