The Higgs Boson surprised the smart money and seems to have shown itself in July, even sooner than expected, in the sensors at the Large Hadron Collider. “They had their own timeline, as the universe often does,” Sean laughed when I asked him how he managed to write this fascinating and highly readable book about the LHC, the history of the Higgs Boson, and –more challengingly–quantum field theory in the same year as its discovery.

The Higgs was surely one of the biggest stories of the year and our interview covered everything from his desire to see more popular writing about quantum field theory to the true magnitude of the discovery, which he didn’t shy away from emphasizing: “A hundred thousand years from now when they talk about the history of particle physics, they will talk about pre-Higgs boson discovery and post-Higgs boson discovery.”

The conversation was great fun and I won’t lie, I may have blushed a little in the booth when he complemented me on having read the book in depth and asking interesting questions about it. Coming from someone who’s previous two interviews were with the Colbert Report (sorry fellow Canadians) and the iconic Canadian science program Quirks and Quarks, it was my pleasure.

You can check it out at Skeptically Speaking.

*Shout-out here though to my great students in EDSE 401 Digital Media in Science Education and EDSE 451 Physical Sciences Curriculum and Pedagogy. Aside from scheduling, I’m not complaining at all!

This is one of the opening descriptive passages of Gary Hustwit’s 2007 documentary Helvetica, which traces the meaning, history and importance of the near ubiquitous typeface. Think of a corporate brand that has a sleek minimal brand image? Chances are the typeface is Helvetica, from the AAs of American Airlines to the very recognizable G in the Gap, all Helvetica. Even the New York subway signs, designed by Massimo Vignelli, are Helvetica.  But what does that have to do with science communication and education?

As a teacher, researcher and writer, it’s really important to me to help people understand not only scientific ideas but also the culture and practices of science. In classes and workshops I try to share how important it is to think beyond just communicating scientific content. Catherine Anderson and I had great fun at last year’s Science Online conference moderating a session called Is encouraging scientific literacy more than telling people what they need to know? We chose a cultural practice (as good Canadians we chose the sport of curling) and explained the rules. We then passed out reading materials (various blog posts and articles about curling) and staged a funny conversation between two curling fans (HURRY HARD!). The idea was to get the audience thinking about how hard it was to engage with and participate in curling when they’d only just been told the rules. Kind of like expecting students to engage with science when all they’ve had the chance to do is memorize formulae and element properties. The discussion was terrific and the audience enthusiastic. This was really a preaching to the choir situation though. I’ve written before that the importance of a science education that includes more than facts has been recognized and advocated for much of the past century. For example, see this announcement from the Alberta Teachers Association Science Council archives:

Alberta Teachers Association Science Council Conference 1961

Thursday Afternoon Presentation and Discussion:
Consultant and Guest Speaker: Dr. Paul deHart Hurd,
Professor of Science Education, Stanford University, California USA
Topic: Recent Trends and Developments in Science Education
“Future emphasis will be on methods of science as opposed to verification of facts.”

I often wonder though why it’s sometimes so hard for the larger dialogue around science education and communication to change. Despite decades of efforts like deHart Hurd’s, why do discussions of science education and public understanding eventually circle back to the communication of facts? If only people knew more about science, then they would understand climate change and evolution or be better consumers. If only we could fix people’s scientific illiteracy. Even when it’s clear that things are not nearly that simple.

There are many reasons of course. Even when science teachers are dedicated to a broader view of science teaching, there are so many other forces in schools that can hold back their efforts. It’s bigger than that though. Deep down, sometimes I can’t even shake the feeling that maybe all that culture and process stuff is just extra and even worse a fear that it might actually take away from understanding the world. When someone argues that the facts should speak for themselves, despite dedicating myself to arguing against that, a little part of me says “Eep, maybe they should.”

Where does that feeling come from when I know from my teaching experience and from the research literature that facts can’t and don’t speak for themselves? For example, even when we focus directly on learning scientific ideas, students don’t learn difficult concepts well by just being told the facts. They need to be personally motivated to change their minds, to rethink the very nature of world (Everything is made of particles, what?!). Participating in the processes of science (such as making predictions and gathering evidence) and understanding the reasons why certain ideas are important (part of the culture of science) all contribute to that motivation. So why do I sympathize with and sometimes even fall back on thinking that maybe if we could just explain things clearly enough more people would understand and appreciate science?

It’s never been so clear to me how much that view and my own deep-down preconceptions are embedded in the mid-twentieth century modern world as when I watched Helvetica.

How and why the typeface developed is a textbook example of modernism: rejecting tradition and aiming for progress and social improvement. The typeface rejected the serif forms and other trappings of traditional typefaces and was developed with only one thing in mind: clarity of communication. Vignelli, talking about his choice to use it for the New York subway signs, talks about the instrumentality of typefaces. He shakes his head saying that there are only twelve good typefaces, if he’s generous, and he only uses three. They should be highly readable and not in any way distracting. Typefaces are not themselves communication. They are not for creating mood or generating emotions. They are only good if they disappear and let the message speak for itself. Wim Crouwel similarly scoffs and expresses dislike for contemporary designers who mix typefaces and use all sorts of different ones in search of a particular atmosphere: “I’m always interested in clarity. It should be clear; It should be readable; It should be straightforward.”*

Helvetica was meant to be neutral, not to have any symbolic meaning and idiosyncrasy. “The meaning is in the content of the text and not the typeface. It shouldn’t have a meaning of its own. That’s why we loved Helvetica very much.” Hey, that sounds a bit familiar doesn’t it? The science should speak for itself.

It’s the younger designers who make the obvious point: Maybe the designer doesn’t want to be aware of the typeface but “even if they’re not consciously aware of it they’ll always feel its effects.” Any typeface creates a mood, it communicates something about designer’s intention. It also elicits emotions tied to other uses of the same or similar type. Choose to use the same version of Helvetica as the NYC subway in a New York playbill to perhaps draw on the readers’ sense of the quotidian, the workaday life. Or do it in a rural storefront and evoke thoughts of excitement and bustling cities.

Of course the typeface always says something. How could the older designers not see that?, I thought to myself as I watched. It’s because the core of modernism–the importance of the message, of progress, of reaching people and making them think and understand better–isn’t just a passing idea, it’s part of who they are and everything they see and think about the world. And it’s part of who I am and who most of my science education and teaching colleagues, friends and students are too.

And it took another experience just to recognize how much. I’ve been working on this post for a while. I saw the documentary more than a month ago and have been working on it little by little but couldn’t quite get it right. I couldn’t get past just making the observation that struggling to change people’s views of typefaces and science education were kind of similar. It wasn’t until this past weekend that I really started to really get it.

On Sunday, I visited the Tate Modern Art Gallery in London. I was in the gallery, but no longer in that wing, when one of Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals was defaced. That’s just a side note though. The wing in which Rothko’s murals are hung is called Transformed Visions. It is in some ways the very essence of modern, filled with reactions and responses to the wars (cold and hot) that defined the 20^th century. At the entrance way to the exhibit are two pieces meant to bookend the gallery. One is Germaine Richier’s Shepherd of the Landes (1951). It’s an eerie bronze sculpture of a small otherworldly shepherd on stilts. The found object used to mold the head has given him (or her) predatory close-set eyes when seen from the side and the open observant side-placed eyes of prey animals when seen from the front. It’s sickly, with twig-like arms and legs and a rotting chest all propped up on the traditional stilts of a Landes shepherd. It is thoroughly disturbing and screams of commentary about the destruction of French life and the rot of the occupation. The other is Thomas Hirschhorn’s Candelabra with Heads (2006). It is exactly as described, with plastic heads and bodies cocooned in packing tape and bubble wrap and mounted, seemingly haphazardly, on a messy wooden scaffold. Where Richier’s made me gasp, Hirschhorn’s made me raise a vague eyebrow and think “really?” That is until the enthusiastic gallery volunteer started to talk about the choice to place these two works together opposite each other.

He said all the expected things about Richier’s training and her reactions to the war around her but he was careful to say that her choice to sculpt the piece in bronze was deeper than her training and achieving the right look, deeper than rejecting tradition by sculpting grotesque figures in traditional materials. He explained that she and her contemporaries saw artists’ ideas as important, possibly transformative. They sculpted in metal so those ideas would last and the chaotic world could be changed. If they only spoke with enough power and impact, artists could change the way people thought and, in doing so, how they acted.

Hirschhorn’s whole view of art is different. He has something to say but seems resigned that art and ideas are temporary. Art hasn’t and probably won’t change the world. His is a piece that expresses one mans’ idea within the context that all of us will see and hear hundreds of ideas, maybe even just today. And it’s silly to think that a piece could change the world, so why not make it out of tape and bubble wrap.

Suddenly it was his that made me uncomfortable. That seemed so wrong, so pointless, so messy.

An art scholar would likely laugh at how simplistic I’ve made the difference seem but the experience said a lot to me about science education, about modernism, and about why I shouldn’t laugh at mid-century designers thinking that a typeface should disappear. Moving away from a strong modernist position that progress can be achieved if only ideas are presented clearly and strongly enough is really uncomfortable. It’s hard to truly accept that no amount of clarity in communicating scientific ideas will change the world. Developing scientific understanding is a messy, sometimes fleeting, sometimes happenstance affair that is the culmination of every experience individuals have with the world, with the people in their lives, and with science. And no matter how many times I say it to myself and others, it’s a bit like encountering Hirschhorn’s piece. The stark truth of what that actually means is hard to take. No wonder we continue to hope that the facts (and not the fonts) might speak for themselves.

I don’t have any answers and honestly thinking this all through has made me more rather the less uncomfortable in the way I see science education and communication. But maybe that’s a good thing.

Further reading of interest:

Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Wittlin, M., Slovic, P., Larrimore Ouellette, L., Braman, D. & Mandel, G. (2012). The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature Climate Change, 2, 732–735. doi:10.1038/nclimate1547

Tobin, K., & McRobbie, C.J. (1996). Cultural myths as constraints to the enacted science curriculum. Science Education, 80, 223–241.

Pintrich, P.R., Marx, R.W., & Boyle, R.A. (1993). Beyond cold conceptual change: The role of motivational beliefs and classroom contextual factors in the process of conceptual change. Review of Educational Research, 63, 167-199. doi: 10.3102/00346543063002167

——————————————

*All quotes were transcribed by hand while I watched the film. If you have a chance, do watch it. It’s excellent, and there’s so much more to it than the little pieces I’ve referenced here.

Here at Boundary Vision, a virtuoso of funk bassist, Victor Wooten, got me thinking about some new metaphors for science education.

Over at the Finch & Pea, my DJ duties gave me some great opportunities. I got to meet and chat with Halifax-based folk singer-songwriter Nick Everett about how becoming a musician might actually be a lot like learning science in Nick Everett and the Zone of Proximal Development.

At a great new summer festival in Edmonton, Interstellar Rodeo, I saw the most energetic afternoon set I’ve ever seen from Australian band Wagons and wondered how science teachers might take a lesson from their hard-working lead singer: Could Aussie band Wagons help new science teachers?

Certainly, though, the highlight was a lovely and deep conversation I had with Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland of the duo Whitehorse. What started out as a quick chat about one of their tracks for a Song of Week, turned into something much richer when I found out how passionate they are about science. The result of that conversation was an article published on the Scientific American Guest Blog this week: There’s another passion behind the music of Whitehorse: The sound of scientific thinking.

The problem is that it’s an analogy that gets taken way too far. The analogy has its roots in cognitive science, as a way to talk about what was at first a radically different way of thinking of how children make sense of the world. Instead of thinking of young children as trainable blank slates, it is much more accurate to recognize that they are actively trying to understand the world around them (both the physical world and the social world). Their actions are a bit like those of scientists: They experiment and propose explanations, they ask questions, make predictions and see what happens (an idea often traced back to Piaget).

Describing them as scientists is a wonderful and rich analogy. The problem is that like all analogies, it breaks down, and this one breaks down especially clearly when it’s applied specifically to science learning. Child-as-natural-scientist arguments tend to equate curiosity and exploration with the expert practice of science, something that under-plays and devalues the difficult and complex world of scientists. Sometimes it is even used to say that as they grow up students somehow lose something they had that made them natural scientists. Taken to the extreme it sometimes comes across as saying that they actually become less scientific as they get older. This completely misses point: science isn’t just a grown up version of a child’s curiosity. While kids have the fertile beginnings, becoming a scientist requires that they learn and skillfully practice many abstract skills that are far from intuitive. When students struggle with scientific thinking later in life it isn’t because they have unlearned or lost the ability, it’s because they (for any number of reasons) didn’t get to take the next steps to developing those skills and understandings[i] (This is something I’ve written about before, and Matthew Francis at Galileo’s Pendulum has reflected thoughtfully on it from his perspective as well.)

Despite my curmudgeonly protestations it continues as a common refrain, especially among my undergraduate science education students, mostly future science teachers. I normally respond with approximately what I said above, but I find that in the process of convincing them to be a bit more critical of the analogy we lose a really nice part of it: the way it seems to motivate teachers and science outreach educators. It feels good to think about kids that way and it makes our work with them feel important and valuable , which it is.

In an unlikely place, though, I think I’ve found a better way to talk about it with my students.

The Association for Psychological Science recently posted a summary of a panel from their 24^th Annual Convention. The panel was called “Music, Mind, and Brain” and featured psychologists and neuroscientists talking about their research into music appreciation and behaviour. For example Aniruddh D. Patel explained the complex social interactions that result from following a beat along with a crowd. I clicked through to read it because of my interests in science-music connections, not at all expecting to make a link to science education. The surprise came at the end with the panel’s coda speaker: bassist Victor Wooten (best known as a member of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones).

Wooten talked about his experiences growing up and learning to play in a completely immersive way, joining the family band at a time when most kids are being sent off somewhere for their first piano lesson. He explained that he learned music in the way that most of us learn our first language – by jumping in and doing it. We don’t send toddlers off to controlled environments to learn about subject-predicate orders. They don’t get practice exercises and aren’t confined to a beginners’ book of words and phrases. They learn by being in and around experts, interacting with them. “Basically, said Wooten, from the very start of your linguistic training, you’re allowed to ‘jam with the pros.’” There is even two way communication, where kids’ phrases and expressions are adopted by parents and siblings. Wooten apparently went on to say that while lots of people recognize that music is like a language, they don’t stop to think of how much benefit there might be in treating musical training more like first language training – something that happens naturally and immersively.

Having had my share of disappointment and frustration as a young musician, brushed aside by family members and teachers as too in-expert to participate, his views resonated with me. As I read it, I wondered how my musical life might be different if I’d had that kind of experience (My piano, that is only played when I am completely alone, probably agrees.) And them bam – those kids-as-scientists arguments slammed into the front of my brain. What would it mean to think about science learning as something immersive and natural like language?

This has some connections to Lave and Wenger’s conceptions of communities of practice, something science educators have picked up on and used as a way to talk about science classrooms and teacher development. It has built into it, the idea of legitimate peripheral participation, the idea that there should be a place for novices to be both a part of the community but also a learner. Usually though, the community of practice is defined locally, i.e., within at the level of classroom or school or municipality.

I liked the idea of thinking bigger about this, about a larger community. As with music, we do too often treat students as complete novices without the assumption that they are already part of a community. Not because they’re scientists but because they’re people. This is what I like about Wooten’s way of thinking about it. The “experts” in his first language analogy are everyday speakers of a first language rather than linguists (or literature scholars or…). Researchers like Collins and Evans, tackling the sociology of expertise, also respect first language development as an expertise. While it’s ubiquitous, it requires significant time and work to develop.

Likewise it might be helpful to think of kids not as beginning natural scientists but as natural members of a wider public community that is interested in, affected by and using science (basically everyone). I am not all the first person to think of this (e.g., linguist J.P. Gee explored using first language acquisition as an analogy for developing learning theories) but I was struck by how much Wooten’s comparison to music made it snap into focus for me.

So what would “child as immersed in a public scientific community” really look like?  It’s hard to say. School science is a very particular type of science, often divorced from both the professional practice of science and more public conversations (e.g., Roth & Bowen, 1999). High school lab internships are one type of example and some extraordinary classrooms have contributed directly to scientific literature, such as the British school children who published their bee research in Biology Letters. But this is still about participating in the professional scientific community, as junior scientists. When it comes to broader participation, even great teaching and great outreach programs can feel like the kindermusic or piano lesson equivalent of science, where students are sent off as a group to learn and practice as novices, not the natural and immersive learning of a first language. Is there such a thing as “conversational science” like the expertise of native speakers?

I’m honestly not exactly sure what it might be. My colleague Jrene Rahm, from the Université de Montréal has been involved in a cool program called Scientifines, which includes students publishing their own science newsletter. Angela Calabrese Barton, from the Michigan State, has engaged students in community oriented-research and advocacy through community food projects.  These do seem to start to get at the idea of learning naturally through immersion in a wider public scientific community but I need time to consider if further. Is there such a thing as conversational science? Is participating in the wider conversation about science something that students can be immersed in in the way they’re immersed in conversational first language?

Of course, this is of course another analogy that will have its own shortcomings but I’m intrigued about by how it’s made me see things a little differently. When the topic of child as natural scientist comes up,  I can’t wait to ask my students this coming year what they think.

Did I first hear about the protest from the CBC though? No, the first news I read about it was from the The Guardian in the UK, where it was reported a full four and half hours earlier. Similarly during the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference hosted in Vancouver in February 2012 there were panels and gatherings addressing the alleged muzzling of Canadian scientists. Where did I hear about them? From the BBC.

It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that both stories were broken by UK media, where a public conversation about science is a visible part of public discourse. A similar scientific protest (even including a funeral theme) called Science is Vital received wide coverage and thorough analysis, both of its successes and failures. It has grown into an ongoing campaign. Studies from British sociologists of science even make the news. I don’t mean to idealize public scientific discourse in the UK – just point out that there is one.

The same cannot be said here.

Asking questions about the role and place of science in Canada seems almost completely outside of our field of view. Events like this need analysis, discussion and careful consideration. But who ran a commentary piece the day after the protests? The Guardian again with Alice Bell’s thoughtful essay on the larger global implications of Canadian scientific issues.

The discussion of the protest has been sparse and significantly short on analysis in Canadian national media. The Globe and Mail ran a Canadian Press piece on it as a news item but has published no commentary or analysis. The protest hasn’t appeared at all in The National Post. Only Macleans has hosted commentary, written by Julia Belluz on her blog Science-ish. CBC has also engaged also in some critical conversations, hosting a live blog and, on Ottawa radio, pressing for a government response. The story doesn’t seem to have made it, however, to any national current affairs programming such as The Current.

This is a serious problem. When science or scientists feature at all in our national conversation, the only message seems to be “see aren’t Canadian scientists great” (and they are), but moments like this protest are a rich and important opportunity to ask about the place of science in Canadian culture. What should the relationship be between university scientists, industrial scientists and government scientists? How should they all be interacting with policy makers and parliament? Do we value government supported research centres like the Experimental Lakes Area?

It feels sometimes like almost no one is asking these questions, but that’s not true.  There are excellent and thoughtful science journalists and writers in Canada, but science in national newsrooms has been gutted and concerns raised by organizations like the Canadian Science Writers Association* are only starting to gain a little traction.

Where is the place for these conversations our national media?

Update July 13, 15:05 MT: The Toronto Star, which on Tuesday ran the same Canadian Press article as the Globe and Mail, has posted a commentary by urban issues writer Christopher Hume.

Update July 18, 9:11 MT: A week later there has still been little analytic coverage or discussion of the implications of the protest. It has, however, received a mention as part of other articles related to federal funding of scientific research.

Globe and Mail: “Ottawa’s wind-farm study a case of suspiciously political science” The Globe’s editorial for Monday, July 16th highlights new federal funding to study the health effects of wind turbines despite little evidence to support claims of dangers. The editors use it as another example of funding decisions not made scientifically, the same concern they saw raised in the Death of Evidence protest.

Vancouver Sun: “Arctic coal-mining plan draws criticism” In an article published on the same day as the protest, Randy Boswell examines a new arctic coal mining plan, following on the heals of one that was rejected by the Nunavut Impact Review Board in 2010. Boswell notes that the controversy has emerged at the same time that scientists across the country are raising alarms about cuts to environmental research centres. (Thanks GeneGeek for the tip on this one.)

CBC:

The CBC carried a national interview on CBC News Network with one of the protest organizers, Dr. Scott Findlay of the University of Ottawa. (I’m not of fan, though, of the “Gosh, I just don’t understand” style of science interviewing that Suhana Meharchand uses here. I understand the intent but it gives an impression of lack of preparation.)

Radio One’s Information Morning in Fredericton picked up that interview and used it to begin a more detailed look into how local research centres have been affected by federal cuts.

With the Maritimes leading the way, Radio One’s New Brunswick drive-home program, Shift, conducted an in-depth interview with Findlay as well.

And so did Whitehorse’s Radio One drive-home, Airplay.

Postmedia:

No word yet from The National Post but Postmedia did provide a story that was run on it’s Canada.com site as well as by papers such as the Vancouver Sun and The Ottawa Citizen. Strangely, The Citizen seems to have run two version of the same story on their site, one that is credited as a Postmedia story and one (a slightly shorter version with a new headline) that is written by the same person (Ottawa-based Teresa Smith) but credited as a staff writer.

I’m proud to say my local Postmedia outlet, The Edmonton Journal, ran their own story on the protest, written by staff writer Graham Thomson: Political science on the Hill.

________________________

* Disclosure: I am a member of the CSWA but have not been directly involved in these efforts.

Curved potato rows, Hamilton, PEI

On Prince Edward Island for vacation this week, this view is everywhere. Rows of potatoes maturing in the early summer sun. Those rows look pretty perfect, though. And I’d have trouble drawing concentric curves, let alone driving a massive piece of farm equipment to get it just right. The answer? GPS. While I’m told there’s debate about its cost effectiveness, planting potatoes is just one of many tasks that has been automated with precision GPS tracking.

It caught my attention because I’d just read Scott Huler‘s On the Grid in preparation to interview him on Skeptically Speaking. The book is a thoughtful look at infrastructure systems in the city of Raleigh, and it surprised me in detailing the important role of GPS in planning of all kinds. It’s way more than a tool for lost drivers! (Okay, I knew that but didn’t know much about the specific uses). In one chapter Scott takes us on a surveyor’s tour of an in-progress housing development where GPS drives the bulldozers and takes the place of most of the stakes that would have marked the curbs, road boundaries, and water, power and sewer lines. Thanks to Scott I’ve also stood in parking lots wondering about transitions from asphalt to concrete, looked more carefully at storm drains that I ever imagined and started paying attention to urban streams.

For this week’s episode of Skeptically Speaking I had the chance to ask him all about the book, which he describes as his “love letter to engineers and taxes.” Given my own background, I couldn’t help but think that engineers are much deserving of the love. Along with Scott, I chatted with Tim DeChant, an environmental journalist who writes the density-themed blog Per Square Mile. Tim has done some fascinating writing about urban trees (who knew that cities might actually have a net positive effect on tree population in some areas?) and relationships between wealth and urban green spaces. You can listen to the episode or download the podcast from the Skeptically Speaking website.

Studying how role models influence students shows a process that is much more complicated than it first seems. In some studies, when female students interact with more female professors and peers in science, their own self-concepts in science can be improved [1]. Others studies show that the number of female science teachers  at their school seems to have no effect [2].

Finding just the right type of role model is even more challenging. Do role models have to be female? Do they have to be of the same race as the students? There is often an assumption that even images and stories can change students’ minds about who can do science. If so, does it help to show very feminine women with interests in science like the science cheerleaders? The answer in most of these studies is, almost predictably, yes and no.

Diana Betz and Denise Sekaquaptewa’s recent study “My Fair Physicist: Feminine Math and Science role models demotivate young girls” seems to muddy the waters even further, suggesting that overly feminine role models might actually have a negative effect on students. [3] The study caught my eye when PhD student Sara Callori wrote about it and shared that it made her worry about her own efforts to be a good role model.

Betz and Sekaquaptewa worked with two groups of middle school girls. With the first group (144 girls, mostly 11 and 12 years old) they first asked the girls for their three favourite school subjects and categorized any who said science or math as STEM-identified (STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). All of the girls then read articles about three role models. Some were science/math role models and some were general role models (i.e., described as generally successful students). The researchers mixed things even further so that some of the role models were purposefully feminine (e.g., shown wearing pink and saying they were interested in fashion magazines) and others were supposedly neutral (e.g., shown wearing dark colours and glasses and enjoying reading).* There were feminine and neutral examples for both STEM and non-STEM role models. After the girls read the three articles, the researchers asked them about their future plans to study math and their current perceptions of their abilities and interest in math.**

For the  most part, the results were as expected. The STEM-identified girls showed more interest in studying math in the future (not really a surprise since they’d already said math and science were their favourite subjects) and the role models didn’t seem to have any effect. Their minds were, for the most part, already made up.

What about the non-STEM identified girls, did the role models help them? It’s hard to tell exactly because the researchers didn’t measure the girls’ desire to study math before reading about the role models.  It seems though that reading about feminine science role models took away from their desire to study math both in the present and the future. Those who were non-STEM identified and read about feminine STEM role models rated their interest significantly lower than other non-STEM identified girls who read about neutral STEM role models and about non-STEM role models. A little bit surprising was the additional finding that the feminine role models also seemed to lower STEM-identified girls current interest in math (though not their future interest).

The authors argue that the issue is unattainability. Other studies have shown that role models can sometimes be intimidating. They can actually turn students off if they seem too successful, such that their career or life paths seem out of reach, or if students can write them off as being much more talented or lucky than themselves. Betz and Sekaquaptewa suggest that the femininity of the role models made them seem doubly successful and therefore even more out of the students’ reach.

The second part of the study was designed to answer this question but is much weaker in design so it’s difficult to say what it adds to the discussion. They used a similar design but with only the STEM role models, feminine and non-feminine (and only 42 students, 20% of whom didn’t receive part of the questionnaire due to an error). The only difference was instead of asking about students interest in studying math they tried to look at the combination of femininity and math success by asking two questions:

1) “How likely do you think it is that you could be both as successful in math/science AND as feminine or girly as these students by the end of high school?” (p. 5)

2) “Do being good at math and being girly go together?” (p. 5)

Honestly, it’s at this point that the study loses me. The first question has serious validity issues (and nowhere in the study is the validity of the outcome measures established). First, there are different ways to interpret the question and for students to decide on a rating. A low rating could mean a student doesn’t think they’ll succeed in science even if they really want to. A low rating could also mean that a student has no interest in femininity and rejects the very idea of being successful at both. These are very different things and make the results almost impossible to interpret. Second these “successes” are likely different in kind. Succeeding in academics is time dependent and it makes sense to ask young students if they aspire to be successful in science. Feminine identity is less future oriented and more likely to be seen as a trait rather a skill that is developed. It probably doesn’t make sense to ask students if they aspire to be more feminine, especially when femininity has been defined as liking fashion magazines and wearing pink.

Question: Dear student, do you aspire to grow up to wear more pink?

Answer (regardless of femininity): Um, that’s a weird question.

With these questions, they found that non-STEM identified girls rated themselves as unlikely to match the dual success of the feminine STEM role models. Because of the problems with the items though, it’s difficult to say what that means. The authors do raise an interesting question about unattainability, though, and I hope they’ll continue to look for ways to explore it further.

So, should graduate students like Sara Callori be worried? Like lots of researchers who care deeply about science, Sara expressed a commendable and strong desire to make a contribution to inspiring young women in physics (a field that continues to have a serious gender imbalance). She writes about her desire to encourage young students and be a good role model:

“When I made the decision to go into graduate school for physics, however, my outlook changed. I wanted to be someone who bucked the stereotype: a fashionable, fun, young woman who also is a successful physicist. I thought that if I didn’t look like the stereotypical physicist, I could be someone that was a role model to younger students by demonstrating an alternative to the stereotype of who can be a scientist. …This study also unsettled me on a personal level. I’ve long desired to be a role model to younger students. I enjoy sharing the excitement of physics, especially with those who might be turned away from the subject because of stereotypes or negative perceptions. I always thought that by being outgoing, fun, and yes, feminine would enable me to reach students who see physics as the domain of old white men. These results have me questioning myself, which can only hurt my outreach efforts by making me more self conscious about them. They make me wonder if I have to be disingenuous about who I am in order to avoid being seen as “too feminine” for physics.”

To everyone who has felt this way, my strong answer is: NO, please don’t let this dissuade you from outreach efforts. Despite results like this, when studies look at the impact of role models in comparison to otherinfluences, relationships always win over symbols. The role models that make a difference are not the people that kids read about in magazines or that visit their classes for a short period of time. The role models, really mentors, that matter are people in students’ lives: teachers, parents, peers, neighbours, camp leaders, and class volunteers. And for the most part it doesn’t depend on their gender or even their educational success. What matters is how they interact with and support the students. Good role models are there for students, they believe in their abilities and help them explore their own interests.

My advice? Don’t worry about how feminine or masculine you are or if you have the right characteristics to be a role model, just get out there and get to know the kids you want to encourage. Think about what you can do to build their self-confidence in science or to help them find a topic they are passionate about. When it comes to making the most of the interactions you have with science students, there are a few tips for success (and none of them hinge on wearing or not wearing pink):

• Be supportive and encouraging of students’ interest in science. Take their ideas and aspirations seriously and let them know that you believe in them. This turns out to be by far one of the most powerful influences in people pursuing science. If you do one thing in your interactions with students, make it this.
• Share with students why you love doing science. What are the benefits of being a scientist such as contributing to improving people’s lives or in solving difficult problems? Students often desire careers that meet these characteristics of personal satisfaction but don’t always realize that being a scientist can be like that.
• Don’t hide the fact that there are gender differences in participation in some areas of science (especially physics and engineering). Talk honestly with students about it, being sure to emphasize that differences in ability are NOT the reason for the discrepancies. Talk, for example, about evidence that girls are not given as many opportunities to explore and play with mechanical objects and ask them for their ideas about why some people choose these sciences and others don’t.

There are so many ways to encourage and support students in science, don’t waste time worrying about being the perfect role model. If you’re genuinely interested in taking time to connect with students, you are already the right type.

__________________________________________________________

* There are of course immediate questions about how well supported these are as feminine characteristics but I’m willing to allow the researchers that they could probably only choose a few characteristics and had to try to find things that would seem immediately feminine to 11-12 year olds. I still think it’s a shallow treatment of femininity, one that disregards differences in cultural and class definitions of femininity. (And I may or may not still be trying to sort out my feelings about being their gender neutral stereotype, says she wearing grey with large frame glasses and a stack of books beside her).

**The researchers unfortunately did not distinguish between science and math, using them interchangeably despite large differences in gender representation and connections to femininity between biological sciences, physical sciences, math and various branches of engineering.

[1] Stout, J. G., Dasgupta, N., Hunsinger, M., & McManus, M. A. (2011). STEMing the tide: Using ingroup experts to inoculate women’s self-concept in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 255-270.

[2] Gilmartin, S., Denson, N., Li, E., Bryant, A., & Aschbacher, P. (2007). Gender ratios in high school science departments: The effect of percent female faculty on multiple dimensions of students’ science identities. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 44, 980–1009.

[3] Betz, D., & Sekaquaptewa, D. (2012). My Fair Physicist? Feminine Math and Science Role Models Demotivate Young Girls Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550612440735

Further Reading

Buck, G. A., Leslie-Pelecky, D., & Kirby, S. K. (2002). Bringing female scientists into the elementary classroom: Confronting the strength of elementary students’ stereotypical images of scientists. Journal of Elementary Science Education, 14(2), 1-9.

Buck, G. A., Plano Clark, V. L., Leslie-Pelecky, D., Lu, Y., & Cerda-Lizarraga, P. (2008). Examining the cognitive processes used by adolescent girls and women scientists in identifying science role models: A feminist approach. Science Education, 92, 2–20.

Cleaves, A. (2005). The formation of science choices in secondary school. International Journal of Science Education, 27, 471–486.

Ratelle, C.F., Larose, S., Guay, F., & Senecal, C. (2005). Perceptions of parental involvement and support as predictors of college students’ persistence in a science curriculum. Journal of Family Psychology, 19, 286–293.

Simpkins, S. D., Davis-Kean, P. E., & Eccles, J. S. (2006). Math and science motivation: A longitudinal examination of the links between choices and beliefs. Developmental Psychology, 42, 70–83.

Stout, J. G., Dasgupta, N., Hunsinger, M., & McManus, M. (2011). STEMing the tide: Using ingroup experts to inoculate women’s self-concept and professional goals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 255–270.

What sounds like a description of the latest rehab-destined movie star is instead how science writer Tom Levenson introduced me to  Sir Isaac Newton’s unexpected transition from one of the greatest scientists of his time to a detective doggedly pursuing criminals.

I interviewed Tom recently on Skeptically Speaking about his book Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist. It tells the compelling story of Newton leaving his position as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge to become Warden of the  Royal Mint. Not unexpectedly, he put his impeccable experiment skills to work improving the Mint’s production processes. More surprisingly, and reluctantly at first, he was drawn into battle with members of London’s underground working to produce fake and devalued coins.

Nearly 20, 000 people were beating on the doors of a venue that could hold less than 10, 000 shouting, “Let us in!” The tickets for the  second night had all been printed with the same date as the first. Faced with the overwhelming numbers, the police waded into the crowd and ordered the opening act, Paul “Huckerbuckers” Williams to stop shortly after he began. A man was stabbed as the confused crowd dispersed. On the surface, The Moondog Coronation Ball, March 21, 1952 in Cleveland, was a total disaster. It was also a defining moment for 20th century music.

Organized by radio DJ Alan Freed (who the crowd was apparently surprised to find out was White), it was a showcase for the music he played on his show: a mix of rhythm and blues, jazz and boogie that he thereafter called rock and roll. The Moondog featured a mixed bill of White and African-American performers and, uniquely at the time, was intended for a racially mixed audience. It is widely considered the first rock and roll show, and March 21, 2012 marked its 60th anniversary.

Joe Soeder, a music critic at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, described it at the “big bang of rock’ n’roll” but that analogy doesn’t seem right to me. Rock and roll didn’t just come suddenly into existence that night. The music was a variation on rhythm and blues that had been developing for almost two decades. What was new was the name, and the name came to mean so much more than just a particular band arrangement and style of song. Rock and roll became a way of life. It brought with it danger, sex, rebellion, and youthful energy. The Moondog Coronation Ball was about naming and claiming that spirit. Without it, there were just scattered DJs enthusiastically playing R+B records.

So it wasn’t the big bang, but we don’t need to leave science to find a good analogy. If there’s one thing that scientists and natural historians have loved over the centuries, it’s naming and classifying things. I think what Freed, promoter Leo Mintz, the crowd, the police, and everyone involved did that night was create the musical phylum of rock and roll.

Popular music at the time was heavily divided by race and generation with little sense of shared musical culture. Somewhat similarly, early classification systems tended to view large kingdoms of life as divisible along a continuum of simple to complex without always noting the relationships and similarities between them. French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier proposed that the animal kingdom was better thought of as divided into four broad categories (embranchements) with similar body types that performed similar functions. Within an embranchement (e.g., vertebrates) contemporary animals had evolved to make the best of use of one of the basic body plans. Cuvier was stubbornly wrong about the relationship between the embranchements, arguing to the end that they had no evolutionary relationship to each other, but the categories he proposed have largely persisted in what we now call phyla. That classification highlighted a different way of looking at the relationship between animals, not as a march from simple to complex but as unified groups sharing common elements.

Calling this music rock and roll  highlighted that it wasn’t just the same rhythm and blues and it couldn’t be dismissed as race music. It was rhythm and blues with country influences and jazz influences. It was music that could be shared by young people across racial lines. Calling it rock and roll made everyone look at it differently.

So why did I mark the 60th anniversary of the first rock and roll show with an indie band’s song from the late 1990s? I could have stuck with Paul Williams’s hit The Hucklebuckle, which includes the terrific dancing call, “Push your baby out, then you hunch your back, start a little movement in your sacroilliac.” I can certainly get behind any song that’s precise about naming body parts. The new category of music, rock and roll, wasn’t just about good songs though. It touched off excitement and wonder in music loving young people everywhere. Randy Bachman (of The Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive) hosts a weekly show on CBC radio in which is love for music is the centrepiece, and he often shares insider stories about the songs and artists. My favorite ones are about how magical it was for a cousin or friend from the US or the UK to come to Winnipeg and bring with them new rock and roll records. They were like treasures, listened to with awe and wonder.

It only seemed fair to celebrate with a song that did that for me. In Ottawa, 1997, good new music was still relatively hard to find. No Pandora, no Pitchfork. Living in a small city meant that music was still a treasure passed from friend to friend. Already great fans of Guided by Voices  (I wore out my first tape copy of their classic Bee Thousand), one sunny day a friend and I walked to a local restaurant that also sold music. The owner kept a small but impeccably curated selection of albums for sale and, best of all, you could listen to any of them at one of the listening tables outfitted with two sets of headphones. We had heard there was a new Guided by Voices EP out and were desperate to hear it. We sat down, donned our big black headphones and this was the first track. We listened in awe. After it was done, my friend took off his headphones and said in a hushed and almost stunned voice, “That is like the purest rock and roll song ever.” I nodded seriously with butterflies in my stomach that I’d just heard something special. Calling it the purest rock and roll song ever might be debatable, but  it’s the closest I ever came to feeling what Freed’s listeners must have felt discovering this new category called rock and roll and why nearly 20, 000 of them tried to break down the doors of the Cleveland Arena 60 years ago to hear it. Happy Anniversary rock fans everywhere.

Side note: We may not have been the only ones who saw a connection from GBV to classic rock and roll. GBV’s new single is called fittingly “The Unsinkable Fats Domino“

It’s been just over two months since I started writing regularly about science and music as the DJ at the online science pub The Finch & Pea. It has quickly become one of my favourite things to do each week. To celebrate, I’m posting a few of my favourite ones here at Boundary Vision. These are the ones that best represent the intersection between science and culture that I aim for here. Enjoy!

I met them at LogiCon, an Edmonton-based science and critical thinking outreach event held annually at The Telus World of Science. The two-day meeting, April 14-15 this year, was open to all science centre visitors, adults and kids, and featured talks by researchers, writers, educators and more. There were talks on scientific topics, from vaccines to particle physics, and scientific thinking, such as how to evaluate claims in the media. One section of the conference was devoted to sessions for families and kids, and of course that’s the part I couldn’t resist attending.

The first session I attended was “What Is Science, Really?” led by University of Alberta philosopher, John Simpson. Simpson also runs a terrific philosophy for kids program at the university including Eurekamp, a summer philosophy camp, which I am unfathomably jealous didn’t exist when I was young. The room was divided with two large tables, kids at one table (mostly 9-13 years old), parents and other adults at the other. Both groups were given a stack of unlabeled photographs of people and objects and asked to rank them based on how important science is to each. There were pictures that were obviously scientific, including ones of famous historical scientists (e.g., Charles Darwin) and people in lab coats doing bench work, but there were also challenging ones like photos of the Prime Minister and of athletes, fictional characters, and writers. I was fascinated watching the different ways the adults and kids approached the task.

The kids stuck fairly closely to the assignment of creating a continuum but they argued vehemently about specific examples. They went back and forth about whether a picture of Harry Potter represented the character or the actor. They thoughtfully discussed a photo of a visual artist and whether doing art required science, finally settling on the conclusion that anyone who systematically thinks about and analyzes their materials and tasks is doing science (oh yes, these were very cool kids). Standing up to place the photo of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, one boy stated emphatically, “I’m not sure where to put him because he doesn’t use science, but he really really should.”

The adults, on the other hand, fixated on defining the terms. They argued not about the examples but whether science included technology or if they needed to create a second continuum. Simpson in the end gave them a second set of the photos so they could place particular examples in both science and technology. They argued about the definition of science versus social science, and they wanted to sketch a model of the relationships before they started categorizing. They hardly ended up with any of the photos sorted by the end of the hour-long session, but their discussion was fascinating as well. This is probably the only time I’ll ever hear this question posed seriously, “So, is Lance Armstrong more sciency or less sciency than a jet or are they both technology?”

The highlight of the day, though, was a panel session featuring four 10-13 year old science enthusiasts and moderated by the host of Skeptically Speaking, Desiree Schell:

The Petri Dish: Engaging Children in Science

What keeps kids interested in science? How can parents, teachers and other adults encourage and inspire kids to keep digging in to science and learning more? Our panel of science-enthusiastic kids sit down with Desiree Schell and discuss what adults do right – and wrong – to inspire scientific curiosity and interest.

As Desiree opened the panel, she emphasized that the goal was to really listen to the kids, to step back and hear about science education from their perspective and to give them a forum to express these views in the way that they wanted. She then introduced us to the panelists, all public school students from around the city:

• Alex B., a 10 year old who was inspired to ask questions by toys he had as a toddler: “Puzzles and things often have stars on them and I wanted to know: Wow, what are those things? That really inspired me.”
• Jadyn, an 11 year old who was drawn into science by books like Into the Universe by Stephen Hawking. To him it was, “simple enough that almost anyone can get it but not so simple that it’s not interesting anymore.”
• Evin, a 13 year old who finds science everywhere and is fascinated by its never-ending questions: “You can never know everything about science. There’s always more to know. That makes for a never-ending interest in science.”
• Alex E., an 11 year old who loves robotics and Lego: “I really like making things that can do anything that you want them to. If you can do that yourself you don’t have to wait for someone else to do it.”

The opening discussion focused on their interest in science, what first inspired it and what maintained it. They expressed broad views that focused not only on the products of science but also science for its own sake. Evin, in particular, showed a deep commitment to the importance of communicating widely about science for the good of all people. Science is about “making the world a better place,” he explained, “One thing we’re really facing now is climate change. We need to enlighten the human race that when we’re doing is really destructive, explain to people that this world isn’t an infinite source of resources.”

All four showed a sophisticated appreciation for science and its relationship to society. I was very impressed by the different views they held, from science as the underlying mechanisms of all of the natural world, to a description of science as a set of methods for understanding that world. They had all clearly has a lot of opportunities to engage with science in different ways. The topic soon turned, of course, to school science and what adults can and should do to encourage kids. It was here that this really turned into a most insightful panel, as they presented a nuanced critique of school science.

Evin began by calling out the emphasis on facts and not the reasoning behind them. He argued that it makes science both intimidating and also less interesting. “The tell us these things, but they don’t tell us why these things happen. Like the lines left by glaciers. They told us the information we should know and not why we should know the information or why and how that happened.”

They also argued that lots of kids are interested in science, even if their teachers don’t know it. Alex B. described how interested he and his peers were, even as very young students, in space and flight but that keeping those topics out of the curriculum until age 10 or 11 meant that students had gotten bored and given up on science long before they got there. “As early as kindergarten lots of us shared common interests in space and aerodynamics but then we don’t get those until Grade 5 and 6. We could have been catapulted forward if we’d done that earlier.” Desiree smiled and said that surely they were exceptional students and lots of their peers might not feel the same way. Alex, though, shook his head and emphatically stated no, he meant most of the students in his class. Almost all of them thought science was interesting in kindergarten and would have eagerly learned about topics they were drawn to, like space and flight or other individual interests they had. he said that most kids just don’t seem interested later on because they had already lost the spark.

This isn’t an uncommon idea, that young children have a curiosity about the world that we could do a much better job of encouraging. It was very striking, though, to hear it from an articulate 10 year old and backed up with specific statements about the kids in his class sharing an interest as youngsters and then losing that interest.

Alex E. added, however, that when students aren’t interested teachers shouldn’t force them. “You shouldn’t force people to do science because then they’ll end up hating it,” he said. Instead, show them the cool products of science or help them learn science that will be useful for them and try to help them develop a real interest. “Show them how they can make the world a better place,” added Evin.

Alex B. and Evin also wanted teachers to give students, especially young ones, more time to explore and experiment. Alex felt that many of the theoretical concepts of science might be hard for young students but that experimental procedures are a much better way to enter into science and build your interest. “When you’re at a young age just getting into science, it’s experimental science that you really want to get into. You won’t get very far with theoretical science, but experimental science can really get you in and then you can go further.” Evin emphasized that this doesn’t happen enough in schools. “That’s one problem that our school teachers have,” he said thoughtfully, “they don’t let us explore, they just give us what the curriculum says.”

This theme of not giving students what they need was carried over into a discussion of role models. A physicist in the audience asked the students what people like him could do to be better role models for young people in science. It’s a common solution proposed for encouraging and maintaining student interest: provide more and better role models. All four panelists, though talkative and eloquent, were silent. They looked at each other, raised their eyebrows, and shrugged their shoulders. Desiree rephrased the question asking them who their role models are and why they are good role models. Not surprisingly the ones they listed where people in their lives, mostly family members and teachers. The justifications, though, were a little more surprising and explained their confused silence. The students didn’t focus at all on the what the role models were like, other than they should be generally nice people. It wasn’t about the role models; it was about what the role models did for the kids. Good role models challenged them just enough. They asked good questions, and most importantly, let the kids find out the answers. Each student repeated essentially the same answer. Role models should encourage and inspire questions and exploration, that’s all. The kids themselves need to do everything else. There were no comments about having role models that were like the students or role models who broke stereotypes or role models who had overcome challenges and no indication that they really wanted to learn from someone else’s experiences. There was instead a lot of reinforcement that the process of role modelling isn’t modelling at all, it’s all about what the kids get to do and it’s really easy to forget that. Alex said it clearly, “You just want to prepare many many paths for students and let them take them.”

We spend a lot of time in science education talking about role models, the importance of the right kind of role models and providing a diversity of role models. Surprisingly we talk very little about what those role models actually do – and that’s the part that matters.

See what I mean? This was definitely one of the most insightful and thoughtful panels on science education I’ve been to (and I’ve attended and sat on many). From the reactions I saw and conversations I heard, the student panelists succeeded completely in making every adult in the room think a little bit differently about science education. Taking time to really listen to what kids have to say is something we need to do more often: there’s a lot to learn.