Stories from settings and characters

Being as it's Christmas, I've been thinking about the Christmas story.  Like most stories, you can construct it from its setting and its characters.  I analysed the Christmas carols we sing at services:

Carol	Setting	Characters	Comment
Once in Royal David’s City	A town, with a cattle shed, stable	Mother, baby,	Nowadays, you are unlikely to find any cattle in a city, but until the beginning of the 20th century, people provided fresh milk in towns and cities by keeping cows in the town. You can find old pictures of cattle grazing on the open spaces. Stables were needed everywhere because of the use of horses for transport.
While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night	Night time,	Shepherds, angels, baby, manger (stable)
The First Nowell	Fields, cold winter’s night	Angel, shepherds, sheep
Little Town of Bethlehem	Silent morning, stars, dark street,	Angels present, and sleeping mortals, but interesting absence of people but with reference mortals sleeping, and God, Christ and Mary.
Silent Night	Bright, silent night, near dawn	Mother, child, shepherds, contrasting noise from a singing ‘heavenly host’
Three Kings	Star, Bethlehem plain	Kings, 3 from the orient, and a fourth born, referred to but otherwise not active.	Notice the use of props (boundary objects) in this carol.  Each gift has a meaning.
Little Donkey	A road, town in sight, star above, cattle shed	Mary, donkey, wise men,
Good King Wenceslas	Deep crisp even snow, bright moon lit night, forest,	King (old man) and page boy, poor man carry fuel (pine logs)
Little Drummer Boy	The setting isn’t stated	Ox, lamb, drummer boy, Mary, baby, “They”	Note the need for the prop (the drum). The “they” refers to people who told the boy to bring gifts.

You see how, knowing characters and settings you can construct a story.  If you have a Christian background, you probably know the story is about the same in most of these carols - they all refer to night time, a clear night and a special star, and they are all about a special baby.  Some of them make this an opportunity to express another sentiment or meaning.  For instance, the "Three Kings" uses the gift of myrrh to forecast the baby's death.  "Once in Royal David's City" admonishes children to be as obedient and good as the baby. "While Shepherds Watched" offers glory to God. 
For the JuxtaLearn project, students need similarly identify settings and characters that unfold a story that expresses a deeper meaning about the STEM subject of interest. 
Happy Christmas.

Engaging and disengaging

"I am writing to inform you that we as a Faculty have discussed the idea further and are not able to contribute to the project."

thus emailed a school contact, disengaging from our project.  I didn't get the marketing right, not for this public for our research.  The gatekeepers are school teachers, the people that would have to orchestrate the classrooms and timetables while the students juxtapose their learning with their own performed ideas. And my targeting email got it wrong. 

However, my colleague, Gill has been working on this and written a one page hand-out that starts:

JuxtaLearn is a large EU-­funded project that aims to help students overcome the barriers presented by Tricky Topics which often cause students to give up a subject. During initial trials, 74% of students showed progression in their quiz results over the course of the day. The JuxtaLearn Workshops can be run as a series of sessions. All sessions and supporting tools are free to schools. The first session is with researchers and teacher(s) and takes place before the student sessions. Student sessions are flexible; they can run over a full school day, or split into smaller sessions with activities taking place pre-­‐workshop following the flipped classroom approach.

Then she outlines the preparatory session for teacher training and professional development.  I particularly like how she shows the radar charts that reveal gaps in student understanding, indicating that teachers will learn to write effective quiz questions that will result in such useful charts.

Links to our videos are

• JuxtaLearn tricky topic tool and quiz: https://vimeo.com/109829640 (2 minutes 56 secs)
• JuxtaLearn workshop (chemistry): https://vimeo.com/109827064 (3 minutes 21 secs)
• Juxtaposing performance and learning :  https://vimeo.com/109331885 (3 minutes)

So we'll try sharing this information with other schools.  Will they engage?

"Publics" or an amorphous mass?

If you want to get people to engage you need to differentiate between them and that's what Andrew's done in his previous posting on draft questions, referring frequently to "publics".  "Publics" is a new term to me.  In ordinary life, I'm used to hearing phrases like "in public" or "the public" but not the plural form "publics". Yet in his posting, Andrew talked about engaging with publics.  For example,

"the publics can be engaged...", "the publics we need to focus on...",  "how do the publics ...understand...?"  and "how do members of these publics communicate...?"

Yet, the term is not in Holliman's dimensions of engagement, despite it being another 'P'. (Holliman's dimensions are: people, purposes, processes, participation, performance and politics). I found a relevant paper by Nick Mahoney, "The work of public engagement". Nick highlights three different ways of viewing of the public, and in doing that perhaps his paper gives the reader a better understanding of what academic social scientists mean by "publics", because that's what I think the term is - a specialist one for academic social scientists.
The three perspectives that he introduces are:

1. "emergence-oriented" - the public comes out, shows itself through talking (discourse and reflection)
2. philosophical and normative in its approach - how the public should be and should act (democratically)
3. calculative - a real and pre-existing entity that allows researchers "to investigate, quantify and represent"

So if you're an academic engager (!) taking these different perspectives into account might be useful when you want to engage with the publics.
I don't think the publics would appreciate these academic perspectives. Dr Alice Bell, when asked for her top tips for public engagement,  had a more cynical view on the term 'public', analysing both 'public' and the term 'engagement'.  ON publics, she said, simply,

"People who work in public engagement sometimes prefer to talk about publics, to emphasise that it isn’t one big lump."

That I understand.   People can't be lumped together.

And that's what Andrew's done in his posting on draft questions.  He's identified:

• students
• teachers
• researchers

with different perspectives on each of them. People are not one big amorphous mass.

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Bell, A. (2014). Public Engagement with Science: Top Tips. [online] Www3.imperial.ac.uk. Available at: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/graduateschool/currentstudents/publicengagement [Accessed 1 Dec. 2014].
Mahoney, N. (2013) 'The Work of Public Engagement', Comunicazioni sociali, Vol 3, No 349-358.