Barriers to Museums’ Informal Efforts to Facilitate Public Engagement with Science
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The Science Communication Project @ISU was founded in 2010 with the goal of enhancing collaborative research on, education for, and the practice of public science communication, broadly conceived. Our biennial symposia- which include public presentations of multidisciplinary research and interactive workshops- bring together a network of scholars who share interests in public engagement of science, environmental communication, natural resource management, and agriscience. Conference proceedings showcase research, evaluations, and critiques of science communication-related practices and phenomena.
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This project embodies the author’s response to Alan Irwin’s essay (2014) calling for social scientists to “exercise greater imagination in helping foster a culture of experimentation in citizens’ responses to scientific fact and policy, thus acting to pluralize practice and offer ways of thinking that embrace different levels and ways of knowing”. In particular, this research focuses on museums as sites of public engagement with science through their participatory curricula. The author believes such curricula hold potential for building lay leadership skills by educating members of the public to employ mechanisms necessary to facilitate a type of deliberative democracy, giving birth to engagement as applied to science issues and policies. These necessary mechanisms, as listed by Ryfe (2005, 2006), comprise rules, stories, leadership, stakes, and apprenticeship.