Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Organizing for 'science' in science museums

It is difficult to think about the ways in which science museums are organized - often their idiosyncrasies are implicit or masked by the seemingly common sensy -ness of them: "of course this the way a science museum is organized, how else would it be organized?" The idea that science museums are about science is fairly pervasive. People know science museums are about science. And yet, it is not immediately obvious to me what about the organization in a science museum is really linked to 'science.' Admittedly, there is often a loose association around disciplinary themes (i.e. biology, physics, psychology), but this is more representative of a 'schooled' version of science than of science practice or science culture outside the schools. There is also a strong bent towards question asking (although we could stand for more studies of this, something along the lines of a study that would allow me to make the claim "people tend to ask more questions in a science center then they do in other museums, at home, or in afterschool programs" or "people, when prompted by a researcher, claim that science centers are places to ask questions"). The Exploratorium is certainly capitalizing on this expectation; running trials with open-ended exhibits and explainers trained to point out to visitors that the exhibits they are working with are particularly good for investigating questions, and even going so far as to attempt to implement rules about exhibit play that give priority to anyone who has a question to ask, and investigation to carryout. This sort of play prioritization creates an interesting hierarchy of activity at an exhibit where 'just messing around' isn't as important as 'having a genuine' investigable question to answer.'

So, perhaps there are some bits and pieces of 'science' that we might be able to talk about as part of the organization of a science center. Still however, recent experience (at the Bay Area Institute: a collective of researchers and practioners interested in informal learning) working with a group of individuals attempting to answer the question 'what counts as science' reminded me that even among like-minded individuals (a rare place to be) there is no distilled answer to the question. This leaves me in a pickle: How can we make sense of science center organization around science when we cannot even agree on what this might mean?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In all the talk about what a science center should do, why don't we hear results of surveys that ask the public this question? If they are the ones being served, then their input should be the place to start.

Like in that Swedish museum, it sounds like someone decided to salvage a ship and decided that enough people would go see it to make it worth the effort. You wrote that every person you talked to recommended going there, so I conclude it did reach its goal. Not as science education but to serve the public interest.

I think the answer is to classify the Vasa ship as public entertainment and not as science education. I would phrase the question, how do you convert public entertainment into scientific education?