farah mendlesohn - popular science...

The following piece was lost to editing from The Inter-Galactic Playground: Children and Science Fiction which will be published by McFarland Press in 2009. In this section, I took a look at the nominations for the Aventis Prize for popular science writing, 2001-2005 in the chidren’s book caegory. What I was interested in was what these books thought children could cope with.

The majority of these popular science books defy the idea common to the pedagogy that children resist factual information, that they need hands on experience to engage them. This, however, is not the end of the issue. Across these books there were different ideas about what a “fact-filled” book should achieve, and sometimes there appeared to be an internal conflict as to what the author thought was interesting and their a priori assumptions about their audience.

The most problematic/interesting examples were for the younger readers. Jacqui Bailey’s A Cartoon History of the Earth, aimed at the very young, suffered from loss of complexity. Its very user-friendliness reduced the value of the text to a “closed” story and one which, quite inadvertently, managed to promote Successive Creation: each type of plant or animal was described as “appearing”, only very occasionally was the sense given that one emerged from another. The first mention of Darwin and his thinking was at the back of the book. In a different fashion, Nick Arnold’s Suffering Scientists appeared conflicted as to what it wanted the book to achieve. Arnold uses the appalling things scientists went through—both physical harm and political persecution—to explore the development of the scientific method. However, one aspect of his jokiness is constantly to say “you wouldn’t want to do that would you?” The book ends: “And even when it’s horrible, it’s horribly fascinating, amazing and even exciting. And although science lessons can be boring—real science is never boring.” (224) While it is clear that is meant to be ironic, to encourage children into science by making it seem cool and something adults wouldn’t want them to do, there remains a note of disparagement.

The most common strategy was to assume that huge numbers of facts, assembled together with excellent pictures, would in themselves arouse curiosity. Richard Platt’s Forensicsand David Burnie’s Dinosaur Encyclopedia epitomized this approach, but with rather different results.

Forensics was beautifully set out, with glorious, glossy pictures. It is a very good book of the old-fashioned career type, setting out what forensic science is for and taking children through from the crime scene to the different ways of assessing evidence in no particular order, but clearly and simply. The assumption here is that children are information hungry. However, the tendency in this book is to describe, not to explain: the discussion of DNA and blood groups never goes beyond description; we are told that people are very difficult to identify via photograph but there is no explanation as to why; computer crime can be tracked, but we aren’t really told how or by whom. One effect of this is that the professions blur, not that they all seem the same, but there is no clear discussion of the routes into these jobs. You have to go to the very end of the book to find a list of some of the roles, and there is still no career advice (such as “study chemistry if you are interested in firearms”).

David Burnie’s Dinosaur Encyclopedia offered far more detail and clearly linked ideas and information, showing how the latter led to the former, not the other way around. Each double page spread covered a topic, although there was some leakage over the page on occasions (this appears to be a standard format in these bed-sheet sized books). Each page contained glossy painted illustrations, continuous prose and small “enhancement” boxes with additional material. What made the book stand out was that process was described to explain why “factual material” was evidence for the claims being made so for example, in the section “How Fossils Form” (18-19) Burnie explains why fossils are so rare, that there are many things that can go wrong in the process, and that the relative frequency of trilobites (and their skin shedding) has enabled paleontologists to use them to construct a time line or fossil calendar. There is a very beautiful diagram at the bottom that shows the process of fossilization. The page works to demonstrate how information is a jigsaw puzzle that is consequently in the process of throwing up new questions. This is even clearer in the discussion, “A Question of Size” (84-85).

Burnie explains gigantism as driven partially by predation (larger animals survive, but larger predators are also more successful) and the way in which the larger dinosaurs digestive system worked, which put a premium on the generation of heat from larger and larger stomachs. However, gigantism is stalled by “increasing difficulties mating and laying eggs” and the strain put on the heart by the geometric increase in mass.

To visualise how this happened, imagine three ‘dinosaurs’ shaped like cubes, with sides 1cm, 5cm and 10cm long. The second dinosaur is only five times as long as the first, but is weight is 125 times as great (the result of multiplying 5x5x5). The third dinosaur is 10 times as long, which means that it weighs a thousand times as much as the first. Once sauropods reached lengths of about 20m, each additional metre meant a jump in weight of over a tonne--a tremendous burden that still had to be supported by just four legs.

The strength of a leg depends on its cross-sectional area, rather than its volume. This means that if an animal gets larger while keeping the same overall shape, its weight outstrips its strength, so its legs are put under greater and greater stress, Sauropods coped with this by modifying their leg bones, and by keeping bending to a minimum, but in the end it would have been weight, rather than anything else, that brought their growth to a halt.
Burnie succeeds in demonstrating the openness of science and the degree to which one element of knowledge rests on many others, that knowledge is an expanding jigsaw, not independent particles. What Burnie achieves, is to recreate the process of following the information trail, into “experimental thought”. Instead of “do this, then do that”, it’s “think of this, then think of that”. The irony is that this is missing from one of the books that claim to be precisely to be about getting children to think scientifically or to think as scientists.

Georgina Andrews and Kate Knighton, 100 Experiments, is a great book to occupy children. It is full of games. What it isn’t, is full of experiments, and woe betide the parent of a “why?” child who does not themselves have a scientific education. Each double-page spread contains an “experiment”, which consists of a list of instructions, followed by an explanation. The problem is that the explanations never go far enough, so that what a child is doing is practical mechanics, not actually science. Here is a typical example.

1. soaking blotting paper in red cabbage, then using the strips to test vinegar, bicarbonate of soda and water, and just water. Here is the explanation.

What’s Going On?

The indicator papers change colour when you mix them with an acid or an alkali. Acids always turn the paper as an acid and alkali detector. Vinegar is an acid and bicarbonate of soda is an alkali. Water is neutral—it’s neither acid nor alkali—and so doesn’t make the paper change colour. Try testing other things such as fizzy drinks, tea or milk.

So what’s missing? Yes, that’s right. Any explanation at all of why any of the above happens. What exactly is the role of that cabbage? That isn’t an explanation. It is a description and it says the same thing at least two, if not three times. It is a brilliant example of pre-Newtonian science in which each observation is discrete to that set of ingredients. There are examples of more thoroughgoing explanations: one that does work, and rather shows up the others, is an explanation of meringue which at least mentions that albumin is made of chains and has a diagram to show the way that, after whisking, the chains uncurl and trap bubbles. But for the most part, Andrews and Knighton seem to be with Lazer Golderb in their assumption that telling children partial or “friendly” stories will aid their understanding of the world.

Only two of the short listed titles manage to combine both information density and experimentalism successfully. Robin Kerrod and Dr Sharon Ann Holgate’s, The Way Science Works is a superb example of science as process. With each topic we are given the history of the “discovery”, have it explained in terms of the theory, given a practical example, and provided with an experiment to do. Each experiment is explained in clear terms which match the theory that has been offered; the experiment is not presented as “specific” in its results but as an illustration to the theory. My two criticisms relate to something I will be discussing in the following chapter on the changing expectations of childhood competence: in Kerrod and Holgate’s book, despite the fact that it is aimed at pre-teens, experiments only have to involve a knife or boiling water to attract the “parents needed” symbol, and some of the experiments seem to be concerned with use, not making: the experiment for radio waves requires the user to move a torch close to a radio arial, not to build a radio. However elsewhere there is instruction on circuit boards and motors.

Johnny Ball’s Think of a Number is a very delayed tie-in to his 1980s television show, and the layout of the pages, and the language of the text matches the exuberance of that broadcast. Each page is dense with information and diagrams, each topic is followed by examples, and the examples are followed by numbers. Ball, like Kerrod and Holgate, has reversed the processes advocated by the constructivists: all three present theory and information, followed by exploration—a guided tour, not a magical mystery tour. I’m not sure I can do justice to Ball’s book, but to give but one example, Ball entraps the child’s imagination about numbers in one double-page spread, which asks the reader to imagine a world without numbers through news headlines: a lottery of colored balls, a game with “lots and lots of goals”, a high jump record “a bit higher than the last record.” But the book itself is astonishingly information dense: there are sections on the history of numbers and maths, there is instruction on geometry, and excellent pages on patterns in numbers such as the Fibonacci sequence and Pascal’s triangle. It expects children to get excited and it deliberately provides more than they could possibly manage (excepting the odd genius) on each page. This last point maybe the crucial one. There is a long history of research that suggests that the most significant variable in a child’s education is the expectations of the teacher. What was un-nerving about so much of the pedagogy, was that alongside celebrating the child’s capacity to explore, there was a continual thread of pessimism: science is difficult, most children won’t be able to cope. In contrast, Ball, Kerrod, Holgate, and Burnie, demonstrate enormous faith in children’s capacity.

I want to leave this section with one last thought: almost all of the books discussed here are for children and young teens. Only Nicola Morgan’s book can be considered for the older age group. It is as if, as Natalie Angier observed, general interest in science is seen as an occupation for children: teens are expected either to be interested in science and hence studying science and reading popular science books intended for adults, or to be a lost cause. It is a pattern strikingly like the one found in science fiction for children and teens.