If you, like us in Life's Public Engagement team, were looking for Ian Simmons' blog response that Paul refers to, you won't find it there because UWE have taken it down. They requested amendments, and Ian has declined to censor. I've reposted it below if you would like to read. Upon a little digging, the aims of the students involved and conclusions they reach are not well represented by the original blog. See them here: http://www.pantaneto.co.uk/issue59/stengler.htm

Naomi

 

I do find this rather a straw man argument. While it is correct to differentiate between giving the message ‘science is fun’ and making science communication as entertaining, interesting and rewarding as possible, I don’t think any science centre I know of has been leading with a ‘science is fun’ message since the late 80s – the only way in which we aim to make the science centre experience ‘fun’ is to make it an enjoyable experience for our visitors – you don’t come for a family day out if you don’t think you will have fun, at best it’s a marketing message and no more.

 In terms of what we aim to convey it is the excitement and adventure of being involved in science. My colleague Andy Lloyd summed this up nicely in a piece for the Independent Learning Review (August 2015) where he describes our mission as being primarily about motivation and identification – science centre exhibitions (and, if we’re honest, pretty much all museums) are terrible at conveying facts and information, and in a world where everyone is a click away from Wikipedia on their smart phones, why should we be doing that?  Ask anyone what they remember from a museum or science centre experience in their youth and it’s an iconic, thrilling moment, not a fact, and our aim (at least it is at our centre, Life in Newcastle www.life.org.uk ) is to provide those kinds of experience, the ones that make you want to find out more about science from the routes through which content learning is best conveyed, e.g. school, books etc. This has nothing to do with ‘fun’ but a lot about having an enthralling, satisfying experience.

The other component is identification – can we give visitors an experience that makes them feel like scientists? The ASPIRES research at Kings identified this as key, people become scientists because they feel it is part of their identity, so our Curiosity exhibition has almost no text, and no conventional science exhibits, but is designed to bring out the kind of behaviours that underpin science, testing, comparing, controlling variables, identifying and solving problems and so on, while our Experiment Zone where people do real experiments with lab equipment, reagents etc. puts people in a scientist’s shoes so they can see if they like it. ‘Science is Fun’ is simply not on our agenda.

Which brings me to ‘forgotten our own role’ .In whose view has our role been forgotten? As you will see from the above, a dialogue between science and society is not top of our agenda – who thinks it should be? Whenever I hear that this is what we should be doing it is usually a top down view from scientists who still retain an element of the old PUS thinking, not from our visitors, who are not primarily interested in this – a dialogue between science and society will not entertain a 10 year old on a rainy Sunday afternoon I am afraid.

While we do certainly do dialogue between science and society, it is, as has been correctly identified, mainly through events, and this is for a reason, not because we have been distracted by making exhibitions fun instead of doing our ‘real job’. Science/society dialogue simply does not make for good exhibits – for a start an exhibition takes at least a year to put together, and has to last at least 5 years or the economics don’t work, and science moves a lot faster than that so exhibitions are out of date fast if they try and be a conduit for this kind of dialogue. Also, you end up with lots of text or video, both of which are done better by other media, so why would we want to do that? Dialogue between science and society is best done with actual people, so events, meet the scientist sessions and so on hit the mark much more effectively.

If anyone thinks we can solve this is a problem and we can solve it by rediscovering museology, they neither understand science centres or museology. I am both a Fellow of the Museums Association with an MA in Museum Studies, and someone who has spent 20 years as a science centre director (and closer to 30 in the field) and I can confidently say that while museology is certainly a language that you speak and master, so is science centre, and they are very different languages. You only have to look at most of the attempts by museums to utilise science centre approaches to see what happens when you apply one language to the other context, it’s not a success.

I also find the assertions expressed above about how science centres conduct themselves startlingly ignorant and patronising – virtually no science centre I know of is without highly qualified educators and scientists, as well as the museum and science centre experience I used to be a science teacher, my head of education spent many years as head of science in a large secondary school, and all our explainers have at least a 2.1 in a science subject, and many have postgraduate qualifications, in some cases PhDs. This is not uncommon in science centres. If they think otherwise your researchers haven’t been looking very hard.