Butterfly, butterfly,
Oh where are you butterfly fluttering through the wind?¹
(a 5th grade student)

We face new horizons at this privileged moment
in the history of science, and it is our hope that we have
been able to communicate this conviction to our readers.²
(Illia Prigogine)

Researchers in many different fields are joining together to present startling and thought-provoking perceptions of reality which teachers can no longer afford to ignore.³
(Alistair Martin-Smith)

I am enchanted by butterflies. To me, they symbolize fragile beauty, mystery, poetry, and freedom of expression. I imagine how wonderful their world must be.

Have you ridden a wind before?⁴

As a beautiful butterfly, pulsing and breathing, the new vision of reality stretches its wings, emerging today from the mechanistic cocoon of a modern worldview. Interesting time. I have not traveled any spaceships to near or distant stars, and I did not crawl through wormholes from one parallel universe to another. As far as I remember, I have never left the Earth, but my entire world is changing. Nothing is the same anymore. As a piece of clay in a child's hands, all familiar and taken for granted attributes of a physical reality - matter, energy, time, space, as well as the entire Universe - are gradually transforming into something drastically different from what they seemed before.

"We must begin where we are," writes William Doll, the author of A Postmodern Perspective on Curriculum.⁵

At this moment I am at the threshold and this is where I begin. Behind me lies the straight-angled cold mechanistic kingdom where I resided and taught science for many years. In front of me shimmers an exciting world where I am yet to live and yet to teach. Avant-garde science unfolds into the 21st century as a powerful and fascinating force. Perspectives from even the nearest future make my mind boil. However, philosophical applications of new scientific insights are even more fascinating. As Nobel Prize winner, Illia Prigogine notes, contemporary science started a new dialogue with nature.⁶

While not yet organized into a coherent worldview, this new dialogue opens the door for re-enchantment, which means departing from a mechanistic, fragmented, meaningless, sterile, spiritless, static, and as such disenchanted world toward something (or someone?) living, feeling, dynamic, complex, interrelated, creative, and ever-evolving.⁷

As Suzan Gablik writes, re-enchantment is in the air.⁸

This ether of re-enchantment is saturated with possibilities for re-thinking human nature, place, and role, as well as human relationship with the world, from dispassionate and manipulative to respectful, caring, appreciative, and deeply connected. In light of this, the significance of re-enchantment is difficult to overestimate: disastrous consequences of our objective detachment from the rest of the world are well known. I agree with Thomas Moore who states that modern ecological, political, social, psychological, economical, educational, and spiritual problems grow out of our loss of enchantment.⁹

But the re-enchantment is in the air. It began to penetrate various dimensions of our life, inviting us to re-invent ourselves and the world we live in, as Morris Berman indicated in The Reenchantment of the World, David Griffin in The Reenchantment of Science,¹⁰ Thomas Moore in The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life,¹¹ and Suzan Gablik in The Reenchantment of Art.¹² According to Gablik, the challenging and important task is to speed up the diffusion of re-enchantment throughout all levels and endeavors of society. If there is a new agenda, a new vision emerging within our society, how might one help put it into practice?¹³

The idea of re-enchantment¹⁴ deeply resonates with my individual and professional identity. I am in the midst of a personal paradigm shift as an experiencing being and as a science teacher. The emerging interrelated, organic, mysterious world portrayed by contemporary science truly and deeply fascinates me. For some inexplicable reason, I have a strong sense of deja-vu. It seems to me, I have known this new world for a long, long time. Today, I experience an exciting moment of Aha! Quantum Leap! that relates to my thinking about reality in general and science education in particular.

I am enchanted with the opportunity to contribute to the overall process of the re-enchantment of the world from the dimension of science education that currently remains chained to a mechanistic worldview. For this purpose, I attempt (re) imagine elements of school science curriculum and pedagogy on the grounds of a new conceptual framework offered by contemporary developments in science. To express my intentions, I will borrow the words of William Doll: I will speak about curricular possibilities in terms of vision. Visions, imaginations, or as Martin Heidegger puts it, searching for horizons, have power to (re) create our reality.¹⁵

The changes in science education I propose are dramatic, risky, and at times difficult to articulate or to accept. It is not particularly easy to see the beginning of something that is being shaped by a truly different awareness,¹⁶ writes Suzan Gablik.

Although these ideas have started to move through our culture very quickly, the challenge still remains for all of us to translate them into our own activities and practices. Obviously, the kind of change I have being signaling here is so major that we will encounter much resistance to even recognizing it.¹⁷

I experienced this challenge first hand while attempting to translate my new visions into pedagogical practice. As I finished teaching a teacher education course, entitled Physical Science in Elementary Schools, memories of internal struggles, excitement, tears, happiness, desperation, and hope are still fresh. According to philosopher Alfred North Whitehead,...the true method of discovery is like the flight of an airplane. It starts from the ground of particular; it makes flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.¹⁸

My landing from the air of imaginative generalization was not always smooth. Freefall without a rope.¹⁹

Lots of bruises. But I am not the first and not the last. Many others were crushed in their quest for flight. However, some strange irresistible power, which is apparently embedded into the human nature, pushes us to continue the quest, no matter what.

I hope this thesis will result in an emergence of a new order of complexity out of the chaotic, fuzzy interplay of my experiences, memories, thoughts, feelings, intuitions, intentions, and imaginations. The data I use include my experiences as a resident of the enchanted land of childhood, a chemistry and physical science instructor in a community college,²⁰ the instructor of a science education course in the elementary teacher education program,²¹ the director of the youth science video club Gaia,²² a mother of an unfolding young life, a poet, and simply as a Being who, as Martin Heidegger writes, is thrown into this phenomenal world without preliminary negotiations.

Why did I find it important to explore my own experiences? I think that in order to propose and to practice dramatic re-enchanting changes in science education and therefore in students' worldviews, I must interpret, understand, internalize, accept, and adopt these changes myself. Otherwise, my thesis will remain an artificial construct collecting dust on the library shelves.

My own experiences, however, are inevitably interwoven and entangled with others' experiences as well as with experiences of the rest of the universe. According to understandings that have emerged from the new developments in science, there is no way I can objectively cut myself off from the world. In this sense, the entire world is my research sample. I am the World. I am a Cosmos. This is the main idea of a holonomic inquiry, which I attempt to conceptualize as my research methodology.

Grounded on new insights in science, the nonlinear steps into re-enchantment that I propose, spiral down along the following progression:

A modest re-enchantment of the science of complexity:
Self-organization, creativity, ambiguity,
and interconnectedness are embedded in Nature.

The deeper re-enchantment of a holonomic paradigm:
Our reality is an unbroken holographic wholeness.

Even deeper re-enchantment of postmodern organicism:
The world is an experiencing, feeling, and imaginative organism, comprised of organisms throughout its totality.

The radical re-enchantment of the spiritual no-no:
New developments in science invite Spirit.

The extreme re-enchantment of a plain magic:
Cutting edge science legitimizes laws of magicality.²³

While writing this manuscript, I was surprised how much it has written itself and how far I am now from what I initially intended.

I intended an ode,
but it turned out a sonnet;
I intended an ode:
It began à la mode,
but Rose crossed the road,
in her new Sunday bonnet;
I intended an ode,
but it turned out a sonnet²⁴

Initially, I limited my study to applications of contemporary physics for school science curriculum, but soon realized that it would be insufficient for my re-enchanting purposes. I was forced to look at a broader picture that included insights from new developments in biology, neuroscience, ecology, astrophysics, chemistry, and quantum theory. Poems from my favorite poets, as well as my own, incorporated themselves throughout my entire essay. They kept jumping into my writing without any special invitation, making me increasingly aware of the power of poetic intuition and of the deep narrative nature of scientific knowledge. I wrote about science and education, but I was unable to do so without poetry! Excerpts from children's science fiction, written by my daughter's favorite authors, situated themselves quite comfortably within this essay as well. Eventually, my story wrote itself into an eclectic mixture of science, poetry, and philosophy. Before I begin, I wish to stress my intentions and the potential significance of my work. For this purpose I will borrow words from Peter Scott, cited in Illia Prigogine's The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and Laws of Nature:

The world, our world, tries ceaselessly to extend frontiers of the knowable
and the valuable, to transcend the giveness of things,
to imagine a new and better world.²⁵

We must begin where we are, and now is time to begin.

Of course,
this is how it must begin:
imagining the world.
Standing on any green hill
at the mercy of all blue rivers,
(re) inventing the colours of sky
and three perfect ravens.²⁶