Women continue to hold less than a quarter of all STEM jobs in the United States, prompting many museums to develop programs and exhibits with the express goal of interesting young girls in scientific fields. At the same time, a number of recent museum exhibits have harnessed the popularity of pop culture and science fiction in order to interest general audiences in STEM subject matter, as well as using the exhibits as springboards to expand or shift mission goals and focus. Because science fiction appears to be successful at raising interest in STEM fields, it may be an effective way to
The IRIS Education and Public Outreach program draws upon the seismological expertise of Consortium members and combines it with the staff expertise to create products and activities that advance awareness and understanding of seismology and geophysics while inspiring careers in Earth science. These products and activities are designed to impact 6th grade students to adults in diverse settings: self-directed exploration over the Web, interactive museum exhibits, major public lectures, and in-depth exploration of the Earth’s interior in formal classrooms. Each year, a select group of undergraduates spends the summer conducting research under the expert guidance of Consortium members and affiliates. Other highlights include the widely distributed Teachable Moment slide sets for use in college and school classrooms within a day of major earthquakes, new animations and videos, new content for the Active Earth Monitor, and expanded use of social media.
Informal science education is a broad field of research marked by fuzzy boundaries, tensions, and muddles among many disciplines, making for an unclear future trajectory (or trajectories) for the field of study. In this commentary, I unpack some of the hidden dimensions, tensions and challenges the five articles raise or point to implicitly in terms of theory, methodology, and future research. I explore ideas to think with in terms of learning pathways or trajectories and time-space dimensions of science learning. I also explore future dimensions for partnerships, collaborations, boundary
In this paper, we explore the details of one youth's science-related learning in- and out-of-school at the time of her participation in an ethnography of youth science and technology learning across contexts and over time. We use the Cultural Learning Pathways Framework to analyze the youth's interests, and the related sociocultural, historical, material, and affect-laden practices in which she and her family participated. The following question guided our analysis: How do everyday moments—experienced across settings, pursuits, social groups, and time—result in scientific learning, expertise
Charismatic megafauna are exotically impressive creatures guaranteed to attract immediate public fascination and sympathy. Their images and life stories provide indispensable resources for keen environmental campaign groups and publicists. The expression itself – charismatic megafauna – is barely a few decades old. Part of its point is to recall and contrast the hosts of apparently less alluring beings at least as crucial and fragile, possessed of their own cultures and needs, but who instead somehow have to rely for survival and support on the easier appeal of these larger and more compelling
In May 2014, Latin America was the stage for the 13th International Public Communication of Science and Technology Conference (PCST 2014). It was the first time that this important international conference had reached the region since its launch in 1989, and it provides a good opportunity to discuss science communication in Latin America. The region is huge and extraordinarily diverse. As such, this article is only the starting point of a conversation on the subject: here the author presents an overview of the field in the region, highlighting some of the landmarks and discussing some
In their 1992 essay ‘The image of objectivity’, and again in Objectivity (2007), Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison describe the development of ‘mechanical objectivity’. Nineteenth-century scientists, they argue, pursued ‘truth-to-nature’ by enlisting ‘self-registering instruments, cameras, wax molds, and a host of other devices […] with the aim of freeing images from human interference’. This emphasis on self-recording devices and the morals of machinery, important as it is, tends to focus our attention away from the often messy and convoluted means of image reproduction – by lithograph, hand
The scrapbook of Winifred Penn-Gaskell – celebrated aerophilatelist and collector of aeronautica –reveals a great deal about its maker and the social and political context of early flight history in Britain. It is argued here that a ‘reading’ of the book as a non-textual object offers a predictive argument for the aesthetic and cultural representation of heavier-than-air craft and pilots in the years immediately prior to the First World War. By viewing each section of the scrapbook as parts of a contingent whole, the early-twentieth century interest in performative masculinity (physical
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle physics facility, provides museological opportunities and challenges. Visitor interest in cutting-edge physics, with its high media profile, is tempered by anxiety about understanding complex content. The topic does not readily lend itself to traditional museum showcase-dominated displays: the technology of modern particle physics is overwhelmingly large, while the phenomena under investigation are invisible. For Collider, a major temporary exhibition, the Science Museum adopted a ‘visit to CERN’ approach, recreating several of the
Oramics to Electronica was a 2011 Science Museum project designed to put the tools of museum participation in the service of research into public history, taking the history of electronic music as our example. The primary output was a temporary exhibition. Whereas the term ‘public history’ is often used to denote popularisation of academic history, in this inflection we are primarily concerned with how lay people like our visitors think about the past in general, and about the past of science and technology in particular. Taking the opportunities that arose, we worked with two ‘expert’ groups
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Tim BoonMerel van der VaartKaty Price
The instrument maker James Short, whose output was exclusively reflecting telescopes, was a sustained and consistent supporter of the clock and watch maker John Harrison. Short’s specialism placed his work in a tradition that derived from Newton’s Opticks, where the natural philosopher or mathematician might engage in the mechanical process of making mirrors, and a number of prominent astronomers followed this example in the eighteenth century. However, it proved difficult, if not impossible, to capture and communicate in words the manual skills they had acquired. Harrison’s biography has
This annual report presents an overview of Saint Louis Science Center audience data gathered through a variety of evaluation studies conducted during 2013. This report includes information on the Science Center's general public audience demographics and visitation patterns, gives an overview of visitors' comments about their Science Center experience, summarizes major trends observed in the Science Center's tool for tracking educational programs, and presents highlights from a front-end evaluation of a new agriculture exhibit and a summative evaluation of the the Youth Exploring Science