Nuffield Curriculum Centre

Science issues

Public engagement with science
Author: Peter Campbell

www.the-ba.net

This week I attended the annual Science Communication Conference, a two-day event jointly organised by the BA and The Royal Society. Hundreds of scientists and science communicators were there. All the talk about public engagement with science-related issues helped us think again about the role of school science at Key Stage 4.

Science Communication Conference topics included personal and public health, climate change, questions raised by developments in genetics and biotechnology, energy technologies… the list goes on. What came across time and again is that public engagement with science depends critically upon public understanding the nature of science and its interactions with society.

Policymakers are prepared to spend millions of pounds in consultation exercises. Given the typical starting-points of many participants, these exercises necessarily involve education as much as dialogue. The process is difficult to manage. When people from many different backgrounds are brought together to discuss science-related issues, politeness is not enough. Whether in NHS Citizen Councils or through the Science Horizons programme, for example, ‘common sense’ can prove illusory, and a ‘clash of discursive worlds’ (as one speaker described) is all too likely.

It is in school classrooms that we have our best opportunity to improve public engagement with science. The 2006 Programme of Study for science at KS4 requires students to be taught about “applications and implications of science”. But this teaching will be trivial and pointless unless it accompanied by knowledge and understanding about the nature of science.

In the words of the KS4 Programme of Study, science students must also be taught about “data, evidence, theories and explanations”. And here’s the rub: several of the new GCSE Science courses trivialise this aspect of science education. How did these new courses ever get accredited?

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