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Hi All,
Here's an early interview with Frank Oppenheimer that was done shortly after I started working at the Exploratorium.  Unfortunately, Jackie is not captured in any interviews I know of. In any case it aptly captures so much of the ExploSpirit and intent.

Oppenheimer:  Portis [Alan M. Portis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_M._Portis] was head of the Lawrence Hall of Science, and other people working there, and their mission was different enough and their situation was different enough that people saw right away that we weren't doing the same thing. That is, the really exhibit-centered emphasis at the Exploratorium and the Science Curriculum Development emphasis of Lawrence Hall were different enough, so that I don't think anybody felt that we were doing something they should do or vice versa. Whether there were any other undercurrents or not, I don't know. There probably were, but nothing very serious.

Weiner:Did you find you were able to attract people to work with you, understood the concept and agreed with it?

Oppenheimer: Yes, there were a lot of young people working with us who did very well, and they're still there, although I don't know that they'll stay forever. The second summer that we were working and actually the first summer that we were really open, Phil and Phyllis Morrison came and helped a lot. And many of the people around the area contributed ideas. Some of them even made things. We had a little committee set up, especially in areas with which I was unfamiliar, like some of the things in visual perception, where I learned a lot and where some of the people then brought in their own exhibits. Somebody at SRI made something, and some faculty over in Berkeley did, and so on.

Weiner:How did these people, not these people themselves but a lot of young people, how did they get paid?

Oppenheimer:Well, the staff people, who are more in their twenties, get paid from the grants, from the general purpose grant mostly, but some of them, when we get an exhibit development grant, some of them are involved entirely in that. Then the other people, the high school students that work there, we usually get special grants for that program, aid they're paid from those. The Rosenberg Foundation helped us to start with. Then the Sloan Foundation. And now we have a grant from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The latter supports this so-called high school explainer program.

Weiner:What were your expectations when you went into it, in terms of what you hoped to see? Did you have
in mind a particular goal over a certain time period?

Oppenheimer:Yes, and I think we're running about half speed. I thought we'd be able to get much larger sums of money to start with, several hundred thousand dollar grants, rather than several tens of thousands dollar grants. Maybe somebody else like Zacharias [Jerrold Zacharias, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrold_R._Zacharias] would have gotten the larger grants, but I didn't.

Weiner:There was never any thought of the need of affiliating your programs with somebody else's Zacharias'
program?

Oppenheimer:No. It might have helped, been part of the California Academy, but I don't think they wanted it there, it was too different. It would have been very good to have been a branch of a university like Stanford University, but there was no interest there. That may come in time, given additional stability and additional staff. But there were a lot of individuals in stability and additional staff. But there were a lot of individuals in universities and research outfits and even companies that volunteered to do things, and that seemed to me one of the virtues of a museum, that people who wanted to be part of the educational process, but who couldn't do it in a school because there were curricula to follow and deadlines and you had to give classes. In museums there aren't very many deadlines. And it's worked out to some extent, not to the extent that I'd hoped, but I think partly because in order to make it work, I'd have to go around more and more as I did in the beginning to other people, whereas what happens is — as the place gets going, your time gets consumed by the place, and you don't wander around as much. But it immediately gives the impression, I think, that it's a very honest place. We don't have mock-ups of phenomena and things, we show the real thing.

Weiner:Yes, it's almost a shock when you walk in, compared to what people expect.

Oppenheimer:Yes. And it's having an impact. A lot of other places are trying to do some of the things, some new places starting up, even in little towns. I don't know if they'll be successful or not. I hope we can get to help them more, but places like Aspen, Eureka, a little town in Pennsylvania, and then other larger museums trying to make sections like this, place in Miami, the San Diego Museum sent a big contingent of their staff up for planning the new science museum and planetarium. It has a small exhibit place that they thought they could do something. I think it's affected Dennis Flanagan and his ideas. So it's doing some of what I hoped it would do, in making it seem possible to do more science education.

Weiner:Because of the informal aspect of the thing

Oppenheimer:Yes. And it really has something of a curricula. It isn't just a collection of anything that anybody's willing to hand you, or a lot of traveling shows.

Weiner:Well, how long — you said you were going half speed and mentioned specifically the numbers, half the numbers you wanted — if you had a goal, it would really be fully operational, effective, influential — is it a five year plan?
Oppenheimer:Well, it is that, already, but as far as the content goes and the completeness of the curricula, I'd have thought we would have gotten done quite a long ways in five years, and I think after four years, we're about half way to where I thought we would be in the time. It's going all right. It's rich enough in content now so that people don't see it all in one visit, and they come back over and over again. There are many problems associated with tt — the fact that it's so hard to be reflective while you're doing busy working exhibits, or to be at all analytical, means that we have to find some way of supplementing the museum visit with other kinds of material, either written material or little films or television broadcasts that pertain directly to it. Something I want to get done in the next year or so.

Weiner:Well, I think that would mean getting people to write pamphlets and so forth.

Oppenheimer:Yes. I think that's one approach. We are writing a catalog that talks in more depth about many of the
things. And ,we are developing little mini-courses using exhibits of interlocking curricula, and they will help.

Weiner:What does this mean in terms of what you want over a period of time, what people can get out of it?

Oppenheimer:Well, I think there are a lot of different kinds of things. A sense that nature's very rich and understandable and interconnected, would be one thing — that they can get interested in looking, observing more carefully and fiddling around on their own with it. And I remember setting up one exhibit, asking somebody what they saw, and the person backed away and said, "No — what aim I supposed to see?" And if we could get rid of this feeling that you can't see something unless you know what you're supposed to see, it would be very good. (Get a feeling that you can see something without knowing what you're supposed to see.)
Weiner:But the aim is not to make them scientists

Oppenheimer:No. There's a conviction that some people may start being scientists because they've been there. That does happen to some extent at all science museums. I've had people tell me how they got started in science at the Chicago Museum. So I think it may help in that way. It may determine, I may shape people's lives, but that's certainly not the primary aim. It's a nice outcome when that happens.

Weiner:Your primary aim's the one of interesting people in the subject

Oppenheimer:Yes, and enabling them to feel that things are understandable, and not with the idea that people will necessarily vote better because they know science, but they might vote better if they thought that things were understandable.

Weiner:I don't know if that makes it easier —

Oppenheimer:I don't know either. I don't think even "better" is the right word. They might take a more thoughtful part in the whole process. But a lot of guff has been written about how democracy needs an informed citizenry, as if this were all by itself going to make everything work well, and I don't believe that, and I don't think the point of it is quite —

Weiner:People can more easily be manipulated — Well, I think that as far as the historical side is concerned, your interest in this brings us to the things I wanted to probe with you today. Is there anything I can keep up with, read what you've written recently which addresses this? So unless there's something that you feel we should go over, things in your life history of significance that I did not ask about, did not know about to ask —?

Oppenheimer:No, I can't think of anything now. I mean, I think a lot of it isn't of significance, but I can't think of

This interview brushes the 273 line limit!
Charles Carlson 
Senior Scientist | Teacher Institute





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