Communicating Science at our recent SPU conference
SPU teachers networking at the meeting Despite the water, water everywhere, SPU teachers from all over the country gathered on June 26th for our annual conference. Making sure that everyone had arrived through varying transport difficulties meant a little extra time over coffee and pastries at the start. So even before the main programme began there was already a buzz of that networking and sharing of experience which makes such events so valuable.
Paul Bowers Isaacson welcomes teachers to the meeting We had a brief introduction to the new A/AS Science in Society development and were able to spend a short time in groups discussing particular aspects of this development that replaces SPU for teaching from September 2008. Further events in the Autumn will introduce this new specification and supporting resources in more detail.
Our first main speaker was Mark Haw who gave us an introduction both to the story of Brownian motion that is told in his new book, Middle World, and also to his thinking on the importance of telling such science stories. His presentation can be downloaded
here (1.1 MB) but note that the movies from slides 6, 28 and 30 have been removed to reduce the file size and for potential copyright reasons. Mark hopes soon to put them up for separate download from his own site.
Mark Haw addresses the conference
Over lunch Mark shared much conversation and did a lot of book signing as many of us reconsidered the way we had taught Brownian motion in the past.
Angela Melamed leads a discussion group at the conference Shereen Muhyeddeen of Macmillan Science books helped make it possible to supply everyone with a copy of Mark’s book and also had other books from the Macmillan Science list on display. She was pleased with the day as we bought a further £225 worth of books from her stand. Particularly popular titles were 10 Questions Science Can't Answer (Yet) by Michael Hanlon, Space on Earth by Charles Cockell and The Whole Story by Toby Murcott. The moderators may look forward to seeing reviews of those books from students next year...!
Shereen has very kindly arranged a discount on any book(s) from the Macmillan science list for all SPU teachers . If you would like to buy at a 20% discount then you can do so by e-mailing Jo Oladejo at Nuffield for the code and then shopping on line at the Macmillan Science website.
Ben Goldacre talks about 'Bad Science' to the conference Our day concluded with a range of thought-provoking observations from our second main speaker, Ben Goldacre. Maintained on coffee and flapjacks from the after effects of Glastonbury, Ben shared a number of stories explored in his ‘Bad Science’ column in The Guardian that SPU teachers could interpret for the classroom to examine the science (or not) involved.
There is an interesting conversation developing on Ben’s website which is sometimes accurate about SPU... Click on this link to find out more.
A number of us were able to stay into the evening to hear Ben speak again for a more general audience at Royal Institution event chaired by Fiona Fox, director of the Science Media Centre. A lively evening in a packed house allowed a brief opportunity to plug the existence of our course to an interested public. Meanwhile others of us struggled home through the rising damp. Can anyone beat arriving back in Northumberland at 3 the following morning, having traveled north via Manchester, and getting a taxi from York? A tough lot we SPU teachers - and worth the effort to get together...
Paul Bowers Isaacson