STEAM Punk 002:  Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion

by | May 21, 2018 | Atheism, March for Science, New Writing Series, STEAM Punk

A science narrative is a story of everyone.  It puts everyone in our species on an equal footing by showing how we all got here.  That makes the science narrative fit perfectly with Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. 

If you web search for EDI you’ll find a lot of policies of businesses and universities, where people are actively searching for a shared narrative for their groups that everyone can participate in by talking about life as they know it. 

That’s a good start.  But businesses and universities are organizations that exist to achieve some goal.  So even without intending to, the people in those organizations focus their efforts on figuring out what EDI means as it relates to their goals.  That means better relations with their employees and customers to help them make money, or overcoming obstacles to people getting education, or whatever it happens to be. 

Theatre, which is what I work in, takes the ideas of EDI all the way.  Professional theatre is a business, but more than that it’s the art of recreating the entire world and as many variations on it as people can imagine.  You make a story personally meaningful to someone by making them feel like they have important things in common with the protagonists.  The highest level of success in the art is to be able make anyone’s story personally meaningful to anyone else. 

In his book The Descent of Man, in 1871, Charles Darwin proposed how the Theory of Evolution could be used to study human psychology.  In his final book, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, he got some actors to collaborate with him to describe different emotions.  But it took 120 more years for people to develop the information processing technology that made the field of evolutionary psychology possible.    (more…)

STEAM Punk 001: The Quest for a New American Narrative

by | Apr 21, 2018 | Atheism, March for Science, STEAM Punk

I went to the Phoenix March and Rally for Science in 2017 as a videographer. About 7,000 people came to march in support of science.  About two dozen people who work in and around science gave speeches in Cesar Chavez Plaza before and after the march. 

At that point I’d been an activist for science and education for 13 years.  As an engineer friend of mine asked me later, how do you protest for science?  Science is a mental tool for figuring things out.  It’s not like people are getting thrown in jail for thinking. 

There are a lot of parts to it.  There’s government funding for research, the government’s use of research in policy making, funding for public education, and the attitudes toward science of elected officials.  Those were all things people talked about at the march.  But it goes even further than that.

There were a lot of people at the March who had degrees and careers in science but were new to activism.  But there are also a lot of people like me who have a lot of experience with activism.  The goal isn’t to get people to remember to use science.  The goal is to change our narrative.  (more…)

STEAM Punk 005- The WEIRD Trap

by | Apr 1, 2018 | STEAM Punk

To work as a scientist you have to get a degree in science.  But that automatically creates limitations of the life experience that scientists use to interpret information.  To be admitted to college, students have to have the kind of education that college administrators require.  All of the colleges in the world are located in relatively wealthy areas.  Modern colleges depends on industrialized technology.   To be part of the global flow of information they have to be in democratic parts of the world.  Places that are democratic enough to be part of the global flow of information are either “Western” or are being “Westernized.  That gives scientists a WEIRD interpretation of the world– “Western”, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.  But by understanding that problem we can find ways to expand our horizons beyond it.

STEAM Punk 004- Teaching Creativity

by | Apr 1, 2018 | STEAM Punk

It takes four years to earn a Bachelor’s Degree, but the world is changing so fast that it’s hard to predict what the job market will be like in four years from now.  What we need more than anything now is creativity.  The science narrative brings all the courses in school together into one body of information.

STEAM Punk 003- Educating the Low-Hanging Fruit

by | Apr 1, 2018 | STEAM Punk

People have different styles of learning, which require different approaches to teaching.  Currently science education is used to teach people to use science as a job skill.  Getting people to learn science as a narrative depends on teaching it as a narrative.  That depends on qualitative improvement in science education, through new approaches to education, not just on the quantitative improvement that better funding would lead to.