Chlorine, curators, and a choir?
Introducing the activities of the British Society for the History of Science’s “Outreach Day.”
What happens when you mix a glass vessel of chlorine, two outstanding collections of scientific instruments and curators, a whole host of jet-lagged conference attendees, a mock trial in a courtroom, and a classical choir? Come along to “Outreach Day” in Oxford this July, and see how we get on….
Forming part of the Saturday program at the upcoming 3 Societies Conference, Outreach Day follows similar events organized at two previous British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) meetings by its revamped Outreach and Education Committee (OEC). The program of activities brings together academic historians of science attending the conference with elementary and secondary school teachers, museum curators, scientists, outreach workers, graduate students, and science communication professionals. This provides an opportunity to evaluate the current work of the OEC in introducing the history of science, technology, and medicine to new audiences. Problems with pilot projects can be identified; links with exhibitions, events, and practitioners forged; and the role of public communication in academic life highlighted – from updating Wikipedia entries to composing podcasts and hosting concerts.
History of Outreach Day
Outreach Day was inaugurated in 2006 as part of the BSHS Annual Conference. “Futures Past” brought together four presentations on topics in literature, science, and science fiction to investigate the problem of “enticing new readers with popular science.”
“The Bone Trail” introduced a schools project based on nineteenth-century geological practices. In May 2006 students from two schools took part in activities that included modeling an iguanodon leg using chicken wire and Plaster of Paris, making a scale-model paper time line of earth history, and baking geological strata cakes (recipe available online). Those involved with setting-up and running the project gave commentaries, including talks on pedagogy and the history of science. Judging from the enthusiastic Outreach Day audience participation in recreating another Bone Trail activity – constructing Manchester strata from a map using bread, cheese, pickle, tomato, and jam – the educational experiment proved a success.
In 2007, Outreach Day showcased innovative approaches to communication produced within the academic world. The morning began with an exploration of how best to use Internet resources to teach the history of science – with presentations on the highly-successful Darwin and Livingstone Online sites, on the Newton Project, and on the development of Graeme Gooday’s new ‘Electricity Online’ web tutorials initiative. Next was writing the autobiographies of objects, including a squashed false leg, a box of wooden crystals, and a bloodthirsty surgical saw, kindly provided by local Manchester institutions. Recreating the activities that had been developed by Alice Nicholls and the OEC as part of the “Object Stories” project, piloted at the Science Museum in March 2007, the audience threw themselves into the task with gusto, producing poems, diaries, and dramatic monologues. The discussion that followed asked questions such as how much could be learned from the objects themselves without supplementary information? Did an overtly fictional presentation diminish the claims that historians of science could make about these objects? For what age group would such activities be best suited?
The afternoon witnessed a dress rehearsal of Sabine Clarke and Terence Banks’s “Death and the City,” a role play based around the 1631 York Plague, with the audience then deciding what had caused the outbreak in their city and what to do about it. The BSHS Strolling Players appeared as a range of appropriate witnesses – from the evangelizing Parson Grimsworth and the smug physician Dr. Brightwell, to entrepreneurial cloth-merchant widow Mrs. Maria Skegswell and plague-ridden peasant Jenny Flanders – who were questioned by spectacularly-bearded aldermen, as well as the audience. This provided an invaluable opportunity for feedback before the play was performed at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Festival in September 2007.
Outreach Day 2008
The program for 3 Societies 2008 is not yet finalized, but it will include “Chlorine,” a presentation of Hasok Chang and Catherine Jackson’s highly successful experimental teaching methods at University College, London, in which successive classes of undergraduate students were converted into a professional community of researchers. Specific topics in the history of chlorine were given to students to investigate, with their enquiry results ‘inherited’ by the following year’s students. As detailed in An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology & War, co-written by Chang and Jackson with the student researchers as contributing authors (available from http://amazon.co.uk and via the BSHS Web site), this encouraged students to produce, as well as acquire, knowledge about the history of science.
Curators from both the Oxford Natural History Museum and the Museum for the History of Science will present a range of sessions. “The Two Debates” uses the Huxley/Wilberforce debate at the Natural History Museum in 1860 as a starting point for exploring the nature of evidence and theory in science. It asks participants, usually secondary school pupils, to select artifacts from the museum collection to help support an argument for the theory of evolution. At the Museum of the History of Science participants should be prepared to cut and paste in “Objects and Travel,” with introductions to learning about scientific instruments through model-making, and even a chance to engage with real visitors. In the afternoon, the Strolling Players return to the stage to present “The Business of Bodies.” A courtroom role-play exploring the issues surrounding grave robbing in Georgian Liverpool, this is the latest theatrical to be developed in association with the BAAS. The 3 Societies audience will receive a sneak preview and will also play the role of the jury in deciding whether or not to convict the alleged grave robbers. The day will also include a reception at which the winner of our 2008 “Designing Darwin” competition will be announced.
And finally to the choir: we hope to host a scientific song soiree, launching the latest musical outreach project of the OEC. With the help of many in the international community of historians of science, technology, and medicine, over the past six months we have collected examples of music from a wide range of cultures, time periods, and genres. In addition to the ubiquitous Tom Lehrer “Elements” song, we’ve uncovered some written by well-known composers, such as Irving Berlin’s warnings about the automobile, some with more obscure origins, such as the mysterious “O’Rangutang” and his concerns over evolutionary theory. We’ve also found some particularly appropriate ditties for this international meeting, such as the many odes to the transatlantic telegraph cable. A program of our favorites will be presented, and perhaps there’ll even be a specially-written lyric or two.
Come along to Oxford and to Outreach Day, and be inspired by ways in which we can take the history of science to new audiences. You never know, you might even enjoy yourself!
Melanie Keene, University of Cambridge
mjk32@cam.ac.uk
For further details on the 3 Societies Conference, the OEC, and on the Chlorine monograph, visit http://www.bshs.org.uk, or join the dedicated BSHS-OEC-NEWS mailing list at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk.