Challenges in Democratizing Science and How to Address Them?

Jaikishan Advani

We live in times when the scientific temperament has been facing a tremendous setback. The idea of science has always been highly narrow and specialized in the minds of science professionals, and it is alien to the masses. The pseudoscience practices, ritualism, and superstitions have always been ingrained in the daily life of our society. However, today we also face a political climate where there is a systematic attack on the scientific temper of the population. The overwhelming dominance of superstitious babas in the functioning of society, propagation of superstitions by state-sponsored mass events such as Kumbh Mela, the pseudoscience being spread in academic institutions and conferences such as the Indian Science Congress, and the blurring of the gap between state and religion are evident. Science today is facing serious funding cuts, and basic science is suffering the most. Syllabi are being changed, and pseudoscientific and irrational elements are being incorporated into them. Initiatives such as March for Science and Breakthrough Science Society has taken up these issues against the attack on science such as funding cuts and the spread of pseudoscience by individuals in top positions in academia; however, a large gap exists between common people and academic science, which is preventing science from becoming people’s entity. For the People’s Science Movement today, the task is not only to understand what the problems of science are but also to understand what science itself is.

Due to capitalist competition and commodification, academic science itself has been converted into a commodity, a publish or perish culture of science institutions has eliminated the culture of mass science. Science is not being looked at as a process, an endeavour to learn from mistakes, being curious, and involving people in this process to learn something new, instead an activity to get the results, academic promotions, and awards. The role of institutions is not to involve people in science but to select a few bright individuals who can be shown as a sign of the success of an institution. Access to science is reducing, students are being forced to drop out of science due to competitive exams such as NEET, CUET. The gatekeepers’ role in science is precisely to eliminate public access and public participation in science. This anti-people culture has influenced the academicians in institutions, and teachers themselves face difficulty if a student asks them a question. Therefore, any activity that involves scientific questioning, argumentation, performing experiments, proving or falsifying claims is curbed even in classrooms by teachers or heads of the departments. The mechanical projects, which are based on rote learning, competition, and passing an examination, are promoted, replacing the real process of science, which involves experimenting, questioning, constructing their knowledge, and collaborating within and beyond classrooms or institutional boundaries.

Amid the growing challenges to the People’s Science Movement, the initiative

Collaboratively Understanding Biology Education (CUBE), which was initiated at Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR, and is currently part of Kishore Bharati, has tried to implement the principles of open-science within as well as outside the institutional spaces. The CUBE program was envisioned by Prof. M.C Arunan at Sophia College, Mumbai, and was started at HBCSE, TIFR, in collaboration with Prof. G.Nagarjuna. The idea of CUBE was influenced by Obaid Siddiqi, a great Indian scientist and institutional builder at NCBS, TIFR. Obaid Siddiqi believed science can be done by simple means and said, “Sophistication is required in the mind, not in the lab”. Therefore, CUBE by principle involves the use of Simple Model Systems to perform experiments, asking questions, involving school and college students, parents, teachers, and researchers on the same platform, and learning by doing science. CUBE initiative has created several projects which are connected to the daily life of students, such as studying nail regeneration using nail election ink mark, studying areas such as Seasonomics using the flowering of gulmohar trees, projects like We and Weather by counting sneezes, which also helps to understand epidemics such as Covid-19. As mango is a favourite fruit of many people, a project such as Mango Mapping is a big success in the CUBE program, which helped collect data on Mangoes from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. These Citizen Science projects are investigative, they are connected to daily lives of people, therefore the alienation of people from engaging in them is reduced, the topics are connected to their health and well being, for example, one can find students in CUBE program who catch mosquitoes and instead of killing and throwing them they observe and identify them, the students even help to predict in which season mosquito borne illnesses will increase in their city and how to control it. After each election, students from different parts of the country involve their parents as well as grandparents in the process of taking pictures of their nail growth using an election mark on their nail as a reference and measure the nail growth rate of the people of different age groups. They involve their parents also in the process of trapping mosquitoes. These activities create a catalyst effect where even parents engage in scientific things around them and learn by being curious about what their children are doing.

CUBE program engages participants in an online video-conferencing platform, Chatshaala (a term coined instead of Pathshaala). The Chatshaala is an inverse of Pathshaala as it involves learning through chatting, gossiping, and discussing. Chatshaala brings students, teachers, parents, and researchers on a common platform online from different parts of the country, where they discuss daily about what activities or projects they did and learn from each other. It is also followed by online chat-based conversations on messaging platforms and social media. The platform, such as Chatshaala provides an alternative space for students other than the classroom where they can engage in doing things, whereas in the classroom mostly they engage in rote-learning, here they get collaborators to ask questions, discuss, argue, perform experiments, collect data, and get an exposure to scientific process and investigations which are absent in classrooms. These kinds of interactions develop scientific rigour as well as scientific temperament among students, where they learn to doubt, ask questions, and critically engage with anything they are presented with. The CUBE program performs conferences, events in colleges, and workshops where the basic focus is to engage learners in doing science, engaging in the process of science, and building a community of science practitioners.

Home Lab movement started by CUBE is a major initiative, which is very crucial for the People’s Science Movement. Students in CUBE often face challenges in having a sustained space for performing experiments freely. To have a lab or a workspace is an essential requirement of engaging in science. Many times, students face that colleges don’t permit them the space for doing real science, maintaining living creatures, and allowing students entry all the time freely. Many times, the authorities face space constraints or disturbance due to such free and open movement of people’s participation in science. Therefore, students were forced to explore their own spaces at their homes. Home Labs are the spaces in the kitchen or the veranda, where students utilize simple kitchen materials and some living organisms to perform experiments. Some of the students used a Potato as a medium to grow and study bacteria such as was done by scientist Robert Koch in the 1800s. Several discoveries that scientists such as Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur made were initiated in home lab environments. Home labs can be an integral part of People’s Science as they provide the scope of involving entire families in scientific engagements, which can help in demystifying several superstitious practices that come up at home and among families.

As Romila Thapar states, today we lack public intellectuals who can question authority. The reason is that the culture of social participation and critical thought has eroded in academic spaces; the culture of asking questions to authority and those in power, criticizing and being critical of oneself, has faded away. Academic spaces, which should promote democracy, critical thought, rationality, and provide autonomy to individuals, are working in exactly the opposite manner under the political influence. Therefore, the challenge today is to reclaim the spaces within academia as well as outside. The way forward is only by promoting the participation of people in science through programs such as CUBE and breaking the social barriers that prevent access to science. The culture of academic spaces can only be changed when a few public intellectuals take up the task of reforming their institutions, bringing democracy in functioning and breaking the rigid boundaries between institutions and people, barriers or compartments between subjects, and dissolving the culture of authority worship. Scientific temperament is never going to be brought by institutions, but by the people and the science movement driven by people.

Today, the role of public intellectuals is more than just propagating science, it is also to change how science is perceived and done, change the way science academic institutions are functioning, create means for access to science for many, and involve people in the practice of science.

CUBE program which was started at Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR, could not be continued at the centre, due to administrative changes and no interest of the renewed leadership of the institution in the program which promotes people’s science. While programs like Olympiad, which are based on selecting a few students through competitive exams, and winning national level awards, are still continuing and getting institutional and governmental support. Even though the CUBE program currently is supported by only a few public intellectual’s personal initiatives. However, it is still continuing with the same spirit because of active participation of members from different parts of the country who continue to be passionate in doing science and promoting it further to the people.

We invite the readers to join Chatshaala at https://metastudio.org/ to participate in scientific discussions of the CUBE program and get involved in the process of learning by doing science.

Jaikishan Advani is a STEM educator and volunteer of the CUBE program.