Properties of the air

1. Locating Meaning:

What is emotionally engaging about the subject? How can it evoke wonder? Why should it matter to us?


Sources of meaning: An important function of education is to enrich our everyday environment with meaning. In the case of air, we tend to take it for granted as a kind of emptiness through which we move. One of the delights of education is the discovery of wonder in what is commonly taken for granted. This topic should matter to children because it can enlarge and enrich their perception of the world and their understanding of their experience. It can be affectively engaging through its power to evoke, stimulate, and develop the sense of wonder and engage it with reality.

Sources of emotional engagement: The wonder of the air that they take for granted.

2. Thinking about the content in story form:

2.1 Finding binary opposites:

What binary concepts best capture the wonder and emotion of the topic?

Main opposition: Main opposition: One usable binary set for a unit on the properties of the air is
empty/full. This may seem a bit simple, with no evident affective "pull." But I think we can invest emptiness with the affective components of starkness, nothingness, uselessness to life, and fullness with the opposites – varied richness, complexity, and supportive of life.

Possible alternatives: simple/complex

3. Finding images and drama:

What parts of the topic most dramatically embody the binary concepts? What image best captures the dramatic contrast?


Image or metaphor that captures the binary oppositions:

If possible, darken the room and show a beam if light passing through. Ask the students what the dust is made up of. Tell them that 60% is made up of decayed human skin. So that each time they rub their faces or hands together, tiny bits of skin sheer off and then decay, then float on the air. So when we breath in . . .! Or, if you think this isn’t going too far, ask them where they think flies go to the bathroom, and what then happens to fly feces? Well, they too decay and . . . ! Or play a radio in one corner of the room and listen to a voice for a few moments. Then switch it off and go to another corner of the room and change the channel to some music. Ask the students how the noises get to the radio. Some will have heard about radio waves. Ask them what the room looks like to a radio; if they had an “eye” like a radio that “sees” radio waves, what would the rest of the room look like? Would it see through walls?

Content that reflects binary oppositions:

We start with the sense of the air as being empty and dull, and will gradually show that it is in fact the richest, and strangest object, in the room.

4. Structuring the body of the lesson or unit:

How do we teach the content in story form?


Sketch of overall story structure of the lesson:

What’s the story about the air? Well, the obvious one is that we need its gases to be able to live. But how many gases are in the air we breathe? What would the air in the classroom look like if we could see the gases in different colors? And what else is there? Hold out your hand: a million particles from the sun just flashed through it. What are these particles? Are they flowing through us all the time? What is a muon? What would the classroom look like if we could see all the atomic and molecular particles passing through it? Why did someone sneeze? Who is allergic to pollens? How many different kinds of pollens might be floating in the air in the room, and how many pollens in all are there in the room? How about viruses and bacteria? What would they look like if we were as tiny as them and could see them as big as a person? Are bacteria bigger or smaller than pollens? And what are smells made of? What would the room look like if we could see only smells?
A guided discovery activity could have the students close their eyes, and imagine themselves getting smaller and smaller, till they were as tiny as a mote of dust floating in the air of the room. The teacher could then introduce them to various other passing bacteria, Mr. And Mrs. Pollen out for a float, dazzled by the flashing colors of different gases, intersected by endless radio waves passing around them, with muons and neutrinos flashing by, and so on.
Teachers might introduce lessons on many of the constituents of the air, constantly playing on the contrast between what was thought to be empty and uninteresting, adding one layer of complexity and wonder after another, till the air seems thronged with amazing elements, which we are too gross to notice.

5. Conclusion

How does the story end? How do we resolve the conflict set up between the binary opposites? How much do we explain to the students about the binary oppositions?

Concluding activity:

The students could be invited in small groups to represent different constituents of the air. Four or five of them might be the pollens, another small group would be radio waves, another dust, another gases, etc. They would find out, with the teacher’s help, as much as possible about their element, and then do two things. First, they could make a presentation to the rest of the class about it, but, second, they would construct a model of their element. They might do the presentation while they are building the models. The aim would be to make their models hugely larger than reality, but sized relative to each other, more or less, and in relative quantities to each other. So we might have five large pollen balls and twenty dust chunks. The conclusion of the unit would come with the students’ models being hung from the ceiling, perhaps lines of colored threads horizontal from ceiling to floor representing the flashing particles from the sun, and thicker wavy ribbons of many colors coming in various directions representing the radio waves. The final result should give the impression of how crowded with wonders the air is, if only we could see it. The room full of models would suggest what it would be like if we were minute.

6. Evaluation

How can one know whether the topic has been understood?


Forms of evaluation to be used:

Any traditional forms of evaluation can be used to assess whether students understand the properties of the air around them. In addition, teachers could assess the degree to which they become knowledgeable in the process of building their models, and can assess their enthusiasm and imaginativeness in doing so. All the comments made earlier under Evaluation are also relevant here.