To begin at the beginning [1]: my name is Bob
Newport, and I’m a sixty-something Professor
of Materials Physics at the University of
Kent. This post arises from one of
my tweets [@Bob_MatPhys] – “It's slowly dawning on me
that two things only are needed for Public Engagement in science: love of
subject and love of people” – and picked up by Julie Gould; the rest, as
they say, is history. What follows is a
personal ramble through my developing interest and activity in the area: I
offer it only as an individual ‘case study’ and in the hope that the story will
prove encouraging in some way.
I’d never really thought of
myself as a ‘science communicator’ as such, but I have come to realise that I have
been working towards that goal for a long time.
A significant part of what my university has paid me for throughout the
years of my academic career is the teaching of students; but although it ought
to be intrinsic to teaching, communication is not necessarily evident in the
absence of focused effort. Genuine communication
comes out of the desire to move beyond the mere transfer of information into
the realms of motivation, enthusiasm and passion, and that is what so many of
us in my profession strive to achieve.
In my case, the process was accelerated when I found myself teaching
within our Physics
Foundation Year and needing to move my unsure and uncertain students to a
place where they could begin actively to engage with their learning. In that situation I discovered the potential
of using movie clips and media articles as accessible entry points for what
often became extraordinarily lively discussions; these, in their turn, helped
to add context to the more formal syllabus we needed to progress through. The approach was later picked up by a writer
with Science News, a popular weekly
magazine in the USA, and led to an extended telephone interview for their article.
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| A uranium-doped glass - fluorescing under UV illumination |
Generically, it’s this same
approach I adopted within my efforts to reach out to regional schools. We have a phenomenally successful Outreach team
now, led by a wonderful former research student in my group, Vicky
FitzGerald, who re-trained as a school teacher (i.e. she is fluent in the
languages of both ‘school’ and ‘science’ – hugely important for the role in my
opinion) [2]. However, 15 years or so ago we had no such
setup: it was all down to the voluntary work of a few individuals. The principal starting point for me has been
my area of research: I am immensely fortunate to have been able to work on
materials that offer both intellectual challenge – my aim is to explain their
behaviour and attributes via a detailed understanding of their atomic-scale
structure – and a relatively easy link to contemporary ‘real-world’
issues. These materials have included
photovoltaics, ultra-hard coatings, non-linear optical glasses and most
recently bioactive glasses (which, for example, can be used to promote the
regeneration of bone). Moreover, the
very nature of the research has meant that my research group and choice of
collaborators has of necessity been inter-disciplinary, giving me access to
chemistry, materials science and biomedical science as enhancements to my
beloved physics. I also had an in-built
link I could utilise to the impressive ‘big toys’ that my group used in order
to gain our core data: facilities like the ISIS
and ILL neutron sources and the Diamond and ESRF
synchrotron X-ray sources. Taken
together, this combination of factors made it relatively easy to talk about
science. I love doing this, and have had
the pleasure of interacting with school groups from Year 5 to Years 12/13, and
in the context of formalised talks, class visits to the Science Museum and
open classroom discussions. Thanks from
school students and teachers is always welcome – I’m only human – but it’s some
of the questions that form the most memorable feedback: like the Year 8 student
who wanted to know whether bioactive glass could be used in order to grow a
Klingon skull. The reason I still
remember that question comes from the fact that it spoke volumes to me about
the depth of this young student’s newly gained understanding of these
materials. Thankfully, I was geek enough
to know what a Klingon is.
However, we all change as time
passes and in my case this has been associated with a migration from Outreach
into the wider realms of Public Engagement, and from a relatively young
audience to one comprising adults. Outreach
has, for me, involved talking about my research to a well-defined cohort of
people – but this is only a part of public engagement, albeit an important one for
a university: public engagement encompasses so much more. Leaving aside the area of ‘crowd-sourced
science’, in which I have had no involvement, there are outstanding
high-profile examples of scientists engaging wonderfully well with the wider
public via TV/Radio (Alice Roberts, Mark Miodownik, Jim Al-Khalili, Brian Cox
etc.) and in newspapers/online (e.g. Athene Donald, Jon Butterworth). I am not amongst their number. No, mine is a more modest, ‘amateur’ and
regional effort which has grown in a rather ad
hoc fashion, and which is squeezed into and around an already full ‘Day
Job’. Having said that, there are common
elements between us. We have all developed
the confidence (or is it foolhardiness?) to engage with non-experts from a
variety of backgrounds in such a way that, whilst our science expertise is
intrinsic to the exchange, the overall ‘agenda’ is theirs. As an example, I have in the past couple of
years given three talks on glass at one or other of the Canterbury Museums. At the Museums’ request these have each been
in different formats (an extended talk followed by afternoon tea – filmed by
one of our students should you be interested, one in the evening and another as
a 15-minute ‘bitesize’ talk at lunchtime) but all of them used my expertise in
the context of their exhibits and artefacts.
Naturally, I was able to weave a lot of science into the talk, including
bioglasses and synchrotron X-rays, but I did so primarily in the context of the
audience’s desire to learn more about what was in the Canterbury Museums’
collection.
One also has to be flexible in
terms of venue and facilities. I
recently spoke to a group from the National
Womens Register: from a dining room chair, I chatted to a group of about 20
in someone’s packed living room with only a tool box of ‘show & tell’ items
by my side. Unusual and challenging
certainly – but what a great environment for uncluttered free-form discussion
about contemporary science; again, to their agenda. Can such a low-key event have an impact? Judging from the message I got from one
participant’s husband via Twitter, I must conclude that it can – at least at
the level of the individual: “My wife [is]
an NWR groupee. I've never known her be so interested in science”. Not only is positive feedback like this
encouraging per se but, let’s face
it, in a busy week there’s only so far one can reasonably go in terms of trying
to meet the challenge of criticism before deciding that ones time is better
spent elsewhere. That’s not to say that constructive
criticism isn’t valuable and welcome, far from it, but merely a reflection of
the fact that public engagement of this kind often remains a time-pressured
‘hobby’ in the eyes of managers trying to assign limited academic resources.
Perhaps the most involving, and
boundary-extending experiment for me in recent months has been my on-going work
with the Turner Contemporary
gallery. Their visionary Head of
Learning, Karen
Eslea, contacted me as part of her search for scientists prepared to engage
in conversation with artists. The
particular focus at the time was to complement their exhibition of work by the renowned
American sculptor Carl Andre, and to
use the discipline of Philosophical
Inquiry in order, hopefully, to derive something special from the
exchange. We jointly sought and obtained
modest funding for the project from Canterbury Festival’s Prosper project,
which also entailed a commitment to a series of whole-day workshops in local
drama venues. Workshops in drama studios
can be rather scary for a physicist, intimidating even, and clearing entire
days for what were decidedly off-piste
activities was no mean feat. However,
these became prized events in my diary as I realised the value of working and
conversing with such a broad range of energetic and passionate people; I learnt
so much! The pinnacle of our experiment
was an extended exhibition-focused conversation between about 30 artists and
scientists, led by philosophical inquiry guru Ayisha de Lanerolle. This was recorded and ‘mapped’ by folk from
an award-winning local company, Cognitive
Media, who generated a four-minute
animation from their 70-minute audio file.
The film became part of the exhibition (and has moved with the
exhibition to its new venue) and provided a vehicle through which gallery staff
have been able to gauge public perception of the sculptures. Never before has my name appeared in the
credits of a film, any film [3], let
alone one associated with an excellent arts gallery; I’m taking this as a good
thing.
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| 'Turneresque' sky, taken from Turner Contemporary gallery |
My perspective on this is
necessarily limited, so I’ve taken the liberty of asking Karen to provide
comments on this from her perspective; she has kindly written something for
this post: “Working with a scientist is a
huge privilege and has helped me to experiment with new ways of working. During
the Philosophical Inquiry (an event which enabled deep thinking and listening
between artists and scientists) I had a moment of revelation when listening to a
description of nickel. I realised that my engagement with art works is based
mostly on their appearance, references, ideas and context. When a scientist
looks at things, whether they are artworks or materials in a laboratory, it is
as if they can experience them under their surface. Their connection with
things extends far beyond the visual, with their mind able to imagine
temperature, structure, the behaviour of atoms in different conditions. In
terms of creativity, and the ability to make vast conceptual leaps, artists
indeed have much to learn from scientists.”
Where next? Well, I’ve already tried to brief a librettist
about the basics of Chaos Theory (after mugging up on it myself) in preparation
for a musical item he’s working on and have volunteered to join a panel to
address questions on public engagement.
In truth, my heart currently resides with the desire to take the positive
outcomes of the ‘Turner Contemporary Project’ further by rolling out the
generic approach to a more widely drawn range of participants. It’s encouraging that we already have offers
of help, for example from Kent’s new science
and technology park at the ex-Pfizer site at Sandwich. It would also be great to see Canterbury
Festival weave science more overtly into its already excellent portfolio, and
with enough time I’d love to do some more writing and perhaps to interact with writers. Time will tell; I am content to look out for
opening doors and see what emerges.
To return to the tweet which sparked off this post for Speaking of Science, the lesson I have learned over and over again is that for the public, people, to be engaged with and by science they need to see scientists who care about what they do and who care equally as much that others understand where this is coming from. The first of these attributes is easy to supply; what’s needed thereafter is a commitment primarily to listen, and then to be open to learn and to change.
[1] Dylan Thomas’ opening
phrase for Under Milk Wood. Listening to the classic BBC performance,
with Richard Burton as the narrator, is one of my all-time favourite calm-down
aids on the train home after a troublesome meeting somewhere.
[2] There is also support at
the Faculty level via another talented ex-school teacher physicist, Dr
Gaby Roch; schools outreach is taken really seriously I’m glad to say.
[3] Actually, that’s not
entirely true: I did a voice-over for an animation
designed, scripted and put together by children at a local primary school
(where my son was teaching): they wanted an ‘old’ voice!
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