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Epistemic networks and the social nature of public engagement with science
Abstract
This theoretical paper focuses on the social processes of public engagement with science and their implications for science education. The core of our argument is that science education should help people become better at evaluating, using, and curating their epistemic networks to make personal and civic decisions and to understand the natural world. In this context, an epistemic network is a set of people who support sensemaking by providing new information and aiding in the interpretation and reconstruction of scientific knowledge in context. We believe epistemic networks are an important consideration for science education, particularly when misinformation plays an outsized role in the cultural landscape. Understanding when epistemic networks are useful and how science education should incorporate them requires a clear sense of how they work in different contexts. We start by contrasting the inevitably social nature of all public engagement with science with the particularly social or interpersonal nature of some public engagement with science. We draw on research from education, communication, and science and technology studies to develop the idea of an epistemic network and to describe two basic types: the individual resource network and the collective action network. We illustrate each type with an extended example that is hypothetical but informed by both research and experience. Finally, we discuss how science education can incorporate epistemic networks, as well as the challenges inherent in that educational strategy.
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Despite growing interest in community-level science literacy, most studies focus on communities of interest who come together through particular science, environmental or health-related goals. We examine a pre-existing community—ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel—with a particular history and politics vis-à-vis science, technology, and medicine. First, we show how Haredi cosmologies and culture come together to critique science as an epistemology while engaging with science as a technology. Then, we demonstrate how community-based medical experts serve as both science-related knowledge mediators and gatekeepers. Whereas Haredi Jews are constantly critiqued for their low levels of individual secular and science education, these community-based webs of knowledge seemingly position Haredi individuals with knowledge that surpasses the average “secular” Israeli. This case study develops unique analytical tools in the growing field of community-level science literacy, while pushing forward conversations about self-ascribed experts, knowledge gatekeeping, and the socio-political contexts of group critiques of science.
The public acceptance of evolution in the United States is a long-standing problem. Using data from a series of national surveys collected over the last 35 years, we find that the level of public acceptance of evolution has increased in the last decade after at least two decades in which the public was nearly evenly divided on the issue. A structural equation model indicates that increasing enrollment in baccalaureate-level programs, exposure to college-level science courses, a declining level of religious fundamentalism, and a rising level of civic scientific literacy are responsible for the increased level of public acceptance.
Recent conceptualizations of science literacy, a key aim of contemporary science education, suggest defining it as a function of actual uses of science in daily life. We characterize expressions of science literacy in online authentic public discourse, using content analysis of a year’s worth of widely-read Israeli online news site coverage of animal experimentation and its reader comments, we explore how expressions of science literacy interact with coverage. The national Israeli science-curricula were used as an analytical framework, including scientific knowledge, nature of science (NOS), and inquiry skills. The findings indicate that over half of the scientific concepts used by the commentators are at the high school or academic level, in which science is elective. There were strong correlations (r = 0.96) between the level of overall science concepts used in the articles and reader comments. Comments supporting animal experimentation employed more and higher level of scientific concepts. Contrasting positions were supported by different types of NOS content: opponents of animal experimentation referred more to the social aspects of NOS, echoing differences in worldviews and lack of trust in scientists. We suggest that enabling informed public engagement with science requires explicit integration of investigative and social aspects of the nature of science.
Science education is likely to respond to the post-truth era by focusing on how science education can help individuals use scientists’ epistemological tools to tell what is true. This strategy, by itself, is inadequate for three reasons. First, science does not actually offer foundational truth, and incautious assertions about scientific truth can make the problems of the post-truth era worse. Second, scientific knowledge offers only part of the solution to personal and policy problems and must be reconstructed in context. Third, people think about and act on science in social context—both as members of their social and cultural groups and with other members of those groups. Taken together, these arguments suggest that we should be focusing on a different question: How can science education help people work together to make appropriate use of science in social context?
Citizen science is transforming the ways scientific knowledge is created, in that citizens participate in active scientific research, and large scientific databases can be accessed online. However, data availability does not guarantee public use or the relevance of these resources. This paper addresses the ways in which non-expert adults involved in a citizen science initiative, perceive, understand and use its scientific information.
Participants responded to an online questionnaire presenting air quality data from ‘Sensing the Air’ citizen science platform, followed by interpretation questions (n = 123). The results showed that 70% of participants were able to interpret the data presented in various visual representations. No differences were found between gender, age or education level. However, respondents with tertiary scientific education obtained higher average scores. Among users who had previous experience with the project, overall scores were higher, and differences based on respondents scientific education were fewer. This may suggest that while scientific education is important in providing skills for data interpretation, it is not the only way to acquire these skills. This study highlights the ability of non-experts to understand and apply scientific data in daily situations and the potential of citizen science to develop scientific skills, competencies and public understanding of science.
Wi-Fi radiation is a type of radio frequency electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMR) that refers to the transfer of energy by radio waves. Nowadays, exposure to RF radiation is widespread including wireless internet connection (Wi-Fi) routers and cell phones. The proliferation of devices emitting RF radiation has entailed some public and media-generated controversy, although scientific evidence has not pointed to the existence of risk. Using the theoretical perspectives of science literacy, public engagement with science, and science media literacy, this work examines public engagement with science-related media reports in a context involving risk. A qualitative design was followed to address multiple viewpoints including an analysis of an authentic primetime TV program concerning the risks of Wi-Fi, its messages, and frames, solicited a public response to the coverage via interviews and decision-making simulation (n = 20), and unsolicited public response based on social media discussions (n = 315 comments). Our findings suggest that a lack of relevant scientific knowledge does not seem to be related to participants’ general scientific literacy among people with higher education. Moreover, interviewees did not place much emphasis on having adequate knowledge in making their decision. These findings emphasize that we need to expand our understanding of the different ways that make scientific knowledge relevant when making decisions on scientific issues that relate directly to everyday life.
Hearing-impaired children’s chances of integrating into hearing society largely depend on their parents, who need to learn vast amounts of science knowledge in the field of hearing. This study characterized the role played by science knowledge in the lives of nonscientists faced with science-related decisions by examining the interactions between general science knowledge, contextual science knowledge in the field of hearing, and parents’ advocacy knowledge and attitudes. Based on six semi-structured interviews and 115 questionnaires completed by parents of hearing-impaired children, contextual science knowledge emerged as the only predictor for having slightly better advocacy attitudes and knowledge (5.5% explained variance). Although general science knowledge was the best predictor of contextual knowledge (14% of explained variance), it was not a direct predictor of advocacy knowledge and attitudes. Science knowledge plays some role in the lives of hearing-impaired families, even if they do not list it as a resource for successful rehabilitation.
Bruner (Synthese, 2017, 10.1007/s11229-017-1487-8) shows that in cultural interactions, members of minority groups will learn to interact with members of majority groups more quickly—minorities tend to meet majorities more often as a brute fact of their respective numbers—and, as a result, may come to be disadvantaged in situations where they divide resources. In this paper, we discuss the implications of this effect for epistemic communities. We use evolutionary game theoretic methods to show that minority groups can end up disadvantaged in academic interactions like bargaining and collaboration as a result of this effect. These outcomes are more likely, in our models, the smaller the minority group. They occur despite assumptions that majority and minority groups do not differ with respect to skill level, personality, preference, or competence of any sort. Furthermore, as we will argue, these disadvantaged outcomes for minority groups may negatively impact the progress of epistemic communities.
The organization of expert activism is a problem of increasing importance for social movement organizers and scholars alike. Yet the relative invisibility of expert activists within social movements makes them difficult to systematically identify and study. This article offers two related ways forward. First, we advance a theory of "shadow mobilization" to explain the organization of expert activism in the broader context of proliferating risk and intensifying knowledge-based conflict. Second, we introduce a new methodological approach for collecting systematic data on members of this difficult-to-reach population. Findings from comparative analysis of expert activists in the environmental justice movement in Louisiana and the alternative agriculture movement in Washington reveal both important commonalities and fine-grained differences, suggesting that shadow mobilizations are strategic collective responses to cumulative risk in contemporary society.
In this article we examine educational assessment in the 21st century. Digital learning environments emphasize learning in action. In such environments, assessments need to focus on performance in context rather than on tests of ed and isolated skills and knowledge. Digital learning environments also provide the potential to assess performance in context, because digital tools make it possible to record rich streams of data about learning in progress. But what assessment methods will use this data to measure mastery of complex problem solvingthe kind of thinking in action that takes place in digital learning environments? Here we argue that one way to address this challenge is through evidence-centered design1a framework for developing assessments by systematically linking models of understanding, observable actions, and evaluation rubrics to provide evidence of learning. We examine how evidence-centered design can address the challenge of assessment in new media learning environments by presenting one specific theory-based approach to digital learning, known as epistemic games (http://epistemicgames.org/eg/), and describing a method, epistemic network analysis (ENA), to assess learner performance based on this theory. We use the theory and its related assessment method to illustrate the concept of a digital learning systema system composed of a theory of learning and its accompanying method of assessment, linked into an evidence-based, digital intervention. We argue that whatever tools of learning and assessment digital environments use, they need to be integrated into a coherent digital learning system linking learning and assessment through evidence-centered design.
This paper draws general insights into the public reception of scientific knowledge from a case study of Cumbrian sheep farmers' responses to scientific advice about the restrictions introduced after the Chernobyl radioactive fallout. The analysis identifies several substantive factors which influence the credibility of scientific communication. Starting from the now-accepted point that public uptake of science depends primarily upon the trust and credibility public groups are prepared to invest in scientific institutions and representatives, the paper observes that these are contingent upon the social relationships and identities which people feel to be affected by scientific knowledge, which never comes free of social interests or implications. The case study shows laypeople capable of extensive informal reflection upon their social relationships towards scientific experts, and on the epistemological status of their own `local' knowledge in relation to `outside' knowledge. Public uptake of science might be improved if scientific institutions expressed an equivalent reflexive discourse in the public domain.
The findings reported on in this manuscript emerged from a design experiment conducted at a low-income urban middle school intended to support the teacher in incorporating pedagogical practices supportive of students' everyday knowledge and practices during a 6th grade unit on food and nutrition from the LiFE curriculum. In studying the impact of the design experiment we noticed qualitative shifts in classroom Discourse marked by a changing role and understandings of the funds of knowledge students brought to science learning. Using qualitative data and grounded theory we present an analysis of the different types of funds of knowledge and Discourse that students brought into science class. We focus on how the students' strategic use of these funds augmented the learning experience of the students and the learning community as well as the learning outcomes. We discuss the implications these funds of knowledge and Discourses had on the development of three related third space transformations: physical, political, and pedagogical. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 50–73, 2009
{textlessptextgreatertextless}br/textgreaterWhile scientific consensus and political and media messages appear to be increasingly certain, public attitudes and action towards the issue do not appear to be following suit. Popular and academic debate often assumes this is due to ignorance or misunderstanding on the part of the public, but some studies have suggested political beliefs and values may play a more important role in determining belief versus scepticism about climate change. The current research used two representative postal surveys of the UK public to: measure scepticism and uncertainty about climate change; determine how scepticism varies according to individual characteristics, knowledge and values; and examine how scepticism has changed over time. Findings show denial of climate change is less common than the perception that the issue has been exaggerated. Scepticism was found to be strongly determined by individuals' environmental and political values (and indirectly by age, gender, location and lifestyle) rather than by education or knowledge. Between 2003 and 2008, public uncertainty about climate change has remained remarkably constant, although belief that claims about the issue are exaggerated has doubled over that period. These results are interpreted with reference to psychological concepts of motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and [`]finite pool of worry'. Implications for communication and policy are discussed.textless/ptextgreater
This review covers recent developments in the social influence literature, focusing primarily on compliance and conformity research published between 1997 and 2002. The principles and processes underlying a target's susceptibility to outside influences are considered in light of three goals fundamental to rewarding human functioning. Specifically, targets are motivated to form accurate perceptions of reality and react accordingly, to develop and preserve meaningful social relationships, and to maintain a favorable self-concept. Consistent with the current movement in compliance and conformity research, this review emphasizes the ways in which these goals interact with external forces to engender social influence processes that are subtle, indirect, and outside of awareness.
A timely complement to John Bruer's Schools for Thought, Classroom Lessons documents eight projects that apply cognitive research to improve classroom practice. The chapter authors are all principal investigators in an influential research initiative on cognitive science and education. Classroom Lessons describes their collaborations with classroom teachers aimed at improving teaching and learning for students in grades K-12. The eight projects cover writing, mathematics, history, social science, and physics. Together they illustrate that principles emerging from cognitive science form the basis of a science of instruction that can be applied across the curriculum.
The book is divided into three sections: applications of cognitive research to teaching specific content areas; applications for learning across the curriculum; and applications that challenge traditional concepts of classroom-based learning environments.
Chapters consider explicit models of knowledge with corresponding instruction designed to enable learners to build on that knowledge, acquisition of specified knowledge, and what knowledge is useful in contemporary curricula.
Contributors Kate McGilly. Sharon A. Griffin, Robbie Case, and Robert S. Siegler. Earl Hunt and Jim Minstrell. Kathryn T. Spoehr. Howard Gardner, Mara Krechevsky, Robert J. Sternberg, and Lynn Okagaki. Irene W. Gaskins. The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. Marlene Scardamalia, Carl Bereiter, and Mary Lamon. Ann L. Brown and Joseph C. Campione. John T. Bruer.
Bradford Books imprint
Informed civic engagement has long been a goal of science education. Yet, how youth civically engage using science—what knowledge and practices they draw on, when, how, and for what purposes—remains largely unknown. By examining youth civic digital media production around climate change and COVID‐19, we shed light on this area. We view both scientific and civic engagement through the theoretical lens of social practice, which locates learning, knowledge, and cognition within culturally embedded social activities. With this theoretical disposition, we examined media produced by youth during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, asking: (1) What scientific numeracies did youth use in civic participation about climate change and COVID‐19? And (2) In what ways did youth adapt and/or remix canonical scientific numeracies within their digital civic media production? Through qualitative coding of 249 media pieces, we identified ways in which youth engaged and adapted scientific civic numeracies. We found that youth often adapted canonical forms of numeracy, integrated or “remixed” scientific numeracies with other knowledges such as those of place and politics, and interwove multiple numeracies. We begin to theorize science‐civic practices , or the locally‐meaningful ways of participating and meaning‐making that interweave multiple literacies used to advance one's civic aims. We use our findings to argue for the imperative of bringing the civic world into the science classroom.
Amid concerns about misinformation online and bias in news, there are increasing calls on social media to “do your own research.” In an abundant information environment, critical media consumption and information validation are desirable. However, using panel survey data, we find that positive perceptions toward “doing your own research” are associated with holding more misperceptions about COVID-19 and less trust in science over time. Support for “doing your own research” may be an expression of anti-expert attitudes rather than reflecting beliefs about the importance of cautious information consumption.
"Competent outsiders" must be able to evaluate the credibility of science-based arguments.
Scientific misinformation and disinformation, proliferating via the internet and social media, are now significant problems. Proposed solutions vary substantially. Here, I describe a set of prospective benchmarks—10 competencies—that seem essential for reorienting science education to address the challenge. They include, first, elements of epistemic motivation, including basic epistemological beliefs about “constructed” knowledge, adopting a posture of respect for empirical evidence, and an understanding of our epistemic dependence on experts. Second, the benchmarks include perspectives and skills in interacting with media sources. These include how to identify experts, how to identify credible gatekeepers, how to recognize deceptive strategies, and how to deal with social networks and technology. Finally, the competencies include self‐regulation, such as acknowledging the cognitive dispositions that bias our thinking (especially about information that challenges our pre‐existing beliefs) and the counter‐balancing role of consensus. I hope that these competency goals can function as a concrete target in guiding discussion of perhaps more complete or more nuanced approaches to the current crisis. With such competencies clearly and explicitly articulated, teachers will be better positioned to develop effective classroom strategies to nurture the relevant competencies.
Given the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, energy transitions are among the most important STS research areas. Evidence increasingly points to social movements and mobilized publics as critical drivers of change, including transformative energy transitions. Yet STS' focus on science and expertise can miss the significance of the public's role in leading and shaping energy transitions. This paper explores how STS considers public engagement and disparities between project-specific issues and broader energy objectives, such as addressing global climate change. Drawing on research about public participation, mobilized publics, and social movements, the paper examines how expanding the STS lens of analysis can ensure that the public's role in energy transitions is fully assessed and reflected. The paper also discusses future research approaches and avenues for more interdisciplinary collaboration, which will be advantageous in investigating transformative energy transition pathways.
The book examines the experience of living in a society that has more information available to the public than ever before. It focuses on the interpretations, emotions, and practices of dealing with this abundance in everyday life. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and survey research conducted in Argentina, the book inquiries into the role of cultural and structural factors that mediate between the availability of information and the actual consequences for individuals, media, politics, and society. Providing the first book-length account of the topic in the Global South, it concludes that the experience of information abundance is tied to an overall unsettling of society, a reconstitution of how we understand and perform our relationships with others, and a twin depreciation of facts and appreciation of fictions.
Anthropogenic climate change remains divisive in the United States, where skepticism of the scientific consensus is associated with conservative worldviews, resulting in political polarization. This study considers three hypotheses regarding U.S. polarization over climate change that have emerged from social psychology research and applies them to science education by showing how these hypotheses could relate to adolescents' science learning. We then test each hypothesis within an experimental educational intervention designed to study the influence of worldview, mechanistic knowledge, and quantitative reasoning on students' written arguments about climate change. We used mixed methods to analyze the results of this individually randomized trial with clustering involving 357 participants in grades 9–11 from 5 U.S. sites. Findings show that: (a) exposure to mechanistic knowledge about climate change increased odds of receptivity toward climate change; (b) increasingly conservative worldviews were associated with decreased odds of receptivity; (c) worldview and quantitative reasoning interacted, resulting in an amplified effect of worldview for students with greater quantitative reasoning. Results also suggest that the influence of worldview and mechanistic knowledge on receptivity work independently from one another in our dataset. This study demonstrates the value of teaching mechanistic understandings of climate change, yet also demonstrates the influence of worldview on receptivity to climate change for adolescents, as well as complex interactions between quantitative reasoning (something school science aims to develop) and worldview. It shows that moving the U.S. public toward the scientific consensus is complex and involves confronting ideologically motivated reasoning within science education.
Sometimes retracted or thoroughly refuted scientific information is used and propagated long after it is understood to be misleading. Likewise, sometimes retracted news items spread and persist, even after it has been publicly established that they are false. In this paper, we use agent-based models of epistemic networks to explore the dynamics of retraction.In particular, we focus on why false beliefs might persist, even in the face of retraction.Surprisingly, we find that in some cases delaying retraction may increase its impact. We also find that retractions are most successful when issued by the original source of misinformation rather than a separate source.
To find out what is in one’s own best interest, it is helpful to ask one’s epistemic peers. However, identifying one’s epistemic peers is not a trivial task. I consider a stylized political setting, an electoral competition of ‘Masses’ and ‘Elites’. To succeed, the Masses need to know which alternative on offer is truly in their interest. To find out, the Masses can pool their privately held information in a pre-election ballot, provided that they can reliably find out with whom they should pool information. I investigate the process of finding the relevant peer group for information pooling by modelling this group formation process as dynamic network change. The simulations show that the Masses can succeed in finding the right peers, but they also suggest reasons why the Elites may often be more successful. This phenomenon generalizes to the notion of Epistemic Network Injustice. Such injustice arises when a subset of citizens is systematically deprived of connections to helpful epistemic peers, leading to their reduced political influence. Epistemic Network Injustice is a new form of epistemic injustice, related to but distinct from the notion introduced by Miranda Fricker.
Practices of generating, analyzing, and using evidence play a central role in the Framework for K‐12 Science Education and the NGSS. However, the construct of evidence remains largely underspecified in these documents, providing insufficient guidance on how to engage students with the broad and complex nature of evidentiary reasoning. This creates a risk of perfunctory and simplified implementation of evidence‐based practices that misses the intent of the standards and does little to prepare students for reasoning with the complex, varied, and contentious evidence encountered in popular media or in advanced education. To address these challenges, we propose a theoretical framework, which we call Grasp of Evidence, that complexifies the concept of evidence in ways that facilitate introducing more authentic forms of evidence and more sophisticated ways of engaging with evidence in science classrooms. Our approach focuses on promoting a lay grasp of evidence needed by competent outsiders as they engage with science in their everyday lives. The framework posits five dimensions. The first four dimensions capture what students should understand about how experts work with evidence: evidence analysis, evidence evaluation, evidence interpretation, and evidence integration. The fifth dimension focuses on how laypeople can use evidence reports themselves. Each of these dimensions of practice involves specific epistemic aims, epistemic ideals, and reliable epistemic processes for reasoning with and about evidence. We discuss these dimensions and their contribution to the conceptualization of evidence as well as provide some initial instructional implications and potential directions for future research.
Recent growth in the number of studies examining belief in climate change is a positive development, but presents an ironic challenge in that it can be difficult for academics, practitioners and policy makers to keep pace. As a response to this challenge, we report on a meta-analysis of the correlates of belief in climate change. Twenty-seven variables were examined by synthesizing 25 polls and 171 academic studies across 56 nations. Two broad conclusions emerged. First, many intuitively appealing variables (such as education, sex, subjective knowledge, and experience of extreme weather events) were overshadowed in predictive power by values, ideologies, worldviews and political orientation. Second, climate change beliefs have only a small to moderate effect on the extent to which people are willing to act in climate-friendly ways. Implications for converting sceptics to the climate change cause-and for converting believers' intentions into action-are discussed.
In the 1920s, John Dewey and Walter Lippmann both wrote important books examining whether the public was capable of playing a constructive role in policy, particularly when specialized knowledge was involved. This essay uses the Lippmann–Dewey debate to identify new challenges for science education and to explore the relationship between science education and science communication. It argues that science education can help foster democracy in ways that embody Habermas' ideal of the public sphere, but only if we as a field pay more attention to (1) the non-scientific frames and narratives that people use to interpret news about science, (2) the “second shaping” of scientific facts by the media, and (3) emerging platforms for public engagement. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 52:145–163, 2015.
In this essay, we review research from the social sciences on how the public makes sense of and participates in societal decisions about science and technology. We specifically highlight the role of the media and public communication in this process, challenging the still dominant assumption that science literacy is both the problem and the solution to societal conflicts. After reviewing the cases of evolution, climate change, food biotechnology, and nanotechnology, we offer a set of detailed recommendations for improved public engagement efforts on the part of scientists and their organizations. We emphasize the need for science communication initiatives that are guided by careful formative research; that span a diversity of media platforms and audiences; and that facilitate conversations with the public that recognize, respect, and incorporate differences in knowledge, values, perspectives, and goals.
There is widespread international concern about post-16 participation rates in science, with women's under-representation constituting a particular issue. This paper contributes to these debates through a novel, critical examination of the role of masculinity within boys' negotiations of science aspirations. Drawing on a UK longitudinal study of children's science and career aspirations from age 10 to 14 (including a survey of over 9,000 (Year 6, age 10/11) and 5,600 (Year 8, age 12/13) pupils in England and repeat individual interviews with 92 children (at age 10/11) and 85 (age 12/13), the paper focuses in-depth on repeat interviews with 37 boys. We identify five discursive performances of masculinity, which are related to the boys' (science) aspirations: two are associated with science/related aspirations (termed “young professors” and “cool/footballer scientists”) and three characterize boys who aspire otherwise (“behaving/achieving” boys; “popular masculinity” boys and “laddish” boys). Classed patterns across these five discourses are then explored through two cross-cutting phenomena, (1) popular constructions of science as “brainy”/“smart” and (2) the uneven social distribution of “science capital,” explaining how each of these are implicated facilitating middle-class boys' identifications from/with science and dissuading working-class boys' aspirations. We argue that these analyses illuminate an orthodoxy of science careers which maps closely on to current patterns of participation in post-16 science and which impacts powerfully on who can/not conceive of a career in science as being “for me.” © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 51: 1–30, 2014
This exploratory study examines the significance of science to parents whose children were recently diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. It asks: (1) In what manner did science emerge in parents' concerns and resources as they attempted to understand and advocate for their children? (2) Did some parents engage with science in a qualitatively deeper or more intense manner? Using longitudinal data from interviews and a novel data collection strategy called engagement mapping, it shows that parents asked questions and used resources that were strongly associated with science, but these were vastly outnumbered by "near-science" concerns and resources that mingled meanings from science and daily life. Several parents in the study wove together concerns and resources in an iterative pattern referred to here as progressive engagement with science.
A long–standing goal of science education is teaching students to be intellectually independent of scientific experts. This article proposes that this goal be abandoned as impossible to attain, and be replaced by a goal of intellectual communalism between scientists and nonscientists. The argument draws upon work demonstrating that epistemic dependence of nonexperts upon experts and of experts upon each other is an unavoidable characteristic of knowledge acquisition. This dependence implies both the need for trust in expertise and for expertise to be used responsibly. Faced with epistemic dependence, the alternative of intellectual communalism for science is recunimended in which nonscientists defer to scientists on matters of evidence for scientific knowledge claims, but use the combined judgment of scientists critically to assess alleged scientific expertise. It is claimed that scientists have no special experrise in the use of scientific knowledge, and that nonscientists must play an evaluative role in this regard. The sort of instruction proposed to achieve the goal of intellectual communalism consists of standard instruction in scientific knowledge, metascientific discussion about the nature of scientific knowledge and expertise, and instruction and practice in judging expertise. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
There is little evidence that the prevailing strategies of science education have an impact on the use and interpretation of science in daily life. Most science educators and science education researchers nonetheless believe that science education is intrinsically useful for students who do not go on to scientific or technical careers. This essay focuses on the “usefulness” aspect of science literacy, which I contend has largely been reduced to a rhetorical claim. A truly useful version of science literacy must be connected to the real uses of science in daily life—what is sometimes called public engagement with science. A small number of science education researchers have already begun to connect science education and the broader field of public engagement with science. Their work, as well as the work of researchers who study public engagement, suggests that it is possible to salvage the “usefulness” of science literacy by helping students become competent outsiders with respect to science. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed95: 168–185, 2011
Social movements organised around health-related issues have been studied for almost as long as they have existed, yet social movement theory has not yet been applied to these movements. Health social movements (HSMs) are centrally organised around health, and address: (a) access to or provision of health care services; (b) health inequality and inequity based on race, ethnicity, gender, class and/or sexuality; and/or (c) disease, illness experience, disability and contested illness. HSMs can be subdivided into three categories: health access movements seek equitable access to health care and improved provision of health care services; constituency-based health movements address health inequality and health inequity based on race, ethnicity, gender, class and/or sexuality differences; and embodied health movements (EHMs) address disease, disability or illness experience by challenging science on etiology, diagnosis, treatment and prevention. These groups address disproportionate outcomes and oversight by the scientific community and/or weak science. This article focuses on embodied health movements, primarily in the US. These are unique in three ways: 1) they introduce the biological body to social movements, especially with regard to the embodied experience of people with the disease; 2) they typically include challenges to existing medical/scientific knowledge and practice; and 3) they often involve activists collaborating with scientists and health professionals in pursuing treatment, prevention, research and expanded funding. This article employs various elements of social movement theory to offer an approach to understanding embodied health movements, and provides a capsule example of one such movement, the environmental breast cancer movement.
Misunderstanding science
- Irwin A.
Distributing expertise and building relationships: Designing for relational equity in youth–scientist mentoring interactions
- Klein E. R.
- Emdin C.