A Rose in a Mirror

Margery D. Osborne

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

submitted to Research in Science Education.

I wish to reflect on this idea of a person constructed in the "theatre of its commitments," that it is how we act, and act in the world outside of ourselves, that matters. I write, drawing on my own history in science, for I was once a crystallographer, and the imaging technologies in which I am presently involved, about how these are shaping the work I do with children and teachers in schools. The metaphor of the rose in a mirror is a particularly provocative one for me as it both connects with the science I used to do and presently do since both are intimately about optics. I wish to explore the metaphor and the meanings it invokes to talk of science and science education and their relationship to biography.

To do this I write first about some qualities of mirrors and lenses drawing on my own history as a scientist who thought and taught a lot about optics. I do this to make some points about the subject/object relationship in the doing of science and of research and finally as it concerns the enterprise of education. To this end, I describe two incidents from my participant research with preschool and first grade children. In this work I purposely tried to make the science we did reflect the science I did as a crystallographer. It is in this context that the children act and both stories are illustrative of what this environment was like. In the first story the children are looking at lenses and discussing the qualities of them and the things they are able to see as they gaze through them. This conversation echos the qualities of lenses I describe in the abstract as an introduction to the story. In the second story I argue that the way I shape the classroom is in effect a lens through which we can view children. Again what we see through such a lens has the same qualities as the things the children and I talk about in the first story. Finally I return to the work of scientists and write about how there is a tension between the inward oriented and the outward directed facets of "doing science" that I experienced and that I try to shape my classrooms to reflect. I argue that thinking about a resolution between these may illuminate our understandings of science and scientists (including child scientists), but it does so in a way that is fundamentally problematic for understanding as a process suggests reflection on something in existence while science and both children and the people doing science do not just exist, they are in the process of doing things that are new, constructing the new in terms of their own identities and also in terms of the worlds they create.

Mirrors and lenses

When looking at something we use tools to visualize it (even if we are just talking about our eyes). These lenses allow one to see certain things, sometimes at the expense of other things and the things that are seen are always distorted or displaced even if only by a little bit. Lenses also allow us to see things that we were not expecting, new stuff. They are tools constructed by the viewer to gaze at an object usually designed for a purpose but sometimes acting in unpredicted ways. They reflect qualities of the designer and qualities of the perceived task as much as of the thing observed. When I say "reflect," this is purposeful for under certain conditions lenses do reflect, if the angle is right or they are made of certain things or depending on lighting conditions, they reflect rather than transmit light. In which case what is seen is the viewer not the object to be looked at. Sometimes this is desired, easily recognizable but sometimes it can take us by surprise. We have all experienced the shock of thinking we are looking out a window at someone and realizing we are seeing ourselves reflected back instead. There is a moment in this of disorientation and sometimes almost nausea and then we quickly avert our gaze and return to our lunch or whatever task we were involved in beforehand.

On the other hand there is a paradox here for although I can assert that the construction of the tools we use to see things reflect our perceptions of those things and our goals in looking and therefore reflect ourselves, to do this they have to mimic, complement, overlap the qualities of the object itself. This is what Luce Irigaray refers to in her metaphor of the speculum—the device used to look internally at a woman must be shaped like the vagina. In essence this is a projection of an image of the object which includes our beliefs about the nature of the object in the creation of the tool. The tool used to gaze at an object must complement, or mirror both the object and the subject in some fundamental ways. Such tools constructed for looking at another can be turned back to help us look at ourselves because they contain qualities of both subject and object. In the book The Order of Things, Michel Foucault muses on such ideas. In his discussion of the painting, "Las Meninas" by Velasquez, he evokes the reciprocity of looking: we can look at the painting, and it in effect looks back at us. I would like to argue a similar thing, the act of looking at another should enable a heightened awareness of self, a self reflexivity.

Understanding these aspects of visualization technologies suggests the relativeness of the subject/object relationship and also tells us that what we see is dependent upon how we look. This is very different from the post-enlightenment science mythology which is often depicted as a search for truth using visualization techniques which reify a particular subject/object perspective. Recognizing the role of technology and the relative positionality of objectification is at the core of my current attempts to reconceptualize science and the roles of scientists and teachers (Barton & Osborne in press; Osborne & Barton, in press; Osborne & Brady, in press; Osborne & Barton, in press). The science derivative from the use of visualization technologies does not appear to challenge such central tenets of science as an immutable subject object relationship. Many would argue that the core of post-enlightenment science is about "seeing" and the objectification of the other. Looking at images is centrally about this. But in recognizing that those images are, at least in part, images of ourselves, it is not. To make an image that represents something that the creator feels is important involves developing an empathetic oneness with the object. Collapsing subject into object. It is that process, which is really a dialectic, which I wish to examine as well as its problematic aspects and to do this I will tell two stories.

The first story I tell is about teaching first and second graders about some qualities of the physics of optics and visualization. In their talk of the lenses I give them, the children play with the ideas of perspective, context and meaning and are also acting in the complex ways I describe scientists acting at the start of this essay. There is much to be thought about in the things they notice about distortion, genesis and the content of the images they see.

Looking through lenses with children

This story is constructed from transcripts and video tapes of lessons I taught in a public school classroom in Michigan. In many ways the science I describe doing with children in my work is pragmatist in nature--it is driven by the children’s purposes and personal orientations. This particular class is of first graders with about 80 percent from various countries around the world other than the United States. Four are English as Second Language students. We have been studying plants for the past month or so, first by comparing a number of potted plants and then by growing our own bean seeds and grape hyacinth bulbs. We have been drawing our plants and learning the names of the various parts and discussing the things plants need to live and grow. Today I intend to have the children begin to track the growth of their bean seeds which have just sprouted. To this end I have given each a six-inch clear plastic ruler with beveled edges. I purposely chose these rulers for their optical qualities as well as for their use in measuring. The children immediately, as I hand them out, hold the rulers to their eyes and discover this.

The other children are yelling, "Rulers! Rulers!"

All the children are exclaiming about the things they see now so I ask, "Well if these rulers are for measuring how come people are looking through them? What did you see when you looked through them? What did you see Kyong Min?"

Many are talking. I hear things like: "I see two heads!" "Look at the lights;" "Its bigger;" "Its a rainbow;" "You’re going up and down;" "Oh my god!" "Wow!" "You look weird!" "You’re skinny;" "You’re red." And they are also debating what they mean by words like skinny and smeared. I get their attention back again and get them all seated so we can talk. Chun So, a little Korean girl who rarely speaks is first.

In this discussion the children and I name the tools we are using as rulers but we are using them as lenses. This is something of an unexpected use or at least I had not expected them to find this use so immediately. As lenses the rulers have rather complex qualities. They act to image something in a different place from what is expected much like something seen in water appears in a different spot than predicted. They double things because there are actually three lenses at angles to each other and when held correctly some act as lenses and some as mirrors. They change the color of things because they act as prisms. They distort (smear) an image and they magnify. All this can have the effect of making us aware of the object, think harder about the object and think comparatively about what it really looks like. It is also possible to forget the reality of the object gazed at and just look at the illusion and think it is real.

The next day we return to our discussion of the little rulers. I ask Mike to tell us what he was able to see.

The conversation moves to a close with Cory telling us a silly joke and I move on to measuring the plants "I want you to look at the ruler not through the ruler. And think about what it looks like. In your group, I’m going to give you five minutes to do that."

I think in this last segment of the story two important things happen. The children discover the rainbow fringes that form around the objects they are looking at through the rulers and I tell them to look at the rulers (lenses) rather than through them. The rainbows become very important in a subsequent conversation a year after this incident as does remembering to look at the tools as well as just looking at the content of the image.

The next part of this story is constructed from transcripts of a class I taught in March the following year. This class was a first and second grade combination with six children returning from the previous year. The class I describe is the final class of a year long unit on soap bubbles and experimental design which I talk about at length elsewhere (Osborne, 1999). In this class we are discussing holograms as well as soap bubbles for we are going on a field trip to a local science museum which had just mounted a hologram exhibit. We start by examining examples on my credit cards.

I ask what they see when they look at the holograms on the cards. Abeni says that it is shiny and has rainbow colors. Tity says that it’s silvery all over. Sueh-yen saw that it reflected light. He also saw that the bird changed shape as he moved it and the background reflected his face. I ask the kids if they had seen Star Wars and if they had an idea what a hologram was. Shumshad says that it looks real and it moves. Emily says that it’s not real though.

We start to talk about where the different colors come from. The children say the light and I respond that the light doesn’t appear to be different colors to me. Dan counters that yes the lights are different colors. He points to different lights in the room which are different levels of white. Emily says that the light sort of reflects itself to make colors. Thomas says that we could do an experiment with a prism, the light may not be different colors but the prism can show us. I ask him if he is saying that the white light can be many colors and he says that it can be the colors of the sun. I ask what are the colors of the sun and he starts to list: blue, purple, . . . , while different children agree and disagree, listing their versions of the colors of the spectrum. I ask Thomas if he is talking about a rainbow to which he says yes. He says that the white light can make the rainbow light and with a prism you might be able to see it.

The children are remaining very aware that they are talking about the lens itself rather than the image. They are reminding themselves of this by remembering that the images they see may look real but are not by thinking hard about the differences between the image and the object itself. This gets increasingly interesting as we proceed in this conversation because the children start to suggest theories for why they see the things they do. Sometimes these theories involve suggesting special properties of the object but equally as often the children seem to be musing on the properties of lenses.

I ask what other people think—how did the hologram get its colors. Paula says that on the hologram the colors come from the light reflecting on the silver pattern. Emily says that there is:

I ask if the invisible rainbow comes from the sun or if it is always in the sky and we can’t see it because the light goes through. "It’s in the sky ‘cause the light goes through," they respond. Danping disagrees. "I don’t think there’s such a thing as an invisible rainbow. I think on the credit card there’s sort of like a plastic piece that’s cut out like an eagle and they put some kinds of things on it and then when the light shines on it, it just comes out like a rainbow." But the light is white, I say. She responds: "I know but when the light shines on the plastic, I think they put something on the plastic to make it shine, so it makes it shine like a rainbow." The children’s suggestions for the genesis of phenomena occur by pointing out associations. The causality is assumed. The mechanism or theory is overlaid on the top.

Now Shumshad agrees with Danping "a little bit." He says if they cut out a piece that’s silver and put some kind of "medicine or something that’s kind of shiny and then they put a plastic piece on the card and then if you move it, it will go. " The children start debating the names of the colors again and whether or not the light from the sun is really white or yellow. Suni in particular seems to have been tutored by his father on this: "all the colors mixed, make the sunlight, make white light." I ask how the colors get out of the white light. He says that they separate but he doesn’t know how they do that. Then he says that the sunlight isn’t really white light but is yellow.

Cory says he agrees with Suni and reminds us of what we did last year with the rulers. How he looked up through the rulers and saw rainbows around everything. I let them try out the rulers. I ask what they see. Alyosha says that he saw a blue line under the thing that he was looking at. Danping says that now she disagrees with her idea from before "now I know how they make the rainbow, I think on the plastic, they just fold a little bit so if they fold over here and over here then these two will be different colors, if they didn’t fold any, this whole piece of the bird [pictured in the hologram] would be a different color."

Sakti says that she saw different colors when she looked at the light. Meiying did also. Kwanhyo says that she saw a rainbow all across the room. Thomas says that he was disappointed because he didn’t see as many colors as he usually does. He only saw red and blue. I say that they aren’t very good prisms.

Suni declares that he has just figured something out. "If you put light through glass you can see the colors because glass makes the color of the light separate into other colors that are mixed to make that color, that’s what I think glass does." Danping says glass needs to have corners to do that. Abeni claims that the thickness of the glass or plastic has something to do with it. I point out that the rulers aren’t very fat. She says that different parts are fatter or thinner. Emily says that you see the colors only when you look through the places where the thickness changes. Tity says that you can see colors by looking through the edges too.

Sueh-yen points out that the rulers and the prism have three sides and he thinks this is important to make rainbows. Shumshad thinks that the reason he couldn’t see a lot of colors with the rulers is because of "the little lines that measure." Emily says that if she crosses her eyes everything is outlined blue or sometimes yellow. This also makes it hard to see. Alyosha tell us about a rainbow he saw in Yugoslavia that happened after a rainstorm. He thinks that it is light shining through the water from the rain that makes the rainbow.

Cory saw a prism at his Grandmother’s and she told him that if you don’t keep it in the light, the rainbows might go away. He says that she said this because once she kept one out of the light too long and then when she did put it in the light there were no rainbows. You have to keep them in the light to get rainbows. I ask him about the rulers, why they work then and he says he doesn’t know. I ask him why we don’t see rainbows all the time and he says he doesn’t know.

The children in this story clearly recognize that the lenses they are gazing through cause distortions which in turn tell them things about light and about the nature of the lenses themselves and their creators. Especially in this last conversation, the children are musing upon the relation of parts to the whole. They are discussing how the prisms they are gazing through distort the light, break the light into component parts. This breaking up of the whole gives us insights into the whole and into the workings of the lens but it remains important to remember the parts are not the whole. In many ways Cory, in his recounting of his grandmother’s magical tale about the origins of rainbows reminds us of this--no matter how close we look and how much we think we have found explanations for what we see, there is still a mystery buried within that invokes tales of magic to satisfy our need for understanding.

The second story I would like to tell is about the nature of the lenses we use to gaze at children both as teachers and as researchers. Like Hawkins, I would say that the context we place children into, the "theatre of their commitments" is all important. The people they are and the people they portray are fundamentally shaped by this. That context, which as a teacher I hold the power to shape, is my "lens." As I gaze through that lens at a child my question is what can I see about him or her. But also I should remember to look at the lens itself and think about what it portrays about me and my goals and values and also to remember the distortions I introduce.

Gazing at children

The following story occurred at the beginning of my work in an "at-risk" public pre-school classroom. I have been going there and acting as an aide, working the "water table" three times a week for most of the school year. In addition to myself there are 13 children, ages three and four, a classroom teacher and an aide. Occasionally there are other special people such as twice a week a speech therapist.

I set up the water table when I come in the classroom--school has already been in session for a half hour before I get there but Mary Jo (the classroom teacher) has left getting the water table ready to me today. I take the cover off and arrange newspapers on the floor and get a stash of paper towels for emergency use. I put the last on my seat--I sit at the head of the table and the children stand around the sides. I put in a few things (a number of funnels, some rigid plastic tubes of varying diameters and some measuring cups of different capacities), leaving others (measuring spoons, curved tubes and bulb turkey basters) in plastic tubs that I keep at my feet so I can hand them out at strategic moments (to divert children from various conflicts or to stimulate someone who is loosing interest back into the activity or when I see a child is needing some thing in particular for an activity they have constructed). The rules are: "only four children at a time" and "no splashing, water stays in the tub!"

I sit down to play and begin by trying to pour water from a container into a plastic tube so that it fills another container. Angela and Tiffany are the first to join me. I send them back to get smocks on and when they return, they settle in to pouring water from small containers into large--filling up the large and then pouring those into the basin of the table with much satisfaction. Tiffany grabs a tube and begins stirring the water as she adds it to a jar. She is talking about making oatmeal and Angela chimes in. I ask them, "Do you like oatmeal?" and this begins a lengthy conversation about the likes and dislikes of everyone and anyone. Conversations with three year olds are patchwork quilts of things they do and know, things they have seen and basic fantasy. I wonder about Tiffany-- does she make oatmeal for her baby sister (which is what she is telling me)? I know she does take care of the baby, Mary Jo calls her the "primary caregiver" of her family. Her mother spends the day in bed and is out all night and she has no father. Angela on the other hand is a mystery to me. She comes to school with her hair freshly put into twisty ponytails, carefully finished with Goody™ barrettes. Her clothes are clean and she is too. The criteria for qualification for "at-risk" services are many-fold.

I get out a couple of the bulb basters and start squeezing water from across the table into Tiffany’s pot. Bulb basters are very difficult for small children to use! They require a certain inversion in logic as well as physical skills and strength. Tiffany though knows what to do--she expertly puts hers underwater and pushes down the bulb with all her weight. I’m very impressed. Then she does it again and the water in the tube gushes out and all over the floor. While I’m cleaning this up with my stash of paper towels, Andrew and Kaitlin arrive.

Kaitlin joins in with Tiffany making fantasy cooking projects with the water. Each has a large pot that they add water to using various smaller containers, stirring after each addition, discussing and critiquing each other from across the table. Probably an interesting discussion I think, too bad I can’t pay attention to it for now Andrew is here.

Andrew has no smock, his sleeves aren’t pulled up and he actually hasn’t stopped running but he is in the water! He seizes a funnel (not from anyone but he still seizes it, he would never just pick it up) and starts pouring water into it. He intently watches the water come out the other end. He puts the end in the water, pours water in the top and watches the water go down in the top part, he does it again and watches the water around the bottom, he moves it to a jar and does it again, he turns it upside down and tries it that way. He notices nothing else including my grabbing his arms and shoving them in the smock, my picking him up and moving him to another place at the table, and/or the other children’s activities. Suddenly he grabs a tube out of Angela’s hands. She opens her mouth to protest but before that can happen I hand her another tube from beneath the table. I was ready for that one. Andrew fits the tube to the funnel and starts pouring. The other children are beginning to look a little worried. I see them watching him out of the corners of their eyes but so far they don’t say anything. Every once in a while they look at me though, checking my reactions. Personally I’m still trying to use a bulb baster to fill Angela’s large container (I’ve decided not to try to reach over to Tiffany any more and anyway she’s busy with Kaitlin).

Suddenly Andrew jams the end of the tube into the drain hole in the table so that the tube-funnel combination stands upright. He pours water in the funnel and the quarter teaspoon or so of sand caught in the drain hole explodes out in a cloud. Andrew doesn’t notice. He grabs another funnel and fits it into the first and pours again. Then he grabs a tube, fits it in with another funnel and pours again. He grabs another funnel and sticks it in, grabs my bulb baster and sticks it in. Now when he pours the water into the top he creates a fountain effect. The construction is well over his head. To pour into the top funnel he has to reach up and over with a full plastic container. Water runs down his arm. He misses and pours water over the girls who watch him with both awe and outrage. He drops the container. All peripheral, he pays attention to nothing but what he is doing. What is he doing?

I ask him. "I’m making something," he replies.

Kaitlin, who has been huddled around her funnel protecting it, gives up and starts to wash her "dishes" at the sink which is just behind her. Angela leaves also, walking off to another center. Tiffany starts mopping up the floor with paper towels. Andrew is still pouring. Suddenly his eyebrows go up. He runs, runs across the room and grabs a piece of the plastic marble slide.

This is not really allowed although never articulated as a rule--no one has thought of doing this before. It wouldn’t really matter though if it had been, he is so fast it is impossible to stop him before not only has he done what he set out to do but he’s gone a couple more steps further along in his construction plan. A couple of the little girls have wanted to bring plastic figurines to the table but it was easy to prevent this--I could see them thinking about it before they even started to try to act on their thoughts. Andrew is way ahead of me. The last thing I want to do is to try to correct him when he has already moved beyond the act.

He starts trying to catch the water as it pours off the sides of his fountain with these pieces. Then he starts just pouring water into the pieces. Then he runs to get more pieces. I can see another construction is about to take shape but just at this point Mary Jo turns out the light--clean up time for snack begins and its the end off our explorations. Andrew has been totally immersed in this for 30 minutes.

Andrew is three years old in this story and four by the end of the school year. He lives with his father who is in his forties and works two jobs. He also lives with an older sister who is seven. When his father is working the night shift he sleeps at his grandmother's home. His mother never sees him although she is in the area. He and his sister where taken from her care by the Department of Family Services. The pre-school program here is configured as a "family" program with four home visits a year by Mary Jo, the classroom teacher. At home his environment is rather restricted, Mary Jo describes it as "Spartan," clean and very very neat. His activities there center around the computer, playing games of any type for all hours. At school he would choose to do this also. There are two computers in the classroom and Andrew would gladly monopolize both simultaneously, running back and forth between them primarily clicking buttons without waiting to see what happens.

Mary Jo has tried many strategies to get him to try other things than the computers but all seem to end in some sort of disaster or other with other children upset and Andrew in time out, sucking his thumb and withdrawn. In fact when ever Andrew is off the computer the other children quickly leave whatever activity he is engaged in. His ferocious intensity and inability to stick to one activity alienate everyone. Andrew is emotionally and socially immature and Mary Jo would like to have him "worked up" and assessed for hyperactivity. He is also extremely bright and verbally advanced. When he chooses to he reads quite well and he conducts classroom conversations during group time like an adult.

His ability to think creatively and remember esoteric facts and ideas is remarkable:

Note the same creative use of materials for purposes they were not intended for as in the water table story. This creative use of materials can also be termed inappropriate--it depends on context and who is looking (and passing judgment).

Mary Jo and Mary, the classroom aide, are deeply troubled by Andrew. The father, John, resists the label hyperactive and Mary Jo can do nothing without his assistance in that line. She has sent the program social worker to talk with him but he insists the child is fine at home. Mary Jo contemplates suggesting that he be removed from the program and put in a smaller scale more highly disciplined environment. She asks me what I feel about this. I argue against it for I believe that such an environment would squelch the creativity he exhibits, would further inhibit any social development. Mary points out that the continuous negative reactions he elicits in teachers and children has a worse effect. I have to agree. Mary Jo talks about how she believes he is emotionally damaged as well as hyperactive, "The worst thing is I feel my every response to him just makes that worse, I damage him more."

I feel inadequate. As a university person I know they would like me to be a source of fresh ideas, some sort of solution. Over the weekend I wrack my brains, I know that in the first grade classrooms I am used to working in I dealt with behavioral problems all the time. The kind of science I advocate and practice with children, is extremely open-ended and encourages the children to shape activities in their own ways. This often seems to encourage them to act out in a manner more restrictive, procedure oriented science activities do not. In those classes, I would try to work with the "difficult" children by giving them more responsibilities, giving them leadership roles and special tasks and hoping this would help them invest more deeply in the science. What if I tried this with Andrew? How would I do this in this classroom?

I carry this worry about with me for days. What would I do? What could I do here? Then I have an inspiration. I'm in the local pet store thinking about the undergraduate courses I teach and they had a cage of baby hedgehogs put out by the small mammals. I am looking at these and thinking about whether I would like to have one--they are quite attractive and they cause me to muse on the image of Beatrix Potter putting out bowls of milk for hers. At any rate they are rather expensive and those little spines worry me. My eyes drift over to the guinea pigs. There are two quite nice baby ones but they have no price. At that moment the owner wanders by and asks me what I'm thinking about. That's when it happened. I bought one. I come up with a plan. Mary Jo and I suggest to Andrew that he can have the guinea pig. I will bring it in and he will care for it as well as taking charge of who can play with it and when. When we ask him if he likes this idea he eagerly agrees.

I bring in the animal after a couple more days of talking things over with Andrew, helping him to think through his role and responsibilities. In the hall with no other children around we look at her in her cage. Andrew: "Give her to me!!" I sit him down and show him how to hold her. He is upset about the wood shavings that fall on his clothes. I brush them off. He is worried about her little claws. He gets agitated at her motions. I take her back. He never touches her again.

Discussion

During my years as a research scientist in geology and crystal chemistry, the feelings and sensations I had when I was doing my work were complex. They included feelings of joy, sensuality, beauty as well as those we associate with rational problem solving and intellectual success. These, as a package, shaped and sustained my absorption in my activities. They were projections of a depth and intensity of my person and my engagement but also involved a loss of a sense of self in a task. This combination of qualities in truth captures aspects of science rarely portrayed in our teaching in schoolrooms and suggests something of the paradox at the core to "doing" science. That science is done for itself by people immersed in it and it is also accomplished by people guided by goals, trying to accomplish important tasks—people both unaware of themselves in the world and people with a heightened awareness of context. These qualities are not separate: they are closely intertwined. My absorption in the science occurred because of its immersive qualities but these enriched and were juxtaposed to the intellectual problem solving inherent in laboratory research. I loved that too. I experienced this dualism as an enriching tension between work and play, rational and irrational, thought and feelings. I wish to suggest that the children in my stories portray both facets, the part which reflects the self-in-the-world and the part which reflects a loss of self. The tension which enriched the science I did/do is a large part the force behind the classrooms which I try to construct, reenchanting the enterprise of science and science education through art and literature, reinfusing it with feelings and beauty.

This tension in the doing of science is a progressive one--it fuels the drive towards self re-creation as well as scientific discovery. It is progressive in both the substance of the science and also for those "doing" the science for the science done reflects those who create it. I would argue, from reflecting on my own experiences, that unless we recognize that the doing of science involves more than mastery aimed at problem solving, that it involves, in a reciprocal and creative way, a being-in-the-world and in-the-making, we do not understand the science, the child or the process of education. David Hawkins, in the quote about the rose in the mirror above was making a plea to enrich science education, to make it more reflective of the science that scientists do. I would echo this plea for it is in the "theatre of our commitments" that we come to be, as well as it being within that terrain that we become capable of understanding others. This statement is more than important, it is essential. In these days of phrases such as "science for all," access and equity are of course central but so is understanding others who come from different backgrounds or hold different values from ourselves. I think for us, as teachers, the only real place we can do this is in the terrain of our classrooms, in an environment where we encourage real, "authentic," engagement with each other and our curriculum.

I think my point in telling these stories of children in my classrooms and of Andrew in particular is to emphasize that I in shaping my classrooms as I do, I construct a "lens," so to speak, for gazing at a child. The materials I give Andrew and the behaviors I think should follow from them are of my choosing and even when I am trying to be sensitive and open, I am not. Andrew, for all my trying so hard to "see" him remains invisible to me. It is this failure which is so extreme in this instance which causes me to reflect upon the lenses I have constructed and upon myself in creating them. Just as the children in my first story recognize that the lenses they are gazing through cause distortions which in turn tell them things about the object they are gazing at and about the nature of the lenses themselves and their creators, I can recognize that here and apply it. The context we put children in, the things we let them do are a lens or a mirror. Through such lenses we can see the children, in varying degrees of distortion, and see ourselves.

One would think that the point of creating these "lenses" to gaze at objects or children or science or ourselves is to garner some sort of "truth," some insight into the inner being and potential of another. We can think that such a pursuit is harmless but it is truly only benign when we perpetuate a fiction, that the observer is not going to do anything with the observations they make and the subject of observation is unaffected by the observation. Being passive is certainly not part of the role of the teacher nor of the scientist and is not the point of what happens in classrooms or in research. Both are caught up in the creative function of constructing something new and creating lenses to view subject matter and children is instrumental in that. In creating the contexts for doing science in my classrooms, I state that I am purposely trying to recreate the places I worked within as a scientist —places where experience is complex and both directed towards inner motivations and outer ones. The two stories I tell exemplify this in many ways. The question is what do these lenses tell us about the children, the science and ourselves, what is such information being used for and how does being in these settings effect what is being looked at?

Now this creation and utilization of lenses used to view another is at the core of the subject object relationship I talk about at the start of this piece. If I am to argue that the subject/object relationship is based upon both self-presentation and perception which are purposeful—both the object and the subject want to do something—I am asserting the relationship is motivated by a need. Sartre differentiates between desire and need. In Being and Nothingness (1965) he claims that acts of free will are motivated by desire. In Search for a Method (1963) he modifies this to need. The difference between desire and need, it seems to me, is one of an intellectual desire versus more emotional, felt need. To desire is in your head, to need is in your stomach. Most importantly need addresses a vanishing point—needs can never be satiated. Desires can and then one can move beyond them. I think of Sartre’s need as similar to bell hook’s (1990) "yearning"—a longing which emanates from the heart as well as the mind, which shapes thought, actions, emotions and which is not satiated even when directly addressed. Similarly James Garrison (1997) describes this as "eros"—a passionate desire, a love that "begins in need and lack." The subject/object identity shifts in response to how this need is acted on and perceived.

Martin Heidegger (1962, p. 194) argues that to separate subject and object, as is implied in metaphors about the subject "seeing" the object, is artificial. The subject and object occupy the same world-space, life-space: "By drawing a distinction that I (the subject) am perceiving something else (the object), I have stepped back from the primacy of experience and understanding that operates without reflection." Heidegger does not deny that we exist purposefully in this world, that we are trying to do certain things. He claims that this purposefulness involves decisions—what to do and what not to do, how to go about doing these things. These decisions are founded upon uncertainty, they reflect needs for things which we do not already have and therefore do not know. We make decisions on a basis of things felt, not articulated. This process of becoming both cognizant of our needs and questioning those needs is the essence of arguments of critical theorists such as Jurgen Habermas (1991) as well as Hannah Arendt (1964/77; 1978). In essence when lenses become mirrors we are doing this.

To conclude, I would like to describe a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine who is an electrical engineer. My friend, David, has been very kindly supplying my graduate students and myself with small digital video cameras which we give to children in schools and which they devise uses for in their science explorations. We had been talking about this metaphor of the rose in the mirror that David Hawkins recounts from the Baghavad Gita. We were looking at a digital photograph of a rose and I asked David if he thought there was anything transcendent about the image of the flower. We had just been talking about my garden but in relating this it is possible to substitute the word classroom for that of garden and to think about children when flowers are mentioned. I had stated that there is a difference between the things people do for a purpose, that are driven by a purpose, and those that they do as recreation—that these are a conceit. In thinking of my garden I start to reconsider this statement. I say, "well I think about this every time I go out in my garden—is it a total conceit to put so much effort into creating a place of beauty (and really private beauty too)? You know though Kant (and Aristotle) equate beauty with truth. Marxists would say beauty is a conceit, post-modernists that truth is (or the search for it). Look at this image . . . is there something transcendent about the flower? About the image? So is it a symbol or a representation and of what?" And David, being a scientist, responds that there is no transcendence of ideas and, echoing Gertrude Stein claims that a "flower is a flower." He goes on:

Well being something of a Deweyian, I would argue that the whole point of experience is to give our lives, our social lives meaning but unlike David, I would say the point of searching for meaning is to assert "truths" (even if relative ones) which guide our actions. Our transcendence is in the realm of our actions–we transcend ourselves by what we are able to do. But in another sense David’s idea, that the flower is immeasurable and therefore transcendent, when applied to our ideas of children and our trying to understand them is a very beautiful thought. It suggests to me that our images of particular objects as well as our understandings transcend the particular as they act as metaphors, as they become evocative of things greater than themselves. This is where wisdom lies, and what, I think, both teaching and research should be about and is the point in concerning oneself with the role of biography in either.

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