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Olivia McRae Progress Blog #7

Open olivia-mc opened 4 years ago

olivia-mc commented 4 years ago

This year in March, I started a PhD under the supervision of A/Prof Alice Motion and Dr Reyne Pullen. My PhD project focuses on how we can use non-academic spaces to engage young adults in chemistry and environmental issues. I wanted to introduce myself and talk about what led me back to doing a PhD after spending a long time convinced that I wouldn’t ever do a PhD.

For me, starting a PhD was a very big decision. After completing an Honours in chemistry in 2017, I had no intentions of returning to do a PhD. Don’t get me wrong – I love chemistry – but chemistry research just didn’t feel like the right path for me. During my Honours, I had the opportunity to teach undergraduate chemistry labs, and enjoyed interacting with students and helping them understand chemistry concepts. I’ve also always liked writing, and these were some of the reasons why I considered paths in education or science communication as a possibility after finishing my degree.

After graduating, I started working as a lab technician for a high school science department. At the time, I was considering getting a Masters in Education, and thought this was a good opportunity to capture a behind-the-scenes look at what teaching at a high school involves. In the end, I decided that secondary teaching was not the right move for me at the time and am grateful that I had the chance to see the reality first-hand. I enjoyed my time there, and worked with many wonderful people, but left at the end of 2019 to pursue my PhD.

Last year, I also began working for a company that runs a wide variety of science workshops for kids. Most of my work involved running science birthday parties for kids aged between 5 – 10 years old. I loved how curious and enthusiastic the kids were about the demonstrations and hands-on activities that they did. They reminded me of the excitement and curiosity that I always want to bring to my own work. My experiences in these different jobs after graduating gave me the confidence to know that I wanted to work in science communication long term.

During 2019, I had been looking into science communication courses but hadn’t found one that suited my long-term goals. In a lab one day, Reyne introduced himself to me and started a conversation about researching science education and communication. It wasn’t an immediate light bulb moment, but a PhD project meant I had the autonomy to tailor my studies to my interests and future goals in a way that I couldn’t in a coursework degree. Having started my PhD now, it feels like it was the right move for me. I love being in a group with people that work on so many different areas of science communication and education, and I’m excited to see where my project takes me in the future!

olivia-mc commented 3 years ago

With ACSME's conference coming up this week, I'll be making a few posts that relate to my presentation. The first one is about the history of Western science communication. Because this post focuses on Western histories, it is not designed to be a complete history of science communication (SciComm). Rather, it is a reflection of the current literature, which often characterises science, and by extension SciComm, as a recent Western endeavour (Orthia, 2020).

SciComm in 18th century Europe upheld three key elements that are still broadly used today to define SciComm: familiar communication methods, knowledge that came from or involved professionalised science, and the public as an audience (Orthia, 2020). The communication of knowledge in Indigenous and non-Western cultures rarely fits into this framework and is therefore excluded in many discussions about the history of SciComm, despite these cultures communicating knowledge long before science existed as a profession in the Western world (Haque and Sharma, 2016; Hamacher, 2018). Furthermore, scientific knowledge from Indigenous and non-Western cultures has been dismissed by Western science for centuries (Simpson, 2004) and falsely presented as equivalent to pseudoscience and myth (Rochberg, 2010; Hikuroa, 2017). Since it is not recognised as part of Western science, the communication of this knowledge has not been recognised either in histories of science communication.

From a Western perspective, the origins of “modern SciComm” are generally attributed to the late 18th to early 19th century (Orthia, 2020). This shift coincided with the professionalisation of science and academia in Western Europe, separating the public from science (Orthia, 2016). Science popularisation was common before this, especially amongst philosophers such as Louis Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle in France (Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel, 2016) and Francesco Algarotti, who published a pop-science book called Newtonianism for Ladies in 1737 (Orthia, 2016a). In 1853, the world’s first public aquarium opened in London Zoo, and a number of informal science learning centres, such as aquariums, zoos, and science museums, began to open and flourish across Europe in the second half of the 1800s (Pinto, 2017). Citizen science also began to gain traction amongst the public. In the 1870s, the German Ornithological Society (Deutsche Ornithologische Gesellschaft) launched a project to study bird populations and migratory patterns, and is considered the first large-scale citizen science project (Mahr and Dickel, 2019).

SciComm continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, but for the sake of brevity, I’m skipping ahead to common SciComm narrative in the literature today: deficit to dialogue.

As public support for science waned in the 1960s and 70s, SciComm was recognised as an important avenue for public education and fostering public support in science. In 1985, the UK Royal Society released the Bodmer Report, and asserted that “improving the general level of public understanding of science is now an urgent task for the well-being of the country”. Shortly after in 1989, Nature published a general science knowledge survey, which bemoaned the lack of scientific knowledge amongst the US and UK public (Durant, Evans and Thomas, 1989). This gave rise to the deficit model of SciComm, which aims to fill knowledge gaps by transmitting information from “experts” to “non-experts” using one-way, didactic forms of communication (Gilbert and Stocklmayer, 2012). The assumption is that a lack of knowledge and understanding of science underpins negative attitudes, scepticism, and misconceptions about science and that education will fix these problems (Sturgis and Allum, 2004).

Over time, there has been a shift from one-way communication towards public engagement, participation, and dialogue about science and broader society (Stilgoe, Lock and Wilsdon, 2014), known as the dialogue model (Jensen and Holliman, 2016). The rhetorical shift in the UK from deficit to dialogue began in the late 1990s (Trench, 2008), and the 2000 House of Lords report in the UK cemented the story. The dialogue model suggests that the public has useful knowledge to contribute to scientific progress and policy, and therefore should have a role in shaping discussions about science and society (Short, 2013).

The participatory model expands the role of the public in scientific research by incorporating multi-directional communication between scientists, other professionals, and citizens (Metcalfe, 2019). Trench (2008) describes this model as:

“Communication about science [that] takes place between diverse groups on the basis that all can contribute, and that all have a stake in the outcome.”

A key principle of the participatory model is the creation of new knowledge together through sharing, often known as knowledge co-production (Gilbert and Stocklmayer, 2012; Metcalfe, 2019). This involves integrating both complementary and conflicting knowledge and opinions as a part of building new understanding (Metcalfe, 2019). In highly complex and interdisciplinary issues, knowledge co-production can be critical in accessing and applying knowledge from diverse stakeholders that otherwise may have been unavailable (O’Connor et al., 2019).

Even through the narrow lens of Western SciComm, its history to date reflects how it has changed over time to meet shifting needs. However, there has been relatively little focus on how SciComm needs to change as a practice to support social justice. Recognising and investigating multiple cross-cultural, and sometimes simultaneous histories of SciComm is an important first step towards countering Eurocentrism (Orthia, 2020), and global perspectives of SciComm are being explored, such as in the recently published book Communicating Science: A Global Perspective. I also suggest that we should expand the definition of science and SciComm beyond Western conceptualisations as a way of creating a more inclusive definition. Practitioners and scholars must also consider how their practices reproduce systemic discrimination, and how to disrupt this. Engaging the public with science is a positive thing, but it can also deepen divides in society if underserved communities are not included or experience barriers to participation (Dawson, 2014). Engaging diverse communities and actively working to include marginalised and excluded populations is critical to ensuring fair and equitable outcomes of participatory engagement with science (Martin and Greig, 2019), and we should all be striving to achieve this in our research and practices.

olivia-mc commented 3 years ago

Edit: For those interested in the Yorta Yorta oral history in my talk, here is a video of Uncle Sandy Atkinson telling his story on Country

As part of my research for my PhD, I have been learning more about the dynamics that encourage participation in science, and the structural inequalities that prevent this. I recently gave a talk for ACSME 2020 about how acknowledging diverse histories of science communication can help counter Eurocentrism and exclusion in science and science communication. Extending on that work, I’ve compiled a list of some of the resources that I’ve found useful for my own education on this topic. This list is not exhaustive by any means, but I hope others may find these useful as a jumping off point. If you have other resources on this topic that you have found helpful (and there are many not on this list), please share them!

References from my talk (in order of appearance):

  1. Grappling with Racism as Foundational Practice of Science Teaching
  2. Science Communication: A Contemporary Definition pp.183-202
  3. Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment
  4. The Public Understanding of Science: 30 Years of the Bodmer Report
  5. Science Communication - There are excellent gems throughout the book, but especially Chapter 9 – “Deficit and Dialogue: Reframing Science Communication Research and Practice”
  6. The Systematic Misuse of Science, which is a chapter from the book Multicultural Science Communication. I recommend having a look through the book as there are several other excellent chapters.
  7. Strategies for Including Communication of Non-Western and Indigenous Knowledges in Science Communication Histories
  8. Pools of Traditional Knowledge and Currents of Change – Chapter from Everyday Knowledge, Education and Sustainable Futures: Transdisciplinary Approaches in the Asia-Pacific Region
  9. Astronomy in India: A Historical Perspective
  10. Indian Astronomy: The Missing Link in Eurocentric History of Astronomy
  11. Equity, Exclusion, and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups plus the zine version here. Emily Dawson has been working in this space for a while and has a lot of good publications on this topic.

Some other readings that weren’t in my talk:

  1. Female and minority experiences in an astronomy-based science hobby
  2. “Balancing acts”: Elementary school girls’ negotiations of femininity, achievement, and science
  3. The inadequacies of “Science for All” and the necessity and nature of a socially transformative curriculum approach for African American science education
  4. Anti-colonial strategies for the recovery and maintenance of Indigenous Knowledge

Social Media: (again, this is a very short list)

olivia-mc commented 3 years ago

Following on from my post about histories of science communication, I also want to explore the origins of Western science. Like SciComm, Western science has a history of perpetuating prejudiced ideas and excluding marginalised groups. Historically, academic institutions were exclusively for privileged wealthy white men, and the current image of scientists in the public sphere overwhelmingly consists of white men (Pringle and McLaughlin, 2014). It’s important to note that the image of Western science as an exclusive institution for wealthy white men is not the only reason why science is exclusive. Several societal and systematic factors beyond stereotypes of science continue to perpetuate racism, classism, and sexism, and prevent marginalised communities from participating in science (Dawson, 2018; Hite et al., 2019). However, by understanding the history of science and how academic and scientific institutions perpetuate structural inequalities, we can start to disrupt and change these practices.

The origins of Western science are typically traced back to a Eurocentric “Scientific Revolution”. This is usually dated back to roughly the 16th century, though some scholars argue that modern science emerged later during the 18th century, with the preceding work falling into the realm of ‘natural philosophy’ (Cunningham and Williams, 1993). Regardless of where you place the separation between natural philosophy and the emergence of modern science, the “Scientific Revolution” is broadly characterised as starting with the works of philosophers and scientists of the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton (Orthia, 2016; Raven, 2011). The notion of a European “Scientific Revolution” specifically places Western science as the zenith of all science, and is one of the few science history narratives that is routinely taught as part of science curriculums (Orthia, 2016).

During the late 17th and early 18th century, European countries began to professionalise science within academic institutes (Orthia, 2020). These institutes explicitly sought to exclude people who were not white, wealthy or male, thus reinforcing and perpetuating the deep inequalities present in society at the time. To maintain this exclusive institute, some scientists used their position of power to find scientific “evidence” from studies of craniology, IQ testing, and more, to prove that structural inequalities based on race, wealth, and gender were justified (Green, 2014). Exclusion of marginalised groups from contemporary science is still pervasive, though it may manifest in less explicit ways today compared to the 18th century (Dawson, 2019).

In their influential 1993 work titled De-centring the 'big picture': The Origins of Modern Science and the modern origins of science, Cunningham and Williams argue that the “old big picture” (that is, one that focuses on the Western “Scientific Revolution”) is not reflective of global science, but of one knowledge-seeking method that emerged during 18th century Europe. They suggested the term science should only be used to describe Western science, and that science should be de-centred and placed amongst other knowledge systems outside of the Western world.

From here, there are two approaches that can be taken. One is to define the “Scientific Revolution” as something uniquely Western and modern that led to science as we know it today. Alternatively, you can take a pluralistic approach and broaden the definition of science to include many forms of scientific knowledge from around the world, situating the European “Scientific Revolution” amongst other global histories of science. A literature review done by Orthia in 2016 suggest most science historians support the latter. Golinski (2012) noted that “to speak of science as a single thing suggests a degree of unity, exclusivity, and long-term continuity that the historical record does not seem to manifest.” Considering the global nature of science today, and the weight that scientific knowledge holds in society, I agree that recognising broader histories of science and systems of knowledge is an important step in countering Eurocentrism in science and recognising the validity of scientific knowledges and practices held outside of the Western canon.

Within science classrooms, exploring histories of science can be a useful tool to improve student engagement (Olsson et al., 2015) and understanding about the nature of science and the scientific method (Cetin-Dindar et al., 2018). They also help provide context to science concepts and breakthroughs. However, evidence shows that the formation of a positive science identity is linked to pre-conceived notions about who and what a scientist is (Vincent-Ruz and Schunn, 2018). Students who don’t fit into the (wealthy) white male stereotype either have to negotiate their own scientific identities with their other intersecting identities (Archer et al., 2012) or disengage if they don’t feel accepted and supported (Dawson, 2019). This reality further emphasises the need for more diverse representation of science histories in science curriculums.

Despite this need for more diverse representation, the historical figures prominent within the Western “Scientific Revolution” perpetuate an archetype of science as white and male. Historical figures that aren’t white and male tend not to fit within the image of the “Scientific Revolution”, and their representation is rarely as prominent or taught to be of equal validity within Western science. Providing such a narrow picture of who is valued as a scientist (both historically and currently) sends a message to marginalised communities that they do not belong in science. The adage, ‘you cannot be what you cannot see’ strongly applies here and becomes vital when considering how to increase diversity and representation within the STEM community currently and with the histories we tell about science.