Teaching the History and Philosophy of Astronomy

Astronomy is a subject with a rich and long history, and many connections to the development of some of the most important ideas in physics. The philosophical implications of the subject are often neglected in introductory survey courses. A framework is presented for teaching the history and philosophy of astronomy in a way that engages students, lets them work in small groups, and encourages them to develop writing and reasoning skills. The class is enlivened by short videos and class debates. This type of class appeals to a broad range of non-science college students. The class is divided into weekly modules: Ancient Skies, Greek Science, Revolutions, Telescopes, Gravity, Evolution, Mapping, Relativity, Quantum Theory, Stars and Atoms, Galaxies, Big Bang, and Life in the Universe. The core content is 18 hours of video lectures, broken into shorter, 6-8 minute-topics, with associated slides. Half of the class time is given over to debates and discussions, with students responding to weekly prompts in class, working in small groups, then doing individual homework each week on a discussion topic. Homework is presented in VoiceThread, a tool that allows for multimedia presentations, and lets students easily comment on each other’s work. A semester-long project allows for a deeper exploration of one of the topics of the class. A spin-off of this course is a massive open online class (MOOC), developed for the Coursera platform and launched in September 2021. This lets the same material reach a large audience of adult, lifelong learners.