Science Components - Scientific Literacy

Visitor participating of the Micro-world workshop
at the Exploratory Science Museum of Unicamp.

Science evolved in such a way that we have an almost endless repertory of amazing discoveries to know and impressive results to show. Amazing chemical reactions, odd physical phenomena, and advanced scientific equipment are targeted by museums and scientific exhibitions. However, how much the visitors can understand the role of science behind the amazing things?

It seems harder to show so intriguing performances when we need to explain the underlying scientific process. Most amazing scientific results can be complex and hard to explain and we are tempted to stay only in the amazing results. This is a challenge, especially in a science museum like the one where I am working¹, because visitors are expecting to "play funny things".

We must consider that an amazing performance presenting scientific results, in which the spectators do not understand what happens behind the scenes, could have an effect equivalent to a magic performance. Is this the impression that we want to transmit?

What is the role of our approach to present science in the way that people see and criticize science today? This question can be extended also to the way we teach science.

There is no doubt that exhibitions and museums of science have a broader role, offering an opportunity to know the world through the lens of science. But the question is how much we are working to avoid the dissociation of this task from the scientific literacy.

Scientific literacy expresses the ability of critical and autonomous thinking about science, its discoveries and results. It includes the capacity of interpreting facts and data, of understanding the scientific process, its characteristics, qualities, and limitations. It also expresses the capacity in perceiving how science and the scientific knowledge can help us to know the world and in day-to-day decisions. Scientific literacy would be treated as the bridge to know the world through the lens of science.

Even being aware of this challenge, I have realized how much I was unprepared to face it when I started the endeavor of presenting science to visitors of the museum. This collection of essays that I call Science Components address questions in this context. They result from practical experiences, interactions, and debates with colleagues of science and of the museum.

          

1. The author of this blog is, at the writing date of this post, educational director of the Exploratory Science Museum of Unicamp (University of Campinas).

Before Midnight – Once you're Happy

In the end of a class the little Joana asks to her teacher: "I’d like to know: once you’re happy what happens? What comes next?"

Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, 1998

Whenever I see those "easy" happy endings I ask myself what comes next. And the Joana's question can be considered the summary of this movie: what happens after a happy ending. In some sense, several romantic movies create a mythology of quick and highly intense love, able to fulfill every space and solve any difference, simplifying the real long term challenges that will appear in the long road.

When the director faced the challenge of telling what comes next in Before Midnight, he decided to follow the same and successful approach of the previous chapter: make the movie nine years after the last one, both in the movie and in the real world. This technique enables not only to have truly older characters, but also to exploit their maturity, life experience and world view.

This movie shows us the real beauty of love, challenging the long road of the life; the friction and wear in the relations; the balance between our expectations and egoism against our generosity and impulse to share the experience of life. There is no final answer, no absolute right position and this leads to the question of acceptance or resignation, as well placed by Tim Lott.

How love fights in the shades of human poverty is the beauty of this movie. This is much greater than bursts of intense passion in paradise moments. This perception deeply touches me and makes me to believe that there is something in love that transcends the human condition.

Boyhood - A family in real time

Until now, all movies I have seen use different actors to show people growing along their lives. But I recognize persons by their stare. Even though you could find a second actor nearly similar to the first one, they will never have the same stare. And this is a fabulous movie if you consider only this technique of following people “really” growing. Specially Mason, whose stare and disquiet are outstanding, while he grows in front of our eyes from his childhood to his youth.

A movie showing the beauty, the fight, the joy and the drama of a family that is recomposed in multiple facets. The director invests in the sensibility of the daily lives instead of big events. A wonderful project, it is definitively worth seeing.

Behind His Eyes - In Cold Blood

Suddenly, "the author" enters in the room. She invites me to read, it is a kind of seduction, a battle, and I cannot resist. She drags me to a mind, to someone else's eyes. I can feel his feet and shoes, and look his world. I try to fight to stay myself! I have my believes and preconceptions, my arrogant view of the world. I think I am the right one. But she wants to go further and further, and I cannot resist. There is his tenderness and innocence of the beginning, then the suffering, the injustice. I got caught in the net. "The author" transformed me in her character, making me able to look the world "behind his eyes". There is this irresistible impulse of going as him towards unthinkable acts. This what I was looking for: the improbable experience of "the reader".

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote cannot be reduced to a "murder book". It is a book about life, summoned back from the ashes by a masterly description of Holcomb daily routine. But is also a door that slams in your face, ending the life trail without notice. Whispering in your ear, death has no plans.

Capote conducts this book with competence. He puts me behind several eyes, starting by being a citizen of the calm Holcomb, their routine and expectations, their sorrows and happiness. The world is Holcomb. I can feel them, I can understand them and live their lives. But there is also the lives of Dick and Perry, the murderers. Capote takes time to bring you to their minds and world views since the beginning. He designed the story as an encounter of lives and the explosion that spils to all sides, the family, the fellow countrymen, the outsiders. A prism of hundred stories.

The horror of the encounter between worlds and the quest to find an explanation, a consolation, a motive to forget, forgive and go back to life.

Tales From Outer Suburbia

“When I was a kid, there was a big water buffalo living in the vacant lot at the end of our street, the one with the grass no one ever mowed.”

A book of improbable stories and enigmatic illustrations. In "Tales From Outer Suburbia", Shaun Tan builds a fantastic world ever provoking your imagination. He invites you to share non trivial stories, where you feel the narratives intertwined with the ethereal images, a fusion of experiences!

It is an unusual children's book. Most of this kind of book underestimates kids' intelligence and taste. Not this one.

Shaun Tan departed from a personal collection of informal drawings that he did in a side-page style. He combines several artistic techniques in the same book. His stories address deep human subjects in a fantasy style. Fantastic places, unexpected passages and strange creatures wait you in this (not only) children's book.

The Early Bird

the early birds by Angelo DeSantis

A popular quote says "the early bird gets the worm". Some attribute to Robert A. Heinlein the complement: "the early worm deserves the bird".

My contribution to the philosophy: before get up early, it is better to know in which position of the food chain you are.

The Arrival

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Today I have discovered Shaun Tan in the book The Arrival. An artist capable of combining the fantastic with the trite, in inspiring and sensible illustrations. His book reminded me the singular technique of Moebius. In an image book with no words, Shaun Tan makes you feel the experience and the lostness of an immigrant. The fantastic land produces an unparalleled perception of being in a foreign world, without references and submerged in an unknown language.

Voyage D’Hermes by Moebius

Breaking the Real

Banksy street art

“[...] I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that.”

I don't understand much about art, especially contemporary art. But I like it. Especially contemporary. This year I visited a special exhibition with a wide artwork collection of Salvador Dalí at The Centre Pompidou. Following its chronology and the way he progressively bends the real, I thought: he wants to break something. I like to think about art as this attempt of breaking something. Not like throwing a stone in a window, but bending the world of the window.

It is not always easy to distinguish the pure rebellion from art. This is what I thought the first time I saw a Banksy street art. It is impressive how he attempts against the real in a different perspective. The real as the way we see and organize the society, our life, the laws, the right and the wrong. His rebellion talk to us in his art. It is an authentic social intervention, which defy us.

Where can we go in this way? I offer a synthesis borrowed from Garcia Marquez:

“I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.”, interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Paris Review, 1981

The things we learn

Towards a speculation beyond learning controlled by our conscious.

Some experiences in the last years radically changed my perception concerning what I can learn and how I can do it. It is neither a new learning theory nor a breakthrough discovery. It is just something that was always there, but I never noticed =)

I will tell the story backwards. In the last year I was talking with a colleague from France about coffee. He told me that drastically started to drink coffee without sugar and, in a couple of weeks, began to like it. Until then I just know people who always drank coffee without sugar, or the opposite. I was curious and I decided to try.

The first days were terrible. My organism was trying to figure out why was I drinking such horrible thing. Then a strange adaptation got underway. Our organism is built to adapt; and adapt often means learning. In some weeks my taste for coffee changed. In the absence of the monophonic sugar, I refined my perception for the polyphonic coffee.

For most people learning is always a conscious activity, in which we are in control of the process, reading, memorizing and organizing ideas. But how we learned to talk, to walk and to taste?

Many people will argue that the taste is not something we learn. It seems one of those unavoidable characteristics that we born with. However, if we do not learn at least part of our taste, how to explain common tastes shared by cultures and communities?

Our brain is a malleable and huge network, connected to each part of our body, constantly adapting, constantly learning. Most of this process is not driven by our conscious control. Nevertheless, we can channel its action in our benefit.

Besides the coffee case, there was another interesting experience of English learning. Years ago I started to listen English interviews as a tentative to evolve my English listening skills. In that epoch, I was a good English reader and a median writer, but I could understand almost nothing when I listen someone talking in English.

Now, think about how you learned to talk. Your brain was submerged in an ocean strange sounds, trying to figure out what was happening. Gradually, our plastic network of neurons started to recognize sounds, then more elaborate structures. The learning process includes experimentation. For this reason, we started to make sounds, then to try words and so on. An impressive process, which have been addressed by researchers all over the world.

My approach to learn English listening was inspired in this process. I started to listen interviews in English. In the beginning I cannot even devise the words (do you agree with me that this seems the coffee experience?). I listened again the same interviews many times and, progressively, my brain started to recognize words, then phrases, then complete interviews. It was a slow process. It took, say, six months so I could understand something; a year and a half or more to feel confident. But it is an endless refinement. I developed the habit of stay listening almost every day, mixing things. The Web is plenty of free resources: audiobooks, interviews, radios, music etc. It is a new and satisfying experience to download books in the LibriVox, for example, and to listen completely by audio The Picture of Dorian Gray or The Origin of Species. You will now consider new values, as the ability of the audiobook reader -- by the way, I recommend Dorian Gray read by John Gonzalez.

These experiences will vary due to many factors. I am trying now the same approach to learn French, but it is much more difficult, since I trying to learn listening before reading =) It is also difficult to learn drinking tea without sugar; its flavor is not that strong as coffee and the quality of water matters much more.

Anyway, I am now paying attention to this learning process intertwined with my daily life. It is always good to have new things to learn, which make us happier and more fulfilled.