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 so in that way we went to public squares to discuss with the population from Lorena about science. We were concerned about others kinds of understanding and point of views of science mostly people has, not only people related to science such as graduation students, professors or researches. And for comparing two kinds of different publics we also made the question with our students colleagues and professors.
Well we can define science as: “Science is the study of the nature and behaviour 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 behaviour 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 gave them answers ready to select like an exam, we left a blank space an let people write what they wanted. We did that on pourpuse, because we wanted to see what people really think of science. But for analyzing the data we tried to establish standard questions and we allocated the answers in these standard answers, based on the answers written by our public.
So as can see the mostly of both publics answer that science is investigation just like its definition. However we can 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 universe wich are branches that science study, it is nice to see how the ordinary population see potential in science.
As you also can see, it’s not all the population that see university as an institution responsible to build professionals or help the improvement of social equality/development like the graduation students see, mostly 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 the most of society.
