Science Education

The World Science Festival begins today in New York City (thanks for the pointer, Farzan!) This is the first time I hear about it, and I am very disappointed I won't be able to attend. It seems to have an engaging mix of science-related topics of interest to the general public. This is definitely not a scientific conference - high school students interview a Nobel laureate, theater troupes perform plays about oxygen and Einstein, artists and scientists discuss experiments gone wrong, live performances and state-of-the-art imaging illustrate brain creativity (don't ask), a neuroscientist describes the science behind the Bourne Identity, and so on. This might be exactly what we need to get a broad audience interested in science. One of the headlines on the website's front page explains that the goal of the festival is to "mak[e] the esoteric understandable and the familiar fascinating" and to "spark a movement in which science shifts from the cultural outskirts to the cultural center." The lineup looks certain to draw a large crowd.

Incidentally, the New York Times recently ran an article about a "new curriculum designed to unite art and science" at Binghampton University in New York, called the New Humanities initiative. The article explains: "The students would be introduced to basic scientific tools like statistics and experimental design and to liberal arts staples like the importance of analyzing specific texts or documents closely, identifying their animating ideas and comparing them with the texts of other times or other immortal minds. One goal of the initiative is to demystify science by applying its traditional routines and parlance in nontraditional settings." The example presented in the article, about wolves and nature, doesn't exactly inspire confidence that the graduates of such programs will have any more ease in finding a job than traditional humanities major, but it presents an important step toward graduating a scientifically literate workforce. Not everyone will enter a science career; however, everyone should be able to understand the simple statistics concepts that underlie politicians' proposals and articles in the mainstream press. (It is not a coincidence that one of the professors quoted in the article uses statistics as his main example.)

Lehigh itself has developed a cross-disciplinary program, called the IDEAS program, bringing together arts, science and engineering. Examples of themes (concentrations) in the program can be found here. The program is still in its infancy, making it too early to assess its benefits or flaws, but there is an obvious enthusiasm for this kind of training in higher education throughout the country: Arizona State has a College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (it includes many familiar departments such as sociology, history, American studies, English, etc, so it remains to be seen whether faculty members in these departments will develop any kind of collaboration with their scientific counterparts), and U. Washington at Tacoma has one too. These programs seem directed to students interested in social sciences - representative statements on the UW website include "Learning how we differ must also help us understand how much we have in common" and "[The program is a] course of study grounded in a respect for diversity and a responsiveness to the needs and desires of the communities and the environment around us." This doesn't sound terribly scientific to me, which suggests "inter-disciplinary studies in arts and sciences" are becoming an empty buzzword already. But maybe someone along the way will be interested in learning math.