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The call for reforms in science education has been ongoing for a century, with new movements and approaches continuously reshaping the identity and values of the discipline. The HPS movement has an equally long history and taken part in the debates defining its purpose and revising curriculum. Its limited success, however, is due not only to competition with alternative visions and paradigms (e.g. STS, multi-culturalism, constructivism, traditionalism) which deadlock implementation, and which have led to conflicting meanings of scientific literacy, but the inability to rise above the debate. At issue is a fundamental problem plaguing science education at the school level, one it shares with education in general. It is my contention that it requires a guiding ''metatheory'' of education that can appropriately distance itself from the dual dependencies of metatheories in psychology and the demands of socialization-especially as articulated in most common conceptions of scientific literacy tied to citizenship. I offer as a suggestion Egan's culturallinguistic theory as a metatheory to help resolve the impasse. I hope to make reformers familiar with his important ideas in general and more specifically, to show how they can complement HPS rationales and reinforce the work of those researchers who have emphasized the value of narrative in learning science. This will be elaborated in Part II of a supplemental paper to the present one. As a prerequisite to presenting Egan's metatheory I first raise the issue of the need for a conceptual shift back to philosophy of education within the discipline, and thereto, on developing and demarcating true educational theories (essentially neglected since Hirst). In the same vein it is suggested a new research field should be opened with the express purpose of developing a discipline-specific ''philosophy of science education'' (largely neglected since Dewey) which could in addition serve to reinforce science education's growing sense of academic autonomy and independence from socio-economic demands.

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This paper reports on a mixed-methods study with high school students. The study focused on the reasons they give with regard to "what they find interesting about their physics lesson" and "what makes them want to study their physics lesson" during a school year. The sample consisted of 219 students, who attended public high schools, located in various geographical regions of Greece. Journal entries made by all students-that is, students from junior high and senior high schools-were content-analyzed through a grounded theory approach. A total of eight categories were identified. Quantitative differences between these categories, and between the two groups of students, were also identified. Even though some of the identified categories are well-known motivators in science education, three specific categories deserve particular attention: "connection to one's own self", "purpose", and "utility". Notwithstanding the limitations of the present research design (i.e., volunteer sample, lack of standardization in students" and especially in teachers' activities), these categories, along with two quantitative indicators-that is, number of journal entries and student percentages-challenge us to rethink what makes the ideas of science, especially those of physics, meaningful or simply relevant to the life of the students.

Engaging students in science and helping them develop an understanding of its ideas has been a consistent challenge for both science teachers and science educators alike. Such a challenge is even greater in the context of the "Science for All" curriculum initiative. However, Bruner's notion of "narrative thinking" and Egan's "romantic understanding" offer an alternative approach to teaching and learning science, in a way that engagement and understanding become a possibility. This chapter focuses on students' "narrative mode of thought," as a bridge to understanding science-which has traditionally been based more upon the use of logico-mathematical thinking in the upper grades-and on a distinctive form of understanding the world, characteristic of students of the age range from 8 to 15 years. This latter form of understanding, that the educational theorist Kieran Egan calls "romantic understanding," has features that can be readily associated with the natural world and its phenomena. Therefore its development could be fostered in the context of school science learning, and in a way that the narrative mode would also be taken into consideration.