I want to watch this video again and again in every class I teach. At some point I realized that the students that I was trying to explain social sciences to, didn't really understand the context of how knowledge is created, accrues, gets challenged, subverted by ego and other investments, becomes helpful, gets tested, changes... And it seemed to me more important than ever for them to know more than students have ever known about things like "fake news" given how instrumental it has been to social change over the last decade. I give them journal articles and I give them "infographics" produced by organizations with a cause - a favourite one proves that spanking works to create better citizens, and one of the "authoritative" links in it goes to an interview with a football player, and another link goes to a parallel child development organization that sounds like the real thing but is actually the product of a charismatic church that stands for gun freedom and parental controls and things like that. But in the processes of discussing things like scientific method, processes, peer reviewed journals, retraction, academic fraud and problematic research samples I realize that I am breaking it down into little bits... The student feedback has been good. They like knowing how to think critically about what they are reading, both in our classes and in their lives and of the media which surrounds them. But what I want is for them to think, as I wish I had been able to think oh so long ago, that they could be scientists too. We need new bodies of research from new perspectives - people raised in poverty, Indigenous people, LGBTQ people - from everyone. Too often we continue to see in photos of gathered scientists an appalling misrepresentation of who is in the world, doing the same old things. This video will be a compelling addition to that section of my classes, bringing in the artistic, the human and the historic:
Some mushrooms will kill you,
while some will show you gods
and some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify.
It will give them a sense, I think, of why science matters and how they might already be operating as scientists without knowing it.