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Education and outreach

Education and outreach

Science centres face the future

01 Sep 2000

Paul McCrory examines some of the long-term challenges facing the UK's science centres.

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The UK is about to experience an explosion in the number of new interactive science centres. By this time next year about a dozen major new science-centre projects will have opened (see table). These large-scale capital schemes have been funded by a mixture of National Lottery grants from the Millennium Commission and money from public and private bodies. The huge size of these centres is in marked contrast to the existing network of smaller science centres.

Although all science centres have their own slightly different philosophies, they each share a common mission – to make science and technology more accessible to the public and school groups through hands-on exhibits, demonstration shows and workshops. The first interactive science centres in the UK opened in the mid-1980s, with the development of Launch Pad at the Science Museum in London, Techniquest in Cardiff and the Exploratory in Bristol.

As the repercussions from the controversial £758m Millennium Dome in London continue and the completion dates of these ambitious new projects approach, it seems likely that the current media sport of “millennium-project bashing” will reach new heights of frenzy and farce. Yes, some of these new centres will face considerable difficulty meeting their visitor targets and they will all require ongoing financial support. Yet if the centres are correctly managed, the massive injection of funds – several hundreds of millions of pounds – represents an enormous opportunity for science communication and education in the UK.

In an increasingly competitive leisure market and under the intense glare of a media spotlight, science centres face many challenges. In this frenetic environment there is a danger that existing and new science centres will concentrate solely on immediate survival at the expense of being innovative and far-sighted. Obviously a strong business approach and a desire to survive in the short term are critical, but it is easy to get lost in these concerns. Many of the longer-term challenges, discussed below, do not appear to make immediate sense on a balance sheet and pose formidable difficulties. However, they lie at the heart of the mission of many science centres.

New Interactive Science Centres in the UK

Project Location Cost* Opening
Discovery Centre, Millennium Point
www.discoverycentre.org.uk
Birmingham £112m Autumn
2001
Explore/Wildscreen@Bristol
www.at-bristol.org.uk
Bristol £97m July
2000
W5 at Odyssey
www.w5online.co.uk
Belfast £90m Spring
2001
Glasgow Science Centre
www.gsc.org.uk
Glasgow £75m Spring
2001
International Centre for Life
www.centreforlife.co.uk
Newcastle £68m May
2000
Wellcome Wing Science Museum
www.nmsi.ac.uk/
science_museum_fr.htm
London £48m July
2000
National Space Science Centre
www.nssc.co.uk
Leicester £46m Spring
2001
Magna
www.magnatrust.org.uk
Rotherham £36m April
2001
Our Dynamic Earth
www.dynamicearth.co.uk
Edinburgh £34m July
1999
The Big Idea
www.bigidea.org.uk
Irvine £14m April
2000
Sensation
www.sensation-dundee.co.uk
Dundee £4.7m July
2000
Making It! Mansfield £3.77m Summer
2001

* The figures quoted include the total cost for all of the elements of each project, not just the science centre.

Having a dream

In their efforts to attract new audiences and compete for the relatively small proportion of the public who are attentive to science, science centres are likely to leave themselves open to ill-informed claims of trivializing science and placing entertainment before education. While I feel that science centres can learn some valuable lessons from the experience of commercial visitor attractions, such as theme parks, there are fundamental differences in the approach of these two types of attraction.

Science centres must continue to reject the notion that education and entertainment are mutually exclusive extremes. In a science centre, visitors have choices and can manipulate the exhibits to produce unique learning experiences, whereas in a theme park the exhibitions are designed to manipulate and direct each visitor along a similar experience. If science centres are to maintain their integrity and distinct identity in the crowded leisure market, it is vital that each of the centres is clear about what it wants to achieve and that this mission is shared by all of the staff at the centre.

But the altruistic mission of making science accessible for as wide a range of visitors as possible can conflict with a deeper economic need for centres to maximize the income from visitors. It is far more costly to cultivate new, reluctant audiences than it is to capitalize on existing visitor groups. Some of the new centres have created exhibitions aimed at particular under-represented visitor groups and they talk confidently about “greater social inclusion”, although how they intend to achieve this worthwhile but seemingly intractable goal is less clear.

Outreach programmes represent one of the best ways of targeting those people who are uninterested in or intimidated by science. By taking science events out to the places where people socialize, it is possible to begin to break down some of the barriers that normally prevent these groups from engaging with science.

Visitors are also intrinsically social creatures and the interactions between staff and visitors at exhibits and during shows play a crucial part in the overall experience of each visitor. The genuine enthusiasm of staff can help to convey the human side of science and encourage visitors to engage with science more confidently – important outcomes of any science-centre visit. We must therefore develop progressive and secure career structures for the staff who interact directly with visitors.

New views of science

Critics of existing science centres have argued that most centres present a very limited view of the breadth of the scientific enterprise. They tend to concentrate on the topics that can be most easily presented through hands-on exhibits – mainly fundamental physics, with the occasional nod to biology or chemistry. The new science centres are starting to broaden this base by including exhibits and programmes about medicine, genetics, geology, psychology, computer science, modern physics, space science, meteorology, environmental science, engineering, robotics, design and mathematics.

I also believe that a wider appreciation of how science actually works is critical in facilitating an informed public debate about contemporary scientific issues. I am not suggesting that centres should try to communicate the idealized inductive “scientific method” taught in schools, because it bears little resemblance to the methods used by real scientists. At their best, open-ended interactive exhibits allow visitors to experience the process of discovery for themselves. It is this creative process that underpins all of science and technology.

It is also possible to develop programmes of shows, dramas and debates that help to communicate the real nature of science and scientific knowledge: that science is a series of provisional models that best represent reality according to our present knowledge; that science can address some questions but not others; that vigorous debate and disagreement between experts is a normal, and indeed necessary, part of the scientific process at the limits of our knowledge; and that probability and risk play a role in all scientific theories. Conveying key ideas about the process of discovery and the nature of scientific progression involves some of the most difficult, yet rewarding, challenges facing science communicators.

Courting controversy

Given the scant attention that most existing centres have paid to contemporary scientific issues and the nature of science, it is hardly surprising that visitors do not associate the “established science” that they experience during their visit with the “controversial science” that they encounter every day in the media. Is it unreasonable to expect one experience to inform the other? Most existing science centres have argued that the public do not want to be confronted with difficult or ethical issues in their leisure time. However, I believe that the public will attend to and try to grasp those scientific issues that they consider to be important to their lives.

Open any newspaper and note the science stories that are covered regularly – BSE, genetically modified food and the potential dangers of mobile phones, for example. News editors are not renowned for publishing material in which the public has no interest. To argue that the public are not sufficiently sophisticated to cope with the limitations and negative consequences of science is to do a disservice both to the scientific enterprise and to the public, who fund it and are affected by its products.

The Antenna exhibition in the recently opened Wellcome Wing at London’s Science Museum attempts to tackle exactly these kinds of socio-scientific issues in a neutral way, which, it is hoped, will extend the coverage that these topics receive in the media. These exhibits will be replaced regularly in an attempt to keep pace with the latest science news stories. The exhibition currently includes the issues of drugs in sport and the human genome project.

I am not, however, suggesting that every exhibition and programme has to raise uncomfortable contemporary issues. Science centres, like any other media, have strengths and weaknesses in the topics that they can communicate. However, by offering visitors a choice of subjects, including topical issues, I feel that the centres can present a more complete and mature representation of science.

It has been argued that the new landmark science-centre projects are expensive architectural edifices imposed on local communities by external agencies. I believe that this image will change once these centres are open and they can begin their real mission – developing networks of people and programmes to communicate science throughout the local community. There are huge opportunities for centres to develop innovative schemes with local schools, adult-education colleges, universities, industries, scientists, and community organizations. How many venues currently exist to encourage local scientists to meet members of the public so that each group’s understanding of the other can be improved?

Users or just visitors?

Finally, the motivational and inspirational aspects of a visit to a science centre are well recognized, but centres need to find ways to encourage visitors to follow up any newly discovered interests or gains in confidence once they leave the centre. How can these short-term outcomes be turned into actual behavioural changes in the way visitors engage with science after a visit? I believe that the centres need to provide links to the other sources of information about science and technology available to the public.

Perhaps the greatest medium- to long-term challenge facing science centres in the UK is in trying to change the way in which people use them. I believe that those centres that survive the next five crucial years will tend to fall into one of two categories: visitor attractions – large centres that, thanks to their location and budget, can sustain infrequent visits by a large number of visitors; and resource centres – smaller set-ups that act as a resource and forum for regular users in their local community and provide a gateway between scientists and the public.

The success of these resource centres will not be crudely measured by the number of visitors that pass through a turnstile, but rather by the extent to which local people actively use them to reconstruct and engage in a new relationship with science – a relationship founded on dialogue that encourages the public to have the confidence to raise their concerns and participate in scientific discussion as a part of their everyday lives. Of course, this model of a science centre raises fundamental questions about the importance of informal learning in our society and how it should be funded.

The way ahead

Many of the challenges outlined above require a greater emphasis on people and programmes in science centres than on exhibits. Programmes of shows and events can respond more quickly and flexibly to different audiences and issues. Allowing visitors to experience and interact directly with physical phenomena through exhibits must remain a vital element of all science centres, but to continue to under-represent other media because they are not “hands-on” in a literal sense is surely to let the medium dictate the message. Unfortunately, staff costs are already the major expense of most science centres and this approach requires a sustained investment in staff.

I hope that the science centres of the 21st century will find the courage and vision to experiment with different styles and techniques to engage new audiences and deal with a wider range of issues. Like science itself, their future lies in continual innovation and evolution.

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