The MIT Museum’s Experimental Practice Group strives to advance new ways of engaging the public with science. The Group has multiple projects in its portfolio, one of which is the Science in Vivo Project. This project aims to integrate science experiences into existing cultural contexts, settings, and events. Their goal is to foster “situated engagement,” which is moving beyond the hands-on activities typically associated with science outreach and finding ways to bring science into communities in culturally meaningful ways. For example, the Atlanta Science Festival has hosted a hands-on science zone at DragonCon for years, but in 2019 they found a way to become a part of DragonCon tradition by joining DragonCon’s public parade.

Situated engagement is a new practice for most science outreach teams, so in order to help them improve their practice Science in Vivo recruited pairs of observers to visit eight situated engagement sites, observe interactions with and reactions from community members, and then share their observations with the science outreach teams. These critiques were extremely helpful in helping the science outreach teams debrief the live events they were part of. Observer pairs usually included one person with expertise in science engagement and one with professional expertise in a different domain. Observers often traveled long distances to observe the event. Now, Science in Vivo would like to include a third observer with deep ties to the community the event is situated in, in order to add a community member’s perspective to the observation team. Ben Wiehe and Amanda Figueroa presented this challenge at a LabStorm at Feedback+Atlanta. The conversation was wide-ranging and covered multiple suggestions from attendees, including:

  • Be explicit about the expertise local observers contribute.
  • Consider a variety of methods to collect representative feedback. 
  • Involve community observers in shaping observation questions.

Read the full article about integrating science into communities by Lily Kirschner at Feedback Labs.