Scientific Culture and Education Sector: Literacy, Understanding, or Engagement?

<p style="text-align: justify;">Scientific culture has been a concern for decades in the developed world, giving rise to conceptual changes known as paradigms. The first one is the longstanding literacy paradigm, defined by the skills and knowledge acquired at the education institution. It has been followed by the public understanding of science paradigm, related to the scientific understanding and an allegedly subsequent positive attitude towards science. Lastly, the engagement with science paradigm or science and society paradigm involves people's implications about the science-technology controversies with significant social impact. This article reflects how science teaching has evolved along the years in line with the scientific culture's conceptual shifts. It is concluded that this triad of paradigms is thus of a school nature, given that educational fields have suffered from transformation processes under the same vision of the world (world view), which has also changed the concept of scientific culture. Individuals in a research community learn ways of thinking, feeling and acting and therefore cannot help feeling a liking for what is short-lived and has not taken roots, both inside and outside the school in our postmodern age</p>

NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS

Society in general is distant from scientific culture, it is required to bring scientific knowledge closer to the population. In this context, an effective and attractive way for scientific dissemination is the establishment of natural history museums, which are institutions of knowledge, displaying the past. Natural history museums have the natural world as their object of study; and their collections may contain the most diverse types of materials (local and/or from various parts of the world), such as zoological, botanical, geological, archaeological, among others. Scientific collections are the largest and most important source of authoritative biodiversity data, contributing to studies of biodiversity composition, evolutionary (morphological and genetic), biogeographical, phenological, as well as geological. The materials present in these collections may serve for temporal comparison, being useful to produce predictive models. Likewise, they have a fundamental role in safeguarding type specimens, i.e. the first organisms identified to describe and name a new species. In addition, there is the component available to visitors in general, in order to raise public awareness on the preservation of the local fauna and flora and of other places in the world. In this way, the museums serve both the academic-scientific public and visitors who come to these sites for recreational purposes. It is intended to promote, in Vila Nova de Cerveira, the Natural History Museum of the Iberian Peninsula - NatMIP (“Museu de História Natural da Península Ibérica”), which intends to collect materials for scientific purposes, mainly Iberian.

Culture and Knowledge under the Technopoly Regime

Book Review Richmond, Sheldon. A Way through the Global Techno-Scientific Culture. Cambridge Scholars Publishers, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2020. 221 pp., ISBN: 9781527549227.

Organisational forms of science communication: the UK and Spanish European higher education systems as paradigms

As key elements in research and development systems, higher education institutions have been taking a leading role when it comes to communicating science and technology, but their performance has been inconsistent so far. In this critical and comparative study of the UK public engagement model and the Spanish scientific culture model, eighteen practitioners from higher education institutions across both regions were interviewed. A mixed qualitative data analysis has been performed identifying similarities and differences that unravelled the science communication management model in the two different higher education systems. This article provides evidence on how the institutionalisation of science communication is strongly influenced by key driving forces in the higher education context as well as the policies of administrations and other agents.

It feels good to immerse in the working culture of ISR

After three years of immersing myself in the working culture of ISR, I admit that it has completely changed my worldviews, attitudes, and behaviors. At the moment, I have a much greater awareness of cost and am much more proactive in pursuing science with high intellectual honesty than myself before. Given the modest international status of Vietnamese science, joining ISR is one of the best choices I have made in my career because it has given me a valuable chance to feel the true scientific culture.

Shared motivations, goals and values in the practice of personal science - A community perspective on self-tracking for empirical knowledge

Some individuals do not limit their self-tracking efforts to passively collecting and observing gathered data about themselves, but rather develop it into forms of self-research and self-experimentation, also called “personal science”. This type of N-of-1 research is relevant to the fields of personal informatics, patient-led research and social studies of science, but as a knowledge generation practice is still poorly understood. To fill this gap, we conducted 22 semi-structured interviews to investigate the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of individuals engaging in personal science activities, as well as shared goals and values present in self-research communities. Our analysis is based on a conceptual framework that integrates previous approaches in self-research, as well as in connection with citizen science, the scientific ethos and cooperation in peer production. We identify how self-researchers seek to go beyond personal metrics about their health and wellbeing regarding data provided by wearables, are engaged over time by individual involvement in technology and scientific-related activity, and collaborate following similar goals and values when learning and sharing empirical knowledge with peers. In this sense, personal science can be understood as an example of a more participatory and inclusive scientific culture driven by self-reflection, critical thinking and openness.

Teaching Undergraduates to Communicate Science, Cultivate Mentoring Relationships, and Navigate Science Culture

To promote persistence in STEM, a course implemented for undergraduate researchers teaches in an integrated manner the skills for: 1) scientific communication; 2) maximizing the effectiveness of research mentoring relationships; and 3) navigating scientific culture and its interactions with multiple social identities.

A Way Through the Global Techno-Scientific Culture, Sheldon Richmond (2020)

Review of: A Way Through the Global Techno-Scientific Culture, Sheldon Richmond (2020) Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 197 pp., ISBN13: 978-1-52754-626-4, h/bk, £61.99, Kindle, $9.99

The State of Black Male Literacy Research, 1999–2020

In this report, the authors describe the scope and scale of Black male literacy research; discuss theories, conceptual frames, and groundings informing the research on Black male literacy education in grades preK–12; and offer insights on Black male literacy research based on the current state of research. Each is based on an extensive review of quantitative and qualitative literacy research studies from 1999 to 2020 with primary or secondary data analysis solely or predominantly focused on Black males in grades preK–12. Four directions for future research are offered to nurture a scientific culture on Black male literacy education to address the methodological possibilities to capture the complexities of the literacy education of Black males across multiple contexts (e.g., in school, out of school), multiple locations (e.g., urban, rural, and suburban), and school types (traditional public, private, parochial, charter, home, boarding).