How a discipline's history is written shapes its identity. Accordingly, science communicators opposed to cultural exclusion may seek cross-cultural conceptualizations of science communication's past, beyond familiar narratives centred on the recent West. Here I make a case for thinking about science communication history in these broader geotemporal terms. I discuss works by historians and knowledge keepers from the Indigenous Australian Yorta Yorta Nation who describe a geological event their ancestors witnessed 30,000 ybp and communicated about over generations to the present. This is likely
The Sustainability Teams Empower and Amplify Membership in STEM (S-TEAMS), an NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot project, will tackle the problem of persistent underrepresentation by low-income, minority, and women students in STEM disciplines and careers through transdisciplinary teamwork. As science is increasingly done in teams, collaborations bring diversity to research. Diverse interactions can support critical thinking, problem-solving, and is a priority among STEM disciplines. By exploring a set of individual contributors that can be effect change through collective impact, this project will explore alternative approaches to broadly enhance diversity in STEM, such as sense of community and perceived program benefit. The S-TEAMS project relies on the use of sustainability as the organizing frame for the deployment of learning communities (teams) that engage deeply with active learning. Studies on the issue of underrepresentation often cite a feeling of isolation and lack of academically supportive networks with other students like themselves as major reasons for a disinclination to pursue education and careers in STEM, even as the numbers of underrepresented groups are increasing in colleges and universities across the country. The growth of sustainability science provides an excellent opportunity to include students from underrepresented groups in supportive teams working together on problems that require expertise in multiple disciplines. Participating students will develop professional skills and strengthen STEM- and sustainability-specific skills through real-world experience in problem solving and team science. Ultimately this project is expected to help increase the number of qualified professionals in the field of sustainability and the number of minorities in the STEM professions.
While there is certainly a clear need to improve engagement and retention of underrepresented groups across the entire spectrum of STEM education - from K-12 through graduate education, and on through career choices - the explicit focus here is on the undergraduate piece of this critical issue. This approach to teamwork makes STEM socialization integral to the active learning process. Five-member transdisciplinary teams, from disciplines such as biology, chemistry, computer and information sciences, geography, geology, mathematics, physics, and sustainability science, will work together for ten weeks in summer 2018 on real-world projects with corporations, government organizations, and nongovernment organizations. Sustainability teams with low participation by underrepresented groups will be compared to those with high representation to gather insights regarding individual and collective engagement, productivity, and ongoing interest in STEM. Such insights will be used to scale up the effort through partnership with New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (NJHEPS).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Amy TuiningaAshwani VasishthPankaj Lai
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This ChangeMakers project builds on a 2016 National Academies report finding that scientific literacy can be understood at a community level as opposed to a traditional focus on the individual. This is important since scientific knowledge is often seen as abstract and distant from the daily concerns of average citizens. A community focus shifts the spotlight away from individual learning to collective learning facilitated by trusted cultural institutions serving as social assets. This work brings together scientific expertise and community organizations to advance operational science literacy--scientific ways of problem-solving--for community leaders and functional science literacy--information and skills people can use in their daily lives--among their service populations. This will be done by gathering and sharing knowledge and developing skills and abilities to contribute to the community's overall well-being.
The New England Aquarium (NeAq) and Aquarium of the Pacific (AoP) will apply a community engagement model involving active listening, documentation, alignment of concerns and goals, and co-development of shared solutions that serves the needs of all participants. As part of the Advancing Community Science Literacy (ACSL) project, multi-disciplinary teams from NeAq, AoP and their regional partners will participate in training on the model. They will apply that training to build and implement action plans to advance community-driven responses to local environmental issues. Teams will be assessed with respect to how they use tools from their shared training, along with peer support and coaching, to make progress in engaging diverse community stakeholders. Results of the evaluation will offer insights and recommendations for informal science learning centers to serve their communities more effectively as engagement facilitators and change agents to support science literacy development and action. By applying techniques developed for cultural institutions to communicate about climate science, and combining those with techniques developed for libraries and other organizations to help meet emergent community concerns, such as storm surges and coastal flooding, it is possible to redefine the role informal science learning centers can play as part of a community culture.
ACSL is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program which supports projects that provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advances innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and develops understandings of deeper learning by participants.
This paper provides an analysis of the implementation and the outcomes of Scienza Attiva, an Italian national project for secondary school students, that makes use of deliberative democracy tools to address socio-scientific issues of great impact. The analysis has required a mixed method including surveys of students' pre- and post-project opinions, focus groups and interviews with students and teachers. The results from this evaluation study provide evidence that the project improves students' understanding of socio-scientific issues, strengthens their awareness of the importance of
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Federica CornaliGianfranco PomattoSelena Agnella
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The scientific community has been under increasing pressure from policymakers and the public to explain how research contributes to the public good. The community has emphasized two distinct approaches to explaining its operations and value. The first is the use of narratives that can make the work of science more accessible and engaging to nonscientists. The other is the use of new data mining and analysis methods to document quantitatively the complex paths by which research progresses and eventually contributes to a variety of societal goals. While both of these approaches have proved useful, the goal of this workshop is to explore ways that they might be combined into a hybrid approach that will be even more effective.
This workshop will assemble experts in the narrative and data-driven science communication approaches with leading science researchers to discuss how these various perspectives can be merged to define a template for a type of communication that encompasses the appeal of narrative, the rigor of new analytic data, and the understanding of how science works in practice.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kevin Finneran
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
How should we convey science—both its findings and its value to society—to the many members of the public who lack either scientific training or intense interest in scientific progress? In October 2016 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop to explore ways of better presenting science—both specific findings and the processes of discovering and confirming—to the public. Participants discussed ways to develop data-enriched narratives that communicate to the public and policy makers in an engaging and rigorous way the work of basic research. They also
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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Attached is the final report for an initiative that develops outreach tool to communicate the results of basic science research to the public. “Incipient Species Project” was funded by a National Science Foundation Connecting Researchers and Public Audiences (CRPA) award (#1212753) to develop a documentary and permanent website on the work of J. Albert C. Uy, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Miami. The documentary and website explores Uy’s work on the evolution of new species (“speciation”) in birds of the Solomon Islands. The documentary, in particular, explores the science of
The twenty-first century has witnessed a shift in science communication ideals from one-way science popularization activities towards more reflexive, participatory approaches to public engagement with science. Yet our longue duéee histories of science communication's antecedents focus on the former and have neglected the latter. In this paper I identify parallels between modern science communication ideals and an iconic Enlightenment text, Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795). I show that Condorcet's carefully negotiated balance between
The validity of citizen science conducted by community activists is often questioned because of the overt values that activists bring to their investigations. But value judgments are a necessary part of even the best academic science, and scientists whose findings suggest the need for policy action can learn from the example of citizen scientists. Communicating clearly about value judgments in science would give the public a better basis for distinguishing between responsible and irresponsible research on controversial issues.
The knowledge deficit model with regard to the public has been severely criticized in the sociology of the public perception of science. However, when dealing with public decisions regarding scientific matters, political and scientific institutions insist on defending the deficit model. The idea that only certified experts, or those with vast experience, should have the right to participate in decisions can bring about problems for the future of democracies. Through a type of "topography of ideas", in which some concepts from the social studies of science are used in order to think about these
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alessandro Luis PiolliMaria Conceicao da Costa
In the course of the last decade the European debate on the concept of citizenship has shown that a definition of this concept in strictly legal and jurisprudence terms is reductive. Indeed a behavioral element is present, which goes beyond the defence and request for defence of rights and duties, but actually stresses the importance of acting within a community (or within several communities). A citizenship belonging to a given space/time context which, to be authentic, requires know-how and know-how-to-be that can be gained in different training opportunities (formal, informal etc.) with
What pushed His Excellency Enrico Fermi, acclaimed Academician of Italy entitled to a state car and driver, to leave Italy all of a sudden in December 1938 in order to reach New York, after a short stop in Stockholm for the ceremony that celebrated him as a Nobel laureate for physics, and to accept a job as a simple physics lecturer at the Columbia University?