Vol.:(0123456789) Cultural Studies of Science Education https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-018-9878-9 1 3 FORUM Building consensus views or interrogating metanarratives? Musings on teaching the nature of science Aswathy Raveendran 1  · Himanshu Srivastava 1 Received: 9 March 2018 / Accepted: 12 June 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018 Abstract This article is a response to María del Mar Aragón, José Antonio Acevedo-Díaz and Anto- nio García-Carmona’s article, which investigated pre-service teachers’ understandings of epistemic and non-epistemic aspects of the nature of science (NOS) based on the historical case study of Ignaz Semmelweis and childbed fever. We situate the study in contempo- rary mainstream debates on teaching NOS and argue that science educators ought to focus on conveying specifc aspects of NOS in-depth, instead of covering a general check list of NOS tenets in their classrooms. Furthermore, we argue that there are multiple ways of narrating the story of science, the protagonist of science classrooms, and that educators should also be conscious of the metanarratives regarding science that get conveyed in their narratives. Keywords Nature of science · Historical case studies · Metanarratives · Science education Popular narratives of the case of Ignaz Semmelweis, the obstetrician-scientist, and his discovery of the cause of childbed fever paint a tragic picture of an unrecognized genius (Allchin 2003). The case of Semmelweis has been analyzed by historians and philoso- phers of science over the years. What appears to have intrigued them is why Semmelweis never received the recognition he rightfully deserved, given how accurate he was in his observations, pre-empting the germ theory and the feld of antisepsis in medicine. Sem- melweis’s own account as well as biographical accounts of historians, attribute to several factors his rejection by his contemporaries. These include political circumstances (Sem- melweis 1983), the personal idiosyncrasies of the scientist himself (Allchin 2003), as well as epistemic reasons (Tulodziecki 2013). The political factors include the unrest in Vienna following the Hungarian uprising against Austrian occupation and the prevalence Lead Editor: R. Levinson. This is a response to María del Mar Aragón Méndez, José Antonio Acevedo Díaz, and Antonio García Carmona’s “Prospective biology teachers’ understanding of the nature of science through an analysis of the historical case of Semmelweis and childbed fever” https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-018-9868-y . * Aswathy Raveendran mee.aswathi@gmail.com 1 New Delhi, India