Participants’ Reflections on the
2005 New England Workshop
on Science and Social Change
Steve Fifield, Ph.D., workshop
participant/evaluator
Delaware Education Research and
Development Center &
Department of Biological Sciences
University of Delaware
August 18, 2005
Introduction
The 2005 New
England Workshop on Science and Social Change (NewSSC05) was held April 21-24
at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA. As a participant/evaluator in NewSSC05, I took part in all
the workshop activities. I also
worked with the organizer, Peter Taylor, and the workshop facilitator, Tom
Flanagan, to conceive and conduct workshop activities to encourage participants
to reflect on the emerging meaning and value of the workshop in light of their
interests, expectations and goals. These reflections were usually in writing,
but some participants also used drawings and diagrams. In this report I draw on the
participants’ reflections to suggest 1) what aspects of the workshop
ought to be sustained, and 2) how the workshop might be revised to enhance its
long-term impact on the participants and on scholarship, education, and
activism regarding science, technology and society.
Workshop Premises & Objectives
The premises and
objectives of the NewSSC05 offer points of reference against which to interpret
participants’ reflections on their experiences and their implications for
future workshops. The premises and objectives were discussed in online
materials available to the participants prior to the workshop (see http://www.stv.umb.edu/newssc05.html),
and summarized by Peter Talyor on the first day of the workshop.
Premises
of NewSSC
1. Wider discussion of science and technology can influence
science, society, science education, and citizen activism in constructive ways.
2. Academic meetings are more fruitful when they allow
participants to connect theoretical, pedagogical, practical, political, and
personal aspects of the issue at hand.
3. Scholars who have a repertoire of process or participation
skills are more comfortable and productive in organized and informal
collaborative processes, and are more likely to see new opportunities, take
initiative, and experiment with the models they have been introduced to.
4. Workshop costs can be kept low if participants expect the
workshops to be generative and restorative and are prepared, therefore, to
attend without full underwriting of expenses or honoraria. To the extent that
this premise is born out, participants will be able to envisage more
opportunities for cross-disciplinary meetings and subsequent collaborations
(see premise 3).
Specific
objectives of NewSSC
a) Stimulate new interdisciplinary projects and collaborations
among STS scholars, scientists, science educators, and concerned citizens.
b) Develop participants' skills and interest in engaging
constructively beyond their current disciplinary and academic boundaries and
contributing to wider discussion of the changing social uses of knowledge about
genes, environment, and development.
Workshop Activities & Participants
The online
workshop program contains the daily schedule of workshop activities (http://www.stv.umb.edu/newssc05.html).
Some pre-circulated workshop readings are also accessible without a password on
this website. For a description of similar workshop activities, and of a
workshop with a collaborative, emergent process, see my evaluation report of
the 2004 NewSSC, <http://www.stv.umb.edu/newssc04eval2.html>).
Eleven people
(six men, five women) took part in some or all of the NewSSC05 activities. The
participants’ fields included biological research; history, philosophy
and social studies of science and technology; undergraduate science education
and teacher education; biotechnology R&D, and information technology. More detailed participant profiles are
available at http://www.stv.umb.edu/newssc05.html.
Peter Taylor, myself, and one other participant also attended the 2004
workshop; the others were first time participants in a NewSSC workshop.
Participants’ Reflections
This evaluation
report draws on participants’ reflections created during two workshop
activities, one on the second day and another on the fourth (and final) day. I
looked closely at the participants’ comments, and compared one to
another, to identify themes that represent broadly shared perspectives, as well
as informative exceptions to the dominant themes. I did not treat the
participants’ reflections like survey data to be sorted and
quantified. The activities in
which the participants created these reflections were substantive components of
the workshop, rather than interruptions in activities to collect evaluation
data. Further, the prompts were
loosely structured to give participants the freedom to respond in ways that
were most meaningful to them at the time.
The result is a collection of writings and illustrations that often take
the same prompts in different directions.
For each collection of reflections, I offer examples that illustrate
common themes followed by an interpretive summary of what the feedback says
about the workshop’s strengths and opportunities for enhancing its
impact.
Evaluation
Activity 1: Where am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?
Late on the
second full day (Friday, April 22) of the workshop, we asked participants to
respond to this prompt: “As I consider my experiences in this workshop so
far, Where am I? Where have I come from? and Where do I want to I
go?” We invited them to use
whatever means of expression they could put on paper–words, drawings,
diagrams, etc. The prompt used the
metaphor of a journey to invite participants to consider the relationship of
the workshop to their past, present, and future work and broader lives.
Participants
responded with prose, lists, flow charts, diagrams, and drawings. Responses
included:
Ø “I am at a place where I wish I
could read something of each participants’ work, and then talk to them,
perhaps 1-on-1, about their ideas and perhaps mine. I wasn’t here when I
arrived. I read some things ahead,
but now I have much more context and curiosity. … Now I wonder whether I
will have the time to discuss these things, and whether others whom I’m
especially interested in considering my ideas, will have the time to read or
discuss them.”
Ø A diagram with many intersecting circles,
and a stick figure moving from outside the circles to the space where they all
overlap.
Ø A sequence of three diagrams that
represent Where have I come from?, Where am I now, and Where do I want to go?,
respectively. In the first two
diagrams, “genetic knowledge” moves from outside the “complexities
of the social environment” to being contained in and a part of those
complexities. In the third
diagram, a “?” is contained in a space labeled “explore new
relations/conceptual possibilities.”
Ø A drawing shows an individual who moves
from being in a “desert” separated from a “scholarly
stream,” to standing on the shore of that scholarly stream, and finally
to being immersed in the stream.
Ø Two word diagrams with the workshop
participant’s initials at the center of each. In the first, labeled “From”, the individual is
connected to philosophy of science and sociology, feminist critiques, teaching,
science, interdisciplinary courses, and scientists. A change process labeled
“Group at Woods Hole” and “Walk on beach!” yields a
diagram in which “resources/people in diverse fields” is a new
intermediary, and presumably enabling, link between the individual; philosophy,
history and sociology of science; and teaching.
Interpretive
Summary. As illustrated
in these examples, the workshop participants’ described personal journeys
that involved encounters with people and ideas that reshaped their social
relationships and conceptual understandings. People at very different places in their
careers–including a graduate student, a scientist moving into science
studies, and a senior scholar in science studies–all saw themselves
headed toward new relationships that would enable, and even transform, their
scholarly work. This suggests
that, at least on the second day, the workshop met the needs of a diverse group
of people as individuals created their own ways to, as the organizer hoped,
“engage constructively beyond their current
disciplinary and academic boundaries.” The workshop supported these journeys by providing
opportunities to interact, productive strategies for interacting and thinking
in new ways, and a safe space to take the risks that enable change. Time will tell if the workshop leads to
“new interdisciplinary projects and collaborations,” but the
participants’ saw themselves traveling in that direction with the help of
their workshop colleagues.
Evaluation
Activity 2: 2005 Participants’ Reactions to Comments and Reviews
On the final
morning of the workshop, participants were asked to react to a) the
recommendations I made in the evaluation of the 2004 NewSSC (see http://www.stv.umb.edu/newssc04eval2.html),
b) feedback from workshop participants from the previous year, and c)
reviewers’ comments on Peter Taylor’s 2004 National Science
Foundation proposal to fund NewSSC workshops. These prompts where points of
reference against which participants evaluated their experiences over the
previous four days and thought about future directions for the workshop series.
Reactions to
the Participant/Evaluator’s Recommendations from 2004
In my evaluation
of the 2004 NewSSC, I offered four recommendations for future workshops. In this section, each of my
recommendations from 2004 is followed by responses from the 2005 NewSSC
participants (some participants did not respond to each item).
Recommendation
1: Increase expectations and opportunities for participant involvement prior to
the workshop.
·
Would
probably be ideal for participation but would be unrealistic. I was very worried that preparation
required would prevent me from attending - impossible during height of
semester.
·
The
Day 1 activity on resources was not a resource for the subsequent days but
could be if done in advance. Best
way to get people to do that is through follow up phone calls.
·
This
did not happen. Breaking into
pre-workshop time is daunting.
·
Expectancy,
not expectations. Possibilities, not finished products.
·
This
is desirable but not easy to achieve.
You have to find ways of involving people who will participate that will
not take too much of their time. Perhaps circulating proposals for [the]
schedule might be interesting…
·
I
prepared some, but wish I had a bit more. Perhaps it would have helped if
participants could suggest no more than 20-25 pages of reading a piece & it
was put on very clean website as primary reading; and the secondary readings
aside. And if we remembered to print everything.
·
Shape
expectation - temper expectations, maybe - but keep the expectancy very
high. Specific expectations should
be framed around sharing meaningful experiences, tools, tricks, and resources.
·
We
could have generated…course ideas prior to the workshop. Otherwise the amount of
reading/preparation was optimal.
Interpretative
summary. In
general, the 2005 participants did not think it would be realistic to significantly
increase the demands on participants prior to the workshop. An alternative is a well-focused
assignment that raises expectancy for the workshop. This approach might make the workshop time more generative
and could serve as one element of a strategy to enhance the continuity and
long-term impact of the workshops series.
Recommendation
2: Shift a larger portion of Peter’s time and effort from organizing and
leading toward participating.
·
Seems
like this was achieved this time.
·
The
most important part of this is to have an assistant organizer (apprentice
organizer?) so that Peter doesn’t put off making phone calls, reading
people’s work, etc. The
secondary part is logistics - offer a grad student a subsidy to come (&
choose one who is good at seeing logistics w/o being micromanaged).
·
Moved
in the right direction, still further to go, but there is a limit based on
Peter’s willingness to let go of agenda setting.
·
Divide
responsibilities among participants so there is no obvious divide [between]
“organizers” and “participants” à collaborative/support in
more ways.
·
I
agree with that. I think this was to some extent achieved this year by bringing
Tom in to facilitate.
·
I
didn’t think this was an issue.
·
I
didn’t see this as a problem…Peter should not have to leave the
group to get milk and sugar for the coffee or to pickup meals - this should be
delegated - resource issues should be delegated. Peter should really focus on process and content.
·
We
could have heard a lot more about Peter’s writing and research! He obviously held back a bit. His
participation was excellent, however, and not overbearing (Vanity
workshops are bad!)
Interpretative
summary.
Most of the participants did not think that Peter’s engagement in the
workshop was hampered by administrative concerns. Some participants did notice that he was sometimes occupied
with tasks that could be handled by a graduate assistant. In my view, administrative demands in
preparation for the workshop do interfere with Peter’s efforts to help
participants build personal and topical connections with one another before the
workshop. Shifting the
administrative tasks to an assistant would free up Peter’s time to foster
connections within the participant community prior to the workshop. The objective to “stimulate new
interdisciplinary projects and collaborations” would be furthered if
participants arrive with relationships and shared interests already emerging.
Recommendation
3: Preserve the flexible scheduling and generous free time to allow for
informal conversations, emergent collaborations, quiet contemplation, and rest.
·
About
the right balance this year - we got the time we needed for it.
·
People’s
need for more free time than we had was mostly to catch up on reading
not done beforehand.
·
This
was accomplished. Perhaps need
just a bit more free time in days 1-2 to allow getting to know you
interactions.
·
Although
I am exhausted, the tight schedule (even scheduled personal reading time)
helped to keep the momentum à productivity in unexpected
fashion.
·
I
agree with that. I think, too, that this has been achieved with some
success. This is one of the
strengths of the workshop.
·
I
think I would have benefited from having more time scheduled to read and
converse.
·
Yes
- For a group this size!
·
There
was optimal amount of free time! Too much free time makes us compete with
home/work/shopping!
Interpretive
summary. The current workshop design
successfully provides opportunities for private reflection, reading, and
conversations within a full and tightly scheduled program. The workshop effectively combines
pre-planned activities with emergent activities that take shape as the workshop
unfolds. The pre-planned activities give the participants time to develop
relationships and identify shared interests, and model collaborative and
critical thinking strategies that participants can use in the activities they
plan later in the workshop. The
salient quality of the workshop is not large blocks of unstructured time, but
the generative way in which initially open time gets filled as participants
plan activities, interact informally, and work in private.
Recommendation
4: Make the research community-building goal of the workshop series more
explicit to the participants.
·
I
did not feel we were trying to build a research community except perhaps within
science education - I guess this was not explicit last year either.
·
Is
that a goal? Community-building, yes, bit perhaps a community of innovators in
teaching first & secondarily research collaborators.
·
Not
much change. Explicit community building goal could fit - not clear to me that
Peter intends to shape shared research agendas.
·
This
would require some more explicit intervention aimed at making the goal explicit
and carrying that goal across the process of the workshop. Not easy to do! There is some
open-endedness that has to be retained so that the very [illegible text]
community we aim at is an emerging construction.
·
Perhaps
having periodic virtual or real reunions (e.g. at ISH[1])
But the follow-up listserv & Website could help.
·
Yes
- as a workshop - skill building should be very visible - boundary-spanning
skills are most important.
Adding mechanisms to assure a…continuity across years is
important.
·
We
could have designed one take-away collaboration that would not
have occurred otherwise…
Interpretive
summary. It remains important to build a shared
understanding of the workshop as means to create and sustain communities that
reach across traditional institutional, disciplinary, and intellectual
boundaries. In the 2004 and 2005
workshops, people from diverse backgrounds found different ways to make the
workshop personally meaningful and valuable. Topics in both workshops moved freely among, and
productively blurred the distinctions of, research and pedagogical perspectives
and applications. Some participants engaged as researchers, others as
educators, some as community activists, and others moved among all these
standpoints. The immediate
experience in this environment was enriching and energizing for the
participants. The challenge now is
to reach for a more sustained impact of “stimulat[ing] new
interdisciplinary projects and collaborations.” The workshop needs to remain an open and supportive
environment for thinking across boundaries, while also more clearly focusing on
productive interactions in the workshop will lead to specific products. The goal of the workshop should not be
to produce a document or other product after only four days. This would undermine the emergent,
open-ended quality of the experience and have little prospect of yielding
anything of value. The goal of the
workshop should instead be to plant the seeds for collaborations that will
yield significant products before the next workshop.
Science
education/public understanding of science has been an important topical strand
in the NewSSC and presents opportunities for sustained collaborations that
would enhance the long-term impact of the workshop. For many of the workshop participants, science education
(broadly defined to include schooling, technical and popular media, informal
education, and community activism) offers a more open and creative space for
collaboration than is the case for traditional research programs, even in the
interdisciplinary domains of science and technology studies. Most NewSSC
workshop participants in 2005 and 2004 were in some way involved in teaching or
public outreach activities related to science and society. The development of
approaches and materials that apply science, technology and society studies to
science education/public understanding of science and society is a field in
which workshop participants could achieve significant personal and intellectual
transformations while they make important scholarly and civic contributions
through collaborative projects.
Reactions to
2004 NewSSC Participants’ Comments
At the end of
the 2004 workshop, we asked each participant to synthesize their reactions in a
paragraph that expressed the workshop’s strengths and weaknesses and
suggested future directions (see http://www.stv.umb.edu/newssc04eval2.html). On the last day of the 2005 workshop,
we gave those responses to the participants and asked them to react to the
passages they found most striking. The following are themes and illustrative
examples from the 2005 participants’ reactions to feedback from the 2004
workshop participants.
1. The effect of the interactive, generative
workshop processes.
· Reacting to a comment from 2004 that the
workshop “enabled a relaxed mind and therefore playfulness and
creativity,” a 2005 participant appreciated that “no one was expert
or critic, [which] allowed the process to be supportive, generative &
restorative…”.
However, in response to the same text from 2004, another participant
wrote, “My mind didn’t ‘relax’ because I didn’t
have enough time to reflect, write, or read.”
· A 2005 participant noted that the
relationships formed at the workshop would “fortify my gradual transition
from scientist to scientist/STS scholar.”
· A 2005 participant had “some
doubts” initially, but wrote, “now that I have experienced this, I
am a bit more hopeful for future events.”
· Another wrote about how she set aside,
for the time being, her familiar ways of exploring science and society
“in the light of the emergent conceptual/procedural contributions of the
workshop’s activities.”
· A 2004 participant wrote: “I saw
collaborations being born.” A 2005 participant replied that the workshop
opened opportunities to meet people and begin collaborations, especially to
women, minorities, and junior scholars, who are often “shut out” of
such opportunities.
2. The value of specific cases and other
science, technology and society content.
· A 2004 participant wrote, “I
learned far more about STS…than I could ever imagine by attending a
conference of comparable length.”
In the margin a 2005 participant noted, “I agree!” But another participant wrote,
“Could have learned more about topic of workshop if there’d been
more” than two cases.
· A 2005 participant developed and led an
activity on how ‘scientific’ knowledge is transformed as it moves
across technical and popular media.
Another participant wrote that this was “profound!”
3.
The
outcomes and products of the workshops
·
A 2005
participant suggested that future workshops include “discussion of how
what we did [in past workshops] was put to work.”
·
In
2004 a participant wrote, “very concrete plans emerged – we are
going to organize an international conference on science and
metaphor.” A 2005
participant wondered, “did this actually ever happen?” The same
participant reflected on the challenge of balancing demands for concrete
products with the generative possibilities of an open-ended design: “we
know – or rapidly learn – that the organizers don’t know how
the event will end – maybe on a harmonic note (with closure) – or
maybe on a dissonant note (with creative tension) or…”.
Interpretive
summary. The
workshop effectively used interactive, generative processes to help
participants explore new ways of thinking about significant issues in science,
technology and society. Many
participants in both 2004 and 2005 noted how ‘safe’ they felt to
explore new ways of thinking and to take intellectual (and so, necessarily,
personal) risks without fear of criticism. The participants described their experiences as stimulating
and rewarding. It is less clear
what participants will make of their experiences in the long run. The participants’ comments from
the past two years suggest the need to link the workshop to specific
applications and products, using the workshops as (re)generative phases in
continuing processes of individual and collaborative work. As I suggested above, the expectation
should not be to produce concrete products by the end of a workshop. This would
greatly constrain the possibilities for exploration and open-ended development
during those few, special days.
The workshop should, instead, be a time and place to launch and sustain
individual and collaborative projects that will bridge the time between
workshops and yield concrete products and applications for distribution beyond
the NewSSC community.
Reactions to
NSF Reviewers’ Comments
Also on the last
day of the 2005 workshop, participants received the full text of NSF
reviewers’ comments on a proposal by Peter Taylor to fund two workshops
on the changing social uses of knowledge about genes, the environment, and
development. The proposal received ratings of fair, good, very good/good, very
good, and excellent from the five NSF reviewers. The proposal was not funded. One of the proposed workshops was the 2005 NewSSC that the
participants had just completed. We asked workshop participants to comment on
the NSF reviews, thinking especially about how best to address the
reviewers’ critiques. The participants directed most of their responses
to reviewers’ comments about the workshop processes, participants, and
products.
1. Workshop processes
The
reviewer who gave the proposal its lowest rating of fair was concerned that the
proposed workshops had too much unstructured time for reading, reflection, and
autobiographical story-telling.
Warning that this format would “drive a scientist or genetic
counselor bananas,” the reviewer believed that to attract scholars from
outside STS, the workshop would need to be “tight, focused and
well-structured.” One participant countered that the workshop “was
rooted in the notion of emergence,” not in scripting everything in
advance. Another maintained that scientists “would benefit most from this
time for reflection.”
2. Workshop participants
The
reviewer who rated the proposal as fair had the impression that these
conferences would be “by STSers for STSers–a way for people in the
field to meet, talk, and get a few quiet hours away from teaching and other
responsibilities…” The
reviewer warned that the workshops would “increase, not diminish, the
insularity” of the field.
One participant responded “hah!” to the notion that the
workshop was a few quiet hours away from work. Another suggested that increased insularity was not a
logical consequence of “STSers being the majority of
participants.” Several
suggested that insularity could be avoided by focusing the workshop on
educational and outreach strategies and materials to make STS perspectives more
accessible to broader audiences. Another wrote, “Interesting synergies
could be created if there would be a session or two held jointly with an
all-biologist group at Woods Hole and/or a public/community forum.
3. Workshop products
Several
participants responded to reviewers’ calls to better define the products
of the workshops, and to better anticipate the “’new
directions’ that might emerge in the discussion of genes, environment,
and development.” One
participant suggested, “Build in stipends for participants who go on to
add units, activities, syllabi, reports of outreach to an ‘open
source’ site.” Another suggested that the workshop ought to be
“aimed at helping STSers develop tools for producing relevant knowledge
& ways of communicating the knowledge.” Some participants suggested
that a workshop be linked to a specific “’named’
product.” Others suggested
that the Internet could be used to document both the course of the workshops
(e.g., a workshop blog) and to disseminate workshop products.
Interpretive
Summary. Workshop
participants see value and generative structures in emergent workshops that
some NSF reviewers do not. The
participants’ appreciation for the workshop design points to a need to
better describe ‘emergence’ as a means of developing the structure and processes of the
workshop, rather than an absence
of structure. The profiles of
workshop attendees demonstrate that both the 2005 and 2004 workshops were not
STS for STSers, as one of the NSF reviewers worried. Clearly, all those who attended had some interest in and/or
experience with studies in the history, philosophy, and social studies of
science, but participants came to the workshop from diverse vocational and
avocational backgrounds. Viewed
from afar, a scientist, a community activist, and a sociologist who share an
interest in science, technology and society may all look like STSers, but from
the perspective of their own communities of practice, their participation in
the workshop pushes them to step outside familiar ways of thinking and doing to
construct shared understandings with one another. At the 2005 workshop, the scientists in our group shared
especially rich, revealing, and extended autobiographical accounts of their
paths to the workshop. There is no
reason to believe that scientists as a group have no use (or time) for
introspection and sense making about their lives and work. Many of the workshop participants
appeared willing to enlist in long-term collaborative projects to create
materials that apply perspectives and approaches from the workshop. The workshop did effectively “develop participants' skills and interest in
engaging constructively beyond their current disciplinary and academic
boundaries…”. To achieve the objective of stimulating
interdisciplinary projects, and to improve the prospects for external funding,
the workshop needs to direct the experiential benefits described by
participants into long-term collaborations that yield materials and approaches
that are widely disseminated.
Recommendations
The following
recommendations are drawn from the interpretive summaries in this report.
1. A well-focused pre-workshop assignment would extend the
period of the workshop and make the participants’ time together more
productive. Develop a modest
pre-workshop assignment for all participants that will help them learn about
one another and begin to identify shared interests to pursue during the
workshop.
2. Administrative demands before and during the workshop interfere with Peter’s efforts to facilitate participants’ substantive interactions. The use of a workshop facilitator reduced demands on Peter’s time during the workshop, but he remained involved in administrative tasks that could be handled by a graduate assistant. Use a graduate assistant to shift administrative tasks away from Peter before and during the workshop.
3. The workshop design successfully provided opportunities for
generative interactions, reflection, and reading within a tightly scheduled
program. A salient quality of the workshop was not large blocks of unstructured
time, but the generative way in which initially open time was filled as
participants planned activities, interacted informally, and worked in private. Proposals
for external funding might be strengthened by a more complete account of
‘emergence’ as a design principle that meets the needs of
participants who want to use their time productively and efficiently.
4.
To better pursue the objective of stimulating
interdisciplinary projects, and to improve the prospects for external funding,
future workshops should direct the experiential benefits described by
participants into long-term collaborations to produce materials and approaches
that are widely disseminated. The goal of the
workshop should be to plant the seeds for collaborations that will yield
significant products before the next workshop. Science education/public
understanding of science has been an important topical strand in the NewSSC and
presents opportunities for sustained collaborations that would enhance the
long-term impact of the workshop. The development of approaches and materials
that apply science, technology and society studies to science education/public
understanding of science is a field in which workshop participants could
achieve significant personal and intellectual transformations while that make
important scholarly and civic contributions through collaborative projects.