Science Education and Communication in India Rajasee Ray VCD401
Introduction: Science Communication – A Background "I do not think it is possible for India to be really independent unless she is a technically advanced country. I am not thinking for the moment in terms of just scientific growth. In the present context of the world we cannot even advance culturally without a strong background of scientific research in every department." Jawaharlal Nehru, in a letter to Gandhi, 1945[1] India, a country that entered the latter half of the 20th century with a forward-thinking growth policy, led by the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, is today a nation of 1.2 billion people [2], who speak more than 1600 different languages and dialects, live mostly in rural agrarian communities, facing various problems of overpopulation, environmental degradation, poverty, disease, malnutrition and social unrest. Against this background, science education and communication is viewed partly as a nation-building catalyst, that will lead the country’s youth into the coming era of technology – and partly as a mass awareness drive, in the words used by various Science Communication Societies across the nation: “to popularize science and the scientific temper among the Indian masses.” [4] Consequently, science communication in India follows two very distinct routes. The first is institutional. The NCSTC, or the National Council for Science and Technology Communication, established in 1980, is the government body that works through mass communication and the education system. It is a part of the Department of Science and Technology and conducts various science communication programmes with students, schools and educators and publishes newsletters, gives away science communication awards and produces various films on science, scientists and technology. [5] The second route is that of non-governmental science communication societies and organizations and individual science communicators and journalists. Various individuals and organizations across the nation exist and work at micro and macro levels, also publishing books and newsletters and conducting science communication programmes in different localities and with different kinds of people of all age groups. Part One: Science Communication at School Level Schooling is compulsory in India, although roughly 25% of the population is illiterate, as of 2008 [6]. 80% of the schools in the country are government schools [7], but 27% of the schoolchildren in the country are educated in private schools [8]. This is because of a nationwide agreement that government school education is far inferior to private school education. The NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) [9] is responsible for setting the school curriculum in India. Science as a subject is given primary importance, although it does not appear by itself in the school curriculum till
the upper primary stage [10]. Primary school science is mainly about the child and his or her surroundings – the activities she conducts during the day and the immediate environment with which he or she interacts. Science is then divided into Life Science and Physical Science at Middle School level, and then finally into the three pillars of Physics, Chemistry and Biology in High School. The importance of science as a subject seems to be directly proportional to the age of the student and the class he or she belongs to. In elementary school, for example, Science – which is then mostly about hygiene and the immediate environment – is not as important as, say, English and Mathematics, as, logically, the last two are the basic foundation on which the child’s further education will be built. However, as the child grows, Science begins to become the dominant part of school education. This is because of a long-standing trend in India that views the subject as a precursor to studying Engineering at Graduation level, a field that is popularly believed to offer a good chance of employment and monetary security. Aside from this, science is also well-respected as a subject in educated and semieducated Indian homes, and enjoys a popularity that can be attributed to the importance attached back in the ‘40s by Nehru to “the scientific temper,” a term that he introduced to encompass the ideas of enquiry, analytical approach, rational thinking and pursuit of truth [11]. All political powers are technologically advanced nations. To become a technologically advanced nation, a country must invest in scientific research and development, as well as science education to create a generation of scientists and especially, engineers, who, in turn, will fuel the science communication drive in the coming generations. In a letter to Gandhi in 1945 [1], Nehru said: “I do not think it is possible for India to be really independent unless she is a technically advanced country… we cannot even advance culturally without a strong background of scientific research in every department.” This importance that was given to science education and communication during Independence, has survived till date in the collective memory of the nation. This has directly resulted in the interest in science communication on the part of both the scientific community and the student that is still strongly prevalent across the country. It has also resulted in the hegemony that science as a subject has over all others in the field of public school education today. Science, because of its empirical factual observational nature, has been viewed as knowledge throughout history in different places in the world. And knowledge – and consequently, information, besides being an important card in the political and economic plane of the world, is also believed to be the messiah that will lead the country’s illiterate, superstitious poor out of the dredges of hunger and struggle to the literate lifestyle of the society of the future. While science communication across the country on mass media levels as well as within school level has helped to eradicate superstition and discrimination and also counteract the ills of disease and unhygienic living conditions [3], this same idea has turned ‘science’ and the ‘science communicator’ into a patronizing patriarchal missionary, leading the ignorant to the light, as it were.
Sreedhar, a scientist at the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore says: “My prejudice is that knowledge creates better societies – but there is no proof of this.” This sentiment is generally echoed by science communicators and educators alike – and government research institutes like the RRI and Indian Institute of Astrophysics, also in Bangalore, have taken the responsibility to, in the words of a leading scientist at IIA, “adopt” different schools – especially public schools, which do not have the funds to generate their own science communication workshops – and send their scientists as science communicators to interact with the students and conduct workshops. The nature of these interactions ranges from the gifting of a small telescope from the research institute to the school to a talk on the current research that the speaker is working on. One of the schools that the IIA shares this relationship with is the Madivala Government School in South Bangalore, a majority of whose students come from the slums that the school is built around. When asked about why they studied science, eighth and ninth standard students from Madivala Government School replied that it was either to pursue it as a career option or to pass the knowledge on to the rest of the world. What they wanted to do as scientists or what the rest of the world should do with that knowledge was a concept they had not yet been introduced to at school. During a workshop at the same school that I helped to conduct, with Deepak Srinivasan, Joanna Griffin and Gauri Sanghi, we realized that even at the eighth and ninth standard levels, when the students have been studying science for a while, there was a clear disconnect between their cultural imaginings of the universe – and what they learnt about in their text books. While they could recite the names of all nine (it was still nine in their text books) planets and talk about the moon-landing, when asked to represent the sky performatively with their bodies, they put up a very still two dimensional scene, with a crescent moon standing against a flat sky with the different planets and some stars in unmoving positions. This fixed image of the sky was something new to us. And this method of representing it, as well as juxtaposing it with the facts they had learnt in class was something new to them. Science in public schools – and many private schools – have a tendency to be viewed as distinct subjects with no relation to the arts, history, literature; or even within science – the distinction between physics, chemistry and biology is re-instated (the student is made to learn the definitions and distinctions) so emphatically and so early that it is difficult and one has to take a particular effort to bridge the gaps and draw the connections in school. However, the children themselves, at least in Madivala, do not seem to have trouble making connections – and with very little effort on our part, they were making connections between astronomy and biology – and even science and religion.
Part Two: Mass Communication Government and non-government organizations and individuals have various media at their disposal for science communication today. Besides film, print and museums, all of which have greatly developed in terms of communication potential since the early days of science communication in the country, various kinds of technology and also commercial ventures, as well as government efforts have made it possible to reach a wider audience in more relatable ways. Since the time of Independence, the number of science communication papers has shown a remarkable increase. The National Institute of Science Communication (NISCOM) started with three popular science journals in Hindi, English and Urdu, started one after the other since 1952. NISCOM grew to a total of 11 journals and also publishes science books in various languages [11], before merging with the Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre (INDSOC) to become National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR), which publishes various research journals, abstracting journals, popular science magazines and books. [12] However, interest and effectiveness of printed media in the field of science communication is waning. Various science magazines like Science Today and Bulletin of Sciences have been discontinued due to insufficient audience [11]. Television as a media is only realizing its potential, but the audience it can reach, and the kind of audio-visual experience that it can turn science communication into, is creating an expectation of a certain entertainment value in all forms of science communication, that many journals and publications fail to live up to. Also while many of these journals attempted to bridge the gap between the scientific community and the non-scientific community, they reached only an audience that was interested in and already exposed to science events in India. Television and radio media, on the other hand, reach a wider audience. Both government and nongovernment organizations have produced science communication films in various languages [11 and 5]. Foreign language films are also screened in various places across the country. The Space Theatre at the Science City in Kolkata, for example, rotates screenings of different kinds of films in English and Hindi. Science museums and planetariums in the country attract an overwhelming number of visitors everyday. Whether all the exhibits are in working condition or not (and more often they’re not), whether anything happens when you push those red buttons, most visitors think of it as a fun day out. The National Council of Science Museums, Kolkata, coordinates 26 science museums and centres all over the country [11]. Science City in Kolkata boasts of being “the largest science-centre in the continent” [13]. Many of the exhibits are not in working condition, but the park is constantly evolving and growing and attracts lakhs of visitors every year [11]. Science City, as its website claims, is “taking science to millions.” One of the most delightful things about Science City is that, although it is called ‘Science’ City, it has exhibits on world geography and history (including history of boats and maritime travel and a motion simulator trip to an ancient Egyptian pyramid).
There are many such science centres in different places in India, none quite as large, but most of which attract a good audience everyday. This audience is of many different kinds, including science enthusiasts, people who have just come to be entertained, parents taking their children on an educational trip, schools taking classes on a field trip. In spite of disappointing technical failures, and changing timings, everyone takes back something from the experience. These science centres organize various events and festivals within their spaces. Kalpaneya Yatre, or Journey of the Imagination, a festival on Astronomy, held at the Nehru Planetarium, Bangalore, was one such event. Besides the visitor workshops and the school participation, where students displayed science projects and models, one of the most memorable things about the festival was the fact that visitors could interact with participating scientists, instead of looking at science through simply the interface of the exhibits. While more planning was required to break the ice between the scientists and speakers at the exhibition and the visitors – it was definitely an attempt – the same attempt that popular science journals make to bridge the gap between the science community and the non-science community. School children are the main visitors to these events, as schools are eager to participate – and first to be informed of these educational festivals. People from nearby villages – or groups from the country who are touring different cities also stop by for these attractions. However, science centres are flawed in their inherent immovability – they cannot reach everyone, and everyone cannot reach them. India has also seen her fair share of traveling science communications projects. Puppet shows, street theatre performances and other such folk media have been effectively used, especially by the Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad [14]. One of the most extensive attempts at mass communication of science was the science jahta. What was started in the ‘60s by the KSSP as a small traveling group of teachers, scientists, artists and students performing theatre and puppet show at different places with accompanying explanatory leaflets, was expanded into five huge processions of volunteers numbering in thousands, traveling 5000 km over 37 days, performing in different Indian villages as they went. This was a joint effort by the government and the People’s Science Movement in 1987, repeated again in 1992 [3]. The Vigyan Rail Science Exhibition, mounted on a train – that traveled to various villages was an attempt at restructuring the jahta, in 2004 [3]. Science communication through folk media helps to not only explain science through familiar visual language – but also creates a fusion media for expression, which is interesting as an art form by itself – and has great potential to serve as a comingtogether of the urban science-community, who’s science is very much based on Western methods and ideology, and rural traditions, many of which are, instead of being simply superstitions and rituals, part of the cultural science-heritage of India – folk science, that has been handed down from generation to generation and has its own perspective of the cultural-scientific world.
Conclusion: A Summary Science education and communication in India is a fast growing, fast spreading effort on the part of the government, government research institutions, non-governmental organizations and individuals. However, taking into account the population of India – and the sheer numbers of people – it is neither fast-growing nor fast-spreading enough. Science communication in a country that is still very much culturally rooted, with varying lifestyles and beliefs, must needs be extremely sensitive. There have been various efforts at different points in history to come up with effective strategies of science communication that are very local in terms of form and message. This is true for both mass media as well as institutional education, something that often lacks cultural sensitivity. It remains for these collaborations between the government and the people, the scientists and the students, the teachers and the artists, the journalist and the audience to continue in larger numbers and frequencies, learning from their successes.
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