Evolving beyond the "scientific literacy" framing
Deficit-based education doesn't help produce engaged students.
A literate person knows how to read and write. Illiteracy is when a person cannot read or write at a particular level of proficiency.
Because English is an absorptive evolving ooze of language, literacy has taken on a different meaning. When you put an adjective in front of it, “literacy” indicates a baseline level of competence in a particular realm. “Adjective literacy” has been used in a big variety of contexts, such as scientific literacy, cultural literacy, or climate literacy.
It looks like we started doing this to “scientific literacy” in the 1950s.
In the 1980s, the phrase “cultural literacy” really took off. I wonder if this particular abomination would have ever grown in popularity if it wasn’t build on the decades of precedent involving “scientific literacy.”
What’s wrong with the cultural literacy movement? To answer this question with a question, I’ll ask, “Who gets to define what constitutes cultural literacy? Whose culture? Who gets to decide what is canon?” The answer to that question for many folks, it turns out, is one particular Ivy League white guy named E.D. Hirsch, who was funded by Exxon to codify a big list knowledge that he and a small team of people just like him thought was important. It was codified in the appendix of his best-selling book Cultural Literacy, which went on to become a scourge on humanity.
Yes, it’s very good for people need to know and understand stuff to help us engage with the history of ideas. And also, it’s harmful when we delegate the task of defining a single foundational set of knowledge to any particular group, especially when it’s comprised of people with a narrow set of identities and perspectives. I hope this is self-evident. The need to resurrect and recontextualize history through the The 1619 Project was deepened by the regressive educational philosophy of the cultural literacy movement, which as you would have expected, did not do justice for the perspectives and experiences of African-Americans in the United States.
In the last few weeks, from a variety of places I’ve seen a movement of folks promoting “scientific literacy,” and this gives me a bit of pause. As scientists, we might learn from the shortcomings of the “cultural literacy” movement before we argue for the benefits of “scientific literacy.”
I’m a bit concerned that “scientific literacy” efforts might be scaffolded on a static framework. The promotion of “scientific literacy” suggests, to me at least, that knowing science stuff is a thing that is achieved rather than a thing that you maintain. Because the “literacy” framework is definitionally focused on repairing deficits rather than framing the education as building information assets, it’s not going to create as much engagement. Notwithstanding the reality that this is what most of us do when we write a syllabus and teach a class, teaching for literacy rather than asset-building is not going to get us where we want to go.
Do we want a scientifically literate populace? Of course we do. What does it mean to be scientifically literate? The consensus seems to be that scientifically literate people understand the process of science and have a basic understanding of core facts in various disciplines, how to do quantitative and qualitative comparisons, and a basic understanding of how statistics works. Yes, let’s have more of that.
Can approach this through a different frame than “scientific literacy” please?
As a little kid, one of my favorite books was Charlie Brown’s Super Book of Questions and Answers. I had a couple volumes but I was most excited about the first, covering what we now call biodiversity. I would repeatedly devour this book and I loved it even more than the various Peanuts paperbacks floating around my house from my older siblings. Whenever I was required to sit quietly in some place for a very long time, I’d be set with my Super Book, an atlas, and some Richard Scarry. (That is probably still true today.) I imagine some part of the reason I became a scientist learning more about how nature works was because of that book.
My copy of the Super Book of Questions and Answers sits on a cart in my office with other fun stuff for kids to play with in case someone visiting my our office suite has a little one in tow. I had some reservations about including this book in there, because a bunch of stuff is so out of date, we consider it to be factually incorrect. For example, we now know that fungi are not closely related to plants, plate tectonics is very well established, and we have explored our solar system with a lot of spacecraft and robots.
What I loved about this book is that what it gave me was a ton of facts. For a first grader, I bet I was probably more “scientifically literate” (beyond dinosaurs) just because of that book. But the book wasn’t about making me literate, it was designed to be fun, and to get me interested in things that might not be essential or important in terms of literacy, but would make me curious. This book was designed to stimulate interest more than diagnose the information that I’m missing out on that would constitute “literate.”
I think a deficit-based scientific literacy framework is more prone to static thinking, and the establishment of a canon of accepted facts and historical figures associated with scientific discovery. Historical (and some contemporary) efforts at “scientific literacy” give us storylines that enshrine a select number of individuals while overlooking the critical and extraordinary contributions of others. Think of folks with non-white-dude identities, such as Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, Charles Henry Turner, Mary Anning, and Lise Meitner. Has a “scientific literacy” mindset been overlooking and actively cover over the contributions of others, necessitating the need to learn about Hidden Figures in our history?
Let’s say we successfully codify a new flavor of scientific literacy that enshrines the contributions of folks who had the credit taken away from them. That might be a step in a better direction, but this still involves an educational agenda that involves a set of inherited facts about what is important, instead of experiencing the reality that our understanding of the world is constantly evolving. I’m not sure if I want folks simply memorizing the names of Emmy Noether and Grace Hopper while they are memorizing Neils Bohr and Linus Pauling. It would be a marginal step up from our status quo, but it’s still a static view of scientific progress.
But of course, we need to teach students science, and that involves learning stuff that we think is important. My concern about the deficit-based literacy framework is an expression of the tension that all college-level instructors feel. We are the ones who decide what is important enough to teach, but we also wish to create independent-minded problem solvers who are empowered to choose the trajectory of their learning. We make difficult decisions to select a small number of facts and ideas that really matter, yet we want our students to have the agency and intrinsic motivation to explore information.
An essential read for teachers that I think reinforces my point here is the classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire. (And also, the part where bell hooks interviews herself about Freire in Teaching to Transgress.) Friere explains that we should experience the process of inquiry together with our students. If we position ourselves as the literate instructors teaching illiterate students, we doing the exact opposite of what Friere recommends.
Take, for example, one form of “illiteracy” that I see in the science education community that folks refer to as “plant blindness.” If you haven’t heard of this, yes, this is an actual term of art that plant educators have coined and been using for decades. It’s simply a compelling way to say that some people think so little about plants that they haven’t bothered to notice any differences among plants. They’re “blind” to plants. Aside from this being an ableist take, it’s also a bad framing to fix lack of awareness about plants. Who wants to be told that they’re “blind” and need to get treated?
If you’re not familiar with the deficit model of science communication, I think understanding this issue is very helpful to understand why working for “scientific literacy” is not going to be as successful as working to build engaged science enthusiasts, or science fans, or science practitioners, or science groupies.
I get why “literacy” is an attractive idea to educators who are expecting the public to make decisions about important matters such as climate change and communicable diseases. It’s not that we should expect everybody to watch science documentaries on Netflix, read the science articles in the newspaper, and hobbies building robots and camera trapping in the park. But is it okay to expect everybody to understand what a “significant difference” is, and to understand a graph when they see it, understand why gravity and evolution are theories, know why volcanoes are where they are, and have a rudimentary bullshit detector for pseudoscience? I would love if everybody were like that. But if I were to actually expect that of other people that feels, I dunno… presumptuous? arrogant? condescending? unrealistic?
There’s a substantial stigma around adults in the United States who do not have basic proficiency in reading and writing, even though about 20% of people in the country fit into that category. And now we want to advocate for other forms of literacy that have even lower rates? We want to frame people who buy into conspiracy theories as scientifically illiterate? What the heck does that get for you?
Scientific literacy isn’t a bad thing, if we think of scientific literacy as understanding science as a process and being conversant with processing scientific information. But if we think of scientific literacy or climate literacy as information deficits, then this might result in educational approaches that aren’t going to foster an educated populace that engages with science in a way that helps them make decisions to improve our lives (and reduce carbon emissions).
References:
Howell, Emily L., and Dominique Brossard. 2021. "(Mis)informed about what? What it means to be a science-literate citizen in a digital world." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 15 (2021): e1912436117.
Dutilh Novaes, C., and S. Ivani. “The inflated promise of science education." Boston Review (2022).
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. 2019. The deficit model of education and unintentional racism. https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com/2019/12/11/the-deficit-model-of-education-and-unintentional-racism/