Team:USP-EEL-Brazil/Public Engagement
What is science?
The mission of CBSin as a NGO is to reduce barriers of science between academia and society. To know what path to follow, we need to be in constant communication with both sides. In that way, we went to Lorena's public square and to the University campus to discuss about science. We were interested in gathering kinds of understanding and point of views of science most people have, not only people related to science such as graduate students, professors or researchers.
We can define science as: “The study of the nature and behavior of natural things and the knowledge that we obtain about them.” [Collins Dictionary] or “The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.” [Oxford Dictionary]
We asked the population these simple questions:
1) What is science for you?
2) Why is science important for you?
3) Why university is important to society?
4) Have you done something of your house by yourself (DIY)?
We didn’t give them answers ready to select like an exam, we left a blank space an let people write what they wanted. We did that on purpose, because we wanted to see what people really think of science. Only to analyse the data we tried to establish standards and allocated the answers in these standard answers, based on the what written by our public.
Both publics answered that science is an investigation just like its definition. However, we can see that a small part of the population from Lorena see much more stuff in science: lots of them see science as a synonymous of life, nature, and the universe which are branches of scientific study. It was nice to see how the ordinary population see potential in science.
As you also can see, it’s not all the people that see university as an institution responsible to build professionals or help the improvement of social equality/development like the graduation students see. Most of the population see the university just as an institution for developing study, not necessarily related to building professional or social development. Maybe we can conclude from this that science and the research in Brazil is something distant from most of society. Now, with CBSin, we want to change this reality.
