Director, Arnold Arboretum
I have always felt that at the heart of science (and I suppose this is what you want to bring to your students) there is an attitude, a searching for those anomalies in the expected patterns of the world, and a willingness and confidence to pose questions about that. I look back and try to figure out where this comes from in my upbringing. I decided to blame my mother. She always said that if I wanted to be happy in life, I should become a pessimist. That way things would always turn out better than I thought they would! I can also remember when I read Moon, Man and Otto in high school. And my ninth grade teacher said, "I want you to pick a chapter, and I want you to take it apart critically and tell me all the things that are wrong with it." And so I gained this attitude, and it is what I think makes scientists.
Let me bring up the first point that I have, and it comes from my own background both as a researcher for 20 years and as a program director in research records at the National Science Foundation. It seems to me that if the student and scientist partnership is going to sail, we are going to have to convince the bench researcher. We are going to have to get that bench researcher's buy-in. And I know from my colleagues that is going to be difficult. I did not hear much from program directors at NSF in the research directorates in the past few days, and I would like to hear from them because I feel they might bring a lot of wisdom to this endeavor. If there is skepticism on the part of the researchers and on the part of the academics in the universities, we ought to engage that skepticism, we ought to address it directly. I think it is going to be important for making a program like this a success.
Second, I think it is really critical in addressing this that we be very clear about what the goals and achievements of SSPs are, and this may require research because we need to identify the appropriate configurations that work. I think it is going to put a lot of researchers at ease—I am talking about bench researchers—if we are clear about what the goals are, why we believe this really works, the situations in which it works, and when it does not work. And that may require research into something beyond simply our knowledge of attitudinal change. We may want to quantify, or try to quantify, the ways in which an SSP works. So evaluation is going to be very critical in selling this concept, and I think it does need to be sold.
Third there is also a need for research that I would call a taxonomic research, and I am not talking about plants and animals. I am talking about a taxonomy of partnerships. There are many different flavors and varieties of partnerships, and it would seem very valuable on the part of the NSF to create such a taxonomy, a fairly neutral taxonomy, as a base for making policy. What are the partnerships? What kinds of partnerships out there work? "Partnerships" is a wonderful word. It has a very warm glow and yet we know—I have experienced this myself in trying to work within the context of partnership where you have very different cultures (the culture of the school versus the culture of the researcher) that we need to be very clear about the different kinds of partnerships and the need to put expectations up front and define them.
I call it a taxonomy. And this taxonomy needs to be user friendly. Those contemplating a partnership (it is like a marriage in many ways) need to know what they are getting into. We need a user's manual for these partnerships, and I would hope such a taxonomy would be that. I have read many things that say to me that there are areas where such partnerships are very appropriate—those fields of science that still have very vibrant amateur scientists involved in them, such as ornithology and paleontology, and fields of science that involve large-scale geography, many of them in the environmental sciences. We ought to look at these. What is it about them that really works?
The early observational stage of the research question is an exciting phase when patterns are being generated and therefore questions are being asked about anomalies. This stage offers a wonderful opportunity for students to track a scientist changing fields and see how that individual really begins to look for those anomalies. So that is part of this taxonomy I envision.
Fourth, at the heart of this concept is that chemistry that operates between the scientists and the teachers. I do want to recognize the teacher's role here because I think it is critical. I believe the best situations are going to be those where a teacher's chemistry and a scientist's chemistry work. On the scientist's side, there is a missionary zeal about this and for very many good reasons. When this works well, the scientist is committed. I think we need to understand the nature of that commitment.
It makes no sense to arm twist scientists into trying to bend their research to fit the situation, or even seducing them with money may not work. I think we need some commitment that has endurance over time. Likewise with teachers, we want to keep the opportunities open for children to generate the questions. Over the past couple of days I have heard bottom up rather than top down. Scientists operate top down, as you know. It's their method.
There needs to be an interaction, a chemistry that begins with a generation of questions by children and teachers working together, and then the location of the right scientist for the chemistry to work. In this way, children and teachers will feel a sense of ownership over the science, and the scientist will be clear that he or she is working for both educational goals as well as interesting research data.
My final point involves an opportunity that I perceive for institutions—to play a crucial role in supporting student and scientist partnerships. At the Arnold Arboretum I wear two hats as director of both a research institution that is part of Harvard University and a public institution embedded within the city of Boston. The arboretum conducts a lot of research overseas involving botanical inventory and pharmaceutical prospecting, especially in the tropical forests of Indonesia, all to support international biodiversity conservation programs in Asia. At the same time, our collections and landscapes are open to the public as part of the Boston park system. As a consequence we have a commitment to public education. And so in wearing those two hats, I have to take on a unique role within the university. And I come to this question today, wearing both those hats. I see such institutions as in fact having a great opportunity because, to return to where I began, I do believe the bench researchers must buy-in.
Informal science institutions that understand research and at the same time deal with the public are in an ideal position to mediate this relationship. They often deal with universities. They understand research. At the same time, they understand the fear of the bench researcher of the public coming in and somehow impacting their research. Informal science institutions do have, therefore, an opportunity and a role to mediate that relationship, to be a mediator. Certainly at Harvard University, the Arnold Arboretum is an ideal mediator between the knowledge generation going on at the university and the knowledge need in the community, and I would strongly encourage informal science institutions to assume the role of mediator in supporting student and scientist partnerships.
With respect to this role for informal science institutions, I feel that technology, particularly computers and network technology, can potentially support this opportunity. Such institutions bring brand name to the mediation role, and technology can be a tool in their hands for that mediation. We are talking about distributed science and distributed communications. If that chemistry is going to work between scientists and children, then the mediator role can, it seems to me, be greatly enhanced through technology, and informal science institutions can be the vehicle that develops the technology to mediate that role. So, I think it is a great opportunity ahead for us.
