A Bright Spark: Open Teaching of Science Using Faraday's Lectures on Candles

As well as being a founding father of modern chemistry and physics Michael Faraday was also a skilled lecturer, able to explain scientific principles and ideas simply and concisely to nonscientific audiences. However science didactics today emphasizes the use of open and student-centered methods of teaching in which students find and develop explanations for scientific phenomena instead of the simply learning about them from lectures and demonstrations. We decided to adapt Faraday's famous lecture series "The Natural History of the Candle" so that some of the ideas and experiments he presented could be used in a student-centered setting, where students decide the meaning of what they see and do.