What Seth Godin doesn't understand about science education

Seth Godin — entrepreneurial guru and all around clever doer — recently shared his thoughts on how science should be taught.

Now, Godin is typically brilliant — his On Being interview, "The Art of Noticing, Then Creating" is an especially great meditation on the process of innovation, and is entirely worth your time! 

But these thoughts? I'd say they're good, but also problematic, and in a very interesting way. Showing how might, I think, point us beyond the simplistic science reform movement that's currently ascendant, and toward a genuinely new sort of science education, one that regularly cultivates adults who think like scientists.

Read his whole post — it's super short. To keep this short, I'll just excerpt the part I disagree with. (How terribly unfair of me!)

Godin writes:

Start with the method. Unlike just about everything else we teach, science is not based on human culture or history. If one wants to study literature or geography or the Kings and Queens of England, it begins with knowing all that came before, the work, the names, the lists, the battles. Science, on the other hand, is above culture. Gravity would have existed even if Isaac Newton hadn't invented it. After two weeks of science class, students should know how to think like a scientist.

Much of this is gold. Kids absolutely should learn to think like scientists. And science really is above culture — getting at the world outside our heads is much of the fun of science! (Aliens civilizations, if they exist, can puzzle out the exact same laws of chemistry that we've discovered.) 

There are, however, two important problems with what Godin writes.

Problem number one: though Godin is entirely correct when he says that "science is above culture", he forgets that hearing the stories of great discoveries can spark interest, and help us think for ourselves.

Stories are brain candy. They can help us enter into the romance of the real world.

Isaac Newton, actually, is a great example! Hearing about the nutty professor who, on his own time, derived the laws undergirding the motion of the planets, then losing his notes, then re-deriving them and as a byproduct discovering the mathematics of all gravity — this can be an easy way to catch the interest of science.

And, indeed, we do catch interest. There are a few people for whom a lust of physics springs naturally. But for most of us, it needs to be cultivated. And the stories of discovery are a great way to do that.

Stories shouldn't, by the way, take the place of scientific thinking — rather, they can help us get deeply into scientific thinking. 

For example, it's famously difficult to think about natural selection — evolution is a deeply counterintuitive notion. It practically breaks all the rules of our folk physics. But hearing the story of Charlie Darwin, and really getting behind him — feeling his loneliness aboard the Beagle, feeling his bamboozlement at the odd patterns of finch variation in the Galapagos — can launch us into struggling for the answers ourselves.

Stories — that is, "culture" — can scaffold our thinking.

The physicist Michael Polanyi argued that science is not really a method — it's a detailed culture that we get inducted into by other scientists. (He wrote in the 1940s, when America was throwing money at science, but was unable to produce much without importing scientists from Eastern Europe, who were schooled in a long tradition of careful lab work.) 

Well, we can (in part) get inducted into the community of science by learning great scientists of the past.

It's important to not push this too far — kids need hands-on and brains-on experience with the real world (see below) — but culture can help cultivate real scientists.

Problem number two: "method" is bunk. Or, at best, it's an unhelpful characterization.

At least, most methods are. Let's overstate this a bit: there is no “scientific method”.  

It’s now generally considered foolishness in science education circles to insist strongly that kids follow the “HYPOTHESIS—PREDICTION—ETC.” cycle.

Real thinking — and here I know Godin agrees! — is messy. It emerges on its own haphazardly. You engage something in nature. You get your hands dirty, your shirt stained. And then you ponder, and try stuff out.

Well, perhaps you could say that what I'm describing is a method. I could roll with that, I suppose. But the word "method" is still unhelpful: it brings to mind an emotionless, Vulcan-like, "System 2" process. Real pondering is a much hotter, human, intuitive thing. 

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So what's needed for a real science education — an education that cultivates real scientists?

1. Regular engagement with real stuff, not (God help us!) assigned textbook reading. Kids should dissect toasters. They should observe the actions of animals and plants. Cook food daily. Visit, and re-visit, a single ecosystem. Peer at a particular square foot of ground under a microscope. 

This takes time. It also takes tools, like being taught to draw what's in front of your face.

2. A culture that prizes asking questions, and hunting for answers. A tribe of people committed to thinking together, challenging each other's notions. 

3. Teachers — aka Learners in Chief! — who fall in love with what they're studying, and help connect the kids to their love. (Say, by using Imaginative Education.)

4. A curriculum that doesn't, at the end of the day, differentiate between "science" and "philosophy" and "math" and "history" and "literature" and "religion" and "spelling" and anything else. 

There's one world, and our subjects are lenses for viewing it. (I've most controversially argued that in a series of posts about teaching creation and evolution.)

If we do these things, I'll suggest, we can create schools that cultivate real scientists — adults who think expansively and cautiously, who look for evidence before belief, who remain open to opposing explanations, who are willing to play with crazy notions — whatever profession the kids end up in. 

At the end of the day, I don't think Godin and I are far apart on this. Certainly our ultimate goals are exactly the same!

And when Godin writes this —

Science makes sense, it's not magic. One of the challenges of teaching science in high school is that there seems to be so much to cover, it's tempting to cram all the formulas, names and theories in front of students. Just as there's no room to argue about when they fought the War of 1812, we often present science as a bag of magical facts, not the result of a method, a method students can implement.

I can only respond, yes, yes, YES! 

But: I'll take his "not magic" and raise it — it's magical, too! As the Flemish physicist Simon Stevin wrote: 

The magic is not magical.

This, in a nutshell, is the promise of science — and of all learning: things make sense.

When we get beyond our usual boredom of the world around us, we realize that we're surrounded by mystery. Everything — clouds, vacuum cleaners, cats — appears to be miraculous. 

And then we launch ourselves into understanding it, and discover, bit by bit, that it consists of parts, and those parts fit together perfectly, gaplessly.

But this doesn't reduce its wonder — rather, it increases it!

I used to say things like "the goal of education is to re-enchant the Universe". I still think there's something right about that. But now I say this: the goal of schools isn't so much to re-enchant the universe as to show that it already is enchanted.

Any science education that can help do that is something that I — and, I think, all of us — can get behind.

Why science must be reductive AND holistic

Scott D. Sampson, in his book How to Raise a Wild Child, suggests that science education has taken a wrong turn:

One of the most prevalent ideas in science is that nature consists of objects.... We objectify nature to measure it, test it, and study it, with the ultimate goal of revealing its secrets.

In order to heal the Nature Deficit Disorder that plagues children, Sampson suggests we need to give kids EMU: experience, mentoring, and understanding. But, he argues, traditional science education (and traditional science) has hyperfocused on one aspect of understanding and ignored the rest.

As Wordsworth put it: "We murder to dissect." In breaking apart the things around us to see what makes them tick, we end up losing the dynamic wholes that fascinated us in the first place.

Sampson points out that this desire to "break down" complexities lies at the heart of the modern scientific disciplines:

Science subdivides nature into chunks or "-ologies": geology is the study of rocks, entomology the study of insects, and so forth. Within each discipline, scientists further dissect their object of study into an ever-smaller array of parts. Zoologists, for example, think of animals in terms of species, organisms, cells, genes, and the like.

There's a certain breed of thinker that thinks this reductive science is bad, bad, bad — that a healthy science must repent of this "reductionism" and do the opposite!

I don't think Sampson is among this group. That he is card-carrying member of a "traditional" scientific discipline (paleontology) seems to imply that he sees the value of breaking down complex phenomena to understand how they work. (Dr. Sampson, if you're reading, feel free to set the record straight!)

Rather, I think, Sampson is arguing that this reductive approach must be combined with an emergentist approach, that looks for connections and wholes.

We need both sorts of science.

How can we bring this emergentist approach — this holistic approach — into schools?

Sampson gives four suggestions: subjectification, place-based learning, food science, and green schools.

I'll be explaining his vision for the last three in future posts. For the moment, I'd like to gush about how Sampson suggests we bring "subjectication" into the school. 

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Sampson invites us to imagine walking through a forest. What do we see? An evergreen tree, perhaps. A squirrel. A crow. A butterfly. A beetle. A stream. And so on.

But this answer focuses on parts, and misses the complex relationships between them:

If we could put on Mother Nature's goggles, the revealed world would be a kaleidoscope of flowing relationships. A fir tree soaking up solar energy while siphoning water from the soil below. A beetle chewing on an oak leaf, gorging itself on green sunlight. A butterfly dancing atop a flower, finding food while helping the flower make more flowers. A spider wrapping up some winged creature for a later meal. A rotting log giving sustenance to a bevy of decomposing critters.

Nature is chockablock with subjects, with agents trying to flourish. To do this, they've negotiated complex relationships with the agents around them.

Science class can be, in part, an exploration of these agents, and of these relationships.

Ultimately, science education, in concert with other areas of learning, could go a long way toward achieving the "Great Work" described by cultural historian Thomas Berry — transforming the perceived world from a "collection of objects" to a "communion of subjects."

I've written elsewhere about how our new kind of school might do this — might help re-enchant the world. We can do that, I argued, by drawing from an indigenous American cosmology (a view that world is full of subjects, rather than objects) and engaging this through the teaching philosophy of Imaginative Education (which holds that everything is interesting, and that even complexity can be explored through stories, emotions, mysteries, and metaphors).

I'm happy to say that this seems deeply consonant with what Dr. Sampson recommends!

He gives us a simple suggestion, however, as to how to start: get kids outside, and

ask children to find as many examples of nature's interrelationships as they can.

The long journey toward rebooting school can start with such simple steps.

Why I'm in love with both a werewolf and a vampire (or: "Beyond the Traditionalist–Progressivist Divide")

Like Twilight’s Bella Swan, I am desperately in love with a werewolf and a vampire. Well, metaphorically. Less metaphorically, I’m desperately in love with two totally opposing visions of schooling.

I’ve found this to be a problem, as:

1. the people who champion each vision more or less hate each other, and
2. when people try to combine these visions, everything explodes.

Let me explain.

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A word of warning: It’s always hazardous to split a messy reality into two neat categories.

Hazardous: but irresistible!

I won’t make any hard-and-fast claims that the division I’m about to make perfectly describes reality. It does describe, however, how I’ve experienced school reform movements.

‘K.

‘Nuff said.

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There are two basic visions for schooling.

On the one hand, there’s the traditionalist vision. Traditionalist-minded schools strive to get students to re-think the amazing things other people have thought before. These schools tend to focus on the liberal arts: students devour literature, memorize poetry, debate philosophy, and recap scientific discoveries.

On the other hand, there’s the progressive vision. Progressively-minded schools strive for something quite different: to help students have their own thoughts, ideas that no one has ever had before!

Let me illustrate!

On the wall of an traditionalist school, you might see a famous quote by the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold. In person, Arnold was widely described as a frivolous and foppish, but his writings were full of icy seriousness. Arnold wrote that to mend society, schools must instruct students in:

the best which has been thought and said.

Walking into a progressive school, on the other hand, you might see a famous quote by the Swiss psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget. Piaget wrote that to mend society, schools must unchain students from the past, and help them discover new things:

the principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.

(Thanks to Bob Hagin for reminding me of this quote at his blog!)

Examples, you say?

If you’ve seen The Dead Poets Society, The Emperor’s Club, or the Harry Potter films, you’ve seen Hollywood images of traditionalist schools.

And, come to think of it, if you’ve seen Dead Poet’s Society, you’ve also seen an image of the opposite: a progressively-minded classroom. (I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say that the conflict of educational visions fuels the plot.)

Curiously, I couldn’t find any examples of full-on progressive schools in film — if you know of any, point me toward them, and I’ll update this post!

But of course this divide isn’t just a Hollywood phenomenon. In real life, classical schools (especially, I find, of the Christian variety) and great books colleges go to the nth degree to achieve the traditionalist vision. In a less extreme manner, the Common Core Standards and E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum attempt to achieve the traditionalist vision.

On the other hand, the current anti-testing movement is animated by a progressive ideal. And at the extremes of the progressive ideal are free schools (such as Sudbury schools) and the unschooling movement.

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These visions don’t play well together.

I’ve found that advocates of both visions tend to react to the other vision with horror and disgust. They’re befuddled that anyone would want to “do that” to children, and they malign each other:

“Traditionalist schools are just drill-and-kill.”

“Those hippie-dippie progressive schools don’t really teach anything.”

Now, there really are problems in each type of schooling. Sometimes traditionalist-minded schools really just amount to drill-and-kill! Sometimes progressively-minded teachers really don’t teach much of anything!

Well, you might be thinking, the solution is obvious: just combine the two. Let each bring its own genius to bear!

Take the best of both worlds!

Easier said than done.

At the end of the day, we’ve got to make choices as to what to put in a school day. Will we allocate time and resources to helping kids master old knowledge, or into helping them make new knowledge?

Kieran Egan has argued (in the second chapter of his thrilling The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up) that these two ideals, in fact, pull against each other: that an attempt to pursue both tends to torpedo both.

His approach to schools — Imaginative Education — is an attempt to reframe the task of teaching so as to make this traditionalist–progressive war obsolete.

Our schools are attempting to do the same thing.

How are we pulling it off?

Stay tuned.

Epic stories (group story-telling)

A problem:

At many schools, history class is shallow facts. It's frequently dull, and students (and teachers) often avoid deep engagement with it.

This means that students grow up disconnected from the wild diversity of real men and women whose experiences could expand their visions for what their lives could be. As a species, we crave to know what other people are really like: stripped of the chance to satisfy that need in school, students satisfy it in tabloid journalism and reality TV.

There's an alternate way to explore the lives of others, one employed in every culture that's ever managed to survive more than a single generation: stories. Through stories, we can experience how interesting other people really are. A story well told is as impossible to resist as sugar when you're hungry, or as a titillating bit of gossip.

Schools, however, don't make much use of professional storytelling.

Our basic plan:

Each week, teachers tell an epic story from history — one that's totally true, and totally captivating.

The story is broken up into four episodes, to be told Monday–Thursday. Each installment ends in a cliffhanger, and each begins in a recap of everything that's happened up 'til now.

These stories are told with the help of a curriculum that we'll be making. The stories will fit into our Big Spiral History progression — we'll spend a year in the ancient world, a year of the medieval world, a year of the modern world, and a year of the contemporary world. Then we'll go back to the beginning, and re-experience history from a more considered vantage point.

Each story will be planned with Kieran Egan's Imaginative Education framework — teachers will dive deep into the history, find what's most engaging, and tell the story with help of a cultural-cognitive tool.

(The curriculum we'll develop will give teachers guidance, suggesting certain research texts, and certain ways to unpack the story. Crucially, though, each teacher will breath life into the story with regards to their own struggles, hopes, and knowledge of the student.)

Our goals:

Virtually all kids in our schools will not only enjoy history, they'll care about it. They'll imaginatively enter the lives of other people far removed from them.

If you walk into our classrooms, you might see:

A whole class of kids leaning in as the teacher unfolds the latest episode in the life of Confucius, or the Empress Theodora, or Frederick Douglass, or Steve Jobs.

Some specific questions:

• Is there a good general course in storytelling that our teachers could work through?
• I'd love to have a team of professional historians, and a team of professional storytellers that we could occasionally get help from. Anyone know any of those whom we might approach?

How to Talk "Imaginative Education" (to People Who Only Want to Hear "Brain Science")

This is you (no, really)

I've lagged in posting because, for the last week, I've been consumed with preparing (and giving) a speech for the 2014 Imaginative Education Conference, held in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. Its title: How to Talk 'IE' to Someone Who Only Wants to Hear 'Brain Science.'

It tackled a fairly serious problem I've had: I know IE, I love IE — and yet it's been very difficult to talk about. The standard way of presenting it (starting with the concept of cultural–cognitive toolkits) tends to befuddle people from the get-go.

That's tragic, as IE is (I think) an unbelievably powerful idea — maybe the most powerful in education today. 

And, at its root, it's a rather simple idea, as well.

That, at least, is what I suggested in my conference talk. I've re-recorded the talk, and I'll be posting it (in chunks) over the next couple days.

Here's the first part:

Part two:

Part three:

And, finally, part four:

I'd love (love love LOVE) feedback on the talk.

Oh, hold up — if you don't know anything about IE (Imaginative Education, that is), don't worry. The video shall explain all.

I haven't written much about IE lately, which is, frankly, weird — I see IE as being the beating heart of our school, particularly in the early grades. (In the triad of love—mastery—insight, IE is the tool that enables us to nail love.)

One of my (myriad) hopes for our school is that it can be a sort of flag for the educational world on how powerful IE is in crafting a curriculum that matters — that draws in all aspects of a students cognition, particularly their emotions.

If you like this video, let me know — I'd be interested in tweaking it to explain IE to an audience who's never heard of it. And then maybe releasing it as a series of quite short videos.

The stupid power of stupid stories

One of Kieran Egan’s major emphases is how tremendously foundational stories are for human cognition. Almost anything, it seems, can be understood more readily if we put it in the form of a story.

Why this is complex and fascinating — stories seem to sit in the nexus of culture and biology. At some point, I’d like to unpack some of this here.

For now, I’ll just relegate myself to (ha!) a simple story. A week ago, my family took a camping trip out to the San Juan Islands, off the Washington coast. It was an excellent trip, all in all, but the drive back home was a little vexing.

James, my three-year-old, was kvetching in the back seat — he had been cooped up far too long — and I decided to distract him with some of the cool studies on crow intelligence that had been done recently at the University of Washington, from which I recently graduated.

I put on my super-excited-distract-the-kid voice:

“JAMES! Some people wanted to SEE how SMART CROWS were! So they went to the CROWS’ NESTS and…”

Epic fail. James’ attention was barely pricked, and he fell back to whining and violently thrusting his toy airplane around the car.

I remembered the cognitive primacy of simple stories, and abased myself, this time in a more measured tone:

“James! Once there was a crow named — erm — ‘Crowster.’”

Attention: snagged.

“And one day he saw a human walking toward his nest.”

It was amazing — in teen argot, “stupid” — how immediately he paid attention, and how perfectly he maintained it. (And, for that matter, how frustrated he was when, for purposes of navigation, I had to break off the story a few minutes later.)

(Fuller accounts of these studies on crow intelligence, incidentally, can be found at the New York Times and at this TED talk. Neither uses simple stories, or, alas, the character of, erm, “Crowster.” They’re still pretty great.)

I don’t want to press this too far: anecdotes featuring one’s child are perhaps the lowliest form of empirical evidence. But this seems to illustrate something broader: stories are magic.

Stories are a format our minds (innately? culturally?) are biased to pay attention to, and to remember. We are the storytelling animal, par excellence. (Take that, dolphins!)

Stories even factor into the System 1 / System 2 division. Daniel Kahneman writes, in Thinking, Fast and Slow —

A sentence is understood more easily if it describes what an agent... does than if it describes what something is, what properties it has.... The mind — especially System 1 — appears to have a special aptitude for the construction and interpretation of stories about active agents, who have personalities, habits, and abilities. (p. 29)

Well, well.

A few questions seem to arise for we who wish to design a new kind of school:

• How can stories enrich all the disciplines, not just (say) literature and history?
• How can we design the curriculum so that these stories connect up with and support each other?
• What are the limits of stories? Are there situations when a story is exactly what a student doesn’t need to understand something?

CONTENT is KING. Or maybe not? (part 2)

On Monday, I tried to explain why I found Kieran Egan’s model of Imaginative Education (and Corbett Charter School’s living out of Egan’s model) so danged exciting. I attempted to explain it in terms of the depth of content that their teachers and students regularly swim in. Instead of skating the surface of a topic, covering what’s most important, they dive into topics, constantly uncovering fascinating details.

As I pointed out, that explanation fails. Depth of content can’t, all by itself, be what strikes me so powerfully about IE, because diving deeply into content can still be boring. (Horribly boring, in fact.)

If content-focused education is to be wonderful, I suggested, it would have to be nested inside something larger.

So let me try this again:

What strikes me so powerfully about IE is that it engages emotions, not just cognition. Furthermore, it sees all academic content as potentially rich in emotional substance.

There are two pieces of this, which I’ll explore for the rest of the week. First, IE is making a statement about human psychology: our emotions are more fundamental than our rationality. Second, IE is making a statement about the external world: virtually everything already has emotional resonance; we don’t have to try to “make” things interesting, as much as “bring out” how they’re already interesting.

Again, I’ll sketch out these two pieces this week, but in the end this discussion boils down to this:

How can we create a school that puts human interests, emotions, hopes, and fears at the center of the curriculum? How can we create a school that sees “academic content” (gods, that term is so dry, isn’t it?) as full of rich complexity that can feed many aspects of our students? How can we conceive of a school that sees itself as a portal to the wonder of the world?

CONTENT is KING. Or maybe not? (part 1)

I suggested, in last Wednesday’s post about the consummate awesomeness of organizing all lesson planning around teams of teachers, that having the teams themselves wasn’t sufficient. The amazing thing Corbett is doing, in my mind, is both who and what: they combine team-planning with a specific method of planning —

they put the question of “what to do in class” after the question of “what is amazing about this content?” That is, they don’t explicitly talk about the form of instruction (game? debate? art project?) before nailing what the beating heart of the story is.

(This is one of the central characteristics of “Imaginative Education,” an approach coming from Kieran Egan and the rest of the Imaginative Education Research Group at Simon Frasier University in Vancouver, B.C.)

Ooh how I love this.  But why, precisely?

At first, I thought we might distill it (with apologies to Bill Gates, and the Internet as a whole) quite simply —

Content is king.

That is, I thought that IE’s wonder might come by getting teachers and students deep into the heart of academic subject-matter. And it’s there, I thought, where the wild things are — where the excitement and pleasures of learning reside.

I think this is a little right, and a little wrong.

First, the rightness of putting content at the center of pedagogy:

Teaching the “content” of the world is the one thing schools are charged to do that differentiates them from all other societal institutions — from the scouting and television and summer camps.

Schools, to be clear, do a lot of things: they socialize kids with one another, prepare people for careers, and teach us all not to wipe our noses on our sleeves (shout-out to my second-grade teacher!). Thus, the school overlaps with other institutions — we can, for example, have productive discussions about what our school can learn from the Green Berets, or from (gods help us) a nineteenth-century free love commune, or from whatever.

But at the end of the day, I’ll suggest, a school is fundamentally about doing something else: engaging academic content, which is to say bringing the swirl of the external world to the consideration of five-to-eighteen year olds.

So, again, my initial theory as to why what Imaginative Education says (and what Corbett Charter School does) strikes me as so amazing is that it doesn’t allow us teachers to skate on the surface of content, but to dive right in.

There’s a problem with this idea, however: content can be dead.

That is, content can be dull, dreary, meaningless. It can be any other nasty adjective we’d like to apply to it. Focusing on content can lead us to a pointless, thirteen-year trudge through minutiae.

And we’ve all experienced this sort of education. (If, someone, you’ve avoided this, watch 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Ben Stein’s immortal lesson on the Hawley Smoot Tariff.)

This charge has led many to de-emphasize rich content, in favor of thinking skills or child-centered learning, or practical skills.

(I don’t, for the record, mean this as a criticism, though I have my criticisms of these movements. Educating is hard, and one mussn’t be too ornery.)

I’ve been drawn, in the past, to those who oppose this rising tide, and attempt to bring “rich content” back to the heart of schooling.

A contemporary leader of the “content = king” paradigm is the wonderful E.D. Hirsch, whose thinking I have a complex relationship with. His popular work includes The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and the series What Your N^th Grader Needs to Know.

Hirsch is vexed by the contemporary movement to replace rich content (myths and historical accounts and literature) with what he sees as soulless skills (“finding the main idea” and “making reader–text connections” and similar bilge). Here, I largely (entirely? vociferously?) agree with him.

He’s done wonderful work in arguing, from the work of cognitive psychologists, that specific knowledge is crucial for higher-level thinking. Want to be a powerful reader? Learn stuff! Want to be a masterful writer? Eat the world, and ruminate on it in your writing!

(If you’re interested in his argument here, you’ll want to check out cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham’s wonderful Why Don’t Students Like School?)

There were a few years in which I found this compelling. But I’ve slowly circled around to the idea that idea that Hirsch’s conception is simply not enough. Rhetorically, it’s open to complaints that schools “teach dead content” and “engage rote memory.” Practically, it doesn't guarantee that classrooms won't devolve (under the control of less-than-inspired teachers) into a succession of "one damn thing after another.”

If we want to put content at the center of schooling, we need to nest it in something bigger.

On Tuesday, I’ll sketch out a better way — what, I think, IE and Corbett is doing that is so wonderful.