Stories about nature as aesthetic experience in science education

In recent decades, constructivist and cognitivist research recognized the important role played by imagination in science education. In particular, the potential of imaginative approaches to attract students to the scientific contents has been highlighted, in addition to the importance of routinely engaging learners’ imagination in everyday learning experiences. The function performed by emotions and, in particular, by the feeling of pleasure appears to be less investigated in scientific literature: it is still not clearly defined how it is possible to facilitate learning processes related to the scientific contents by making them more enjoyable. A branch of research is exploring the possibility of using metaphors and narratives for this purpose: to mobilize the emotional and affective dimension, integrating it with the logical one. This contribution aims to deepen the role that the feeling of pleasure can play in science education experiences in which metaphors and narratives are used systematically. There is an area in which the feeling of pleasure is intertwined in a paradigmatic way with the knowledge of peculiar elements: in the aesthetic experience, we consider an object (artistic or natural) to be beautiful to the extent that we perceive a feeling of pleasure aroused by it. In this regard, the more pleasant stories about nature are to read, the more effective they are in terms of educational effectiveness. Stories need to be not only clear, precise, explanatory; stories need in fact not only to be understood, but also aesthetically enjoyed. By taking “The Winter Story” as example (Fuchs, 2011), the paper focuses on the characters that make stories enjoyable. The pleasure of the text is indeed an essential ingredient in the narrative understanding of natural phenomena: the presence of metaphors, personifications, of a "grammar of stories", meaning the elements that are involved in the cognitive value of the narration.