On feminism

Here is a typical snippet of a conversation that I am often engaged in.

Person (could be male or female): “So, what, are you like some sort of feminist or something?”

Me: “Uh…yeah”

Person: “Oh… really?”

Why is this so hard to believe? Seriously? Why are feminist and feminism dirty words?

Regardless of whatever TERRIFYING FEMINIST imagery you have in your head, let me explain to you what feminism means to me.

1. Feminism is a part of my identity, not everything about me. I am also Scottish, female, a daughter, a Bob Dylan fan, a sister, a student, a girlfriend, a researcher, a Dog Person, a liberal, a vegetarian, and someone who can lick her own elbow.

2. Feminism means different things to different people.  I recognise and respect that there are lots of sub-branches of feminism but I won’t go into them here – I don’t have enough in-depth knowledge on the subject and won’t claim to. The point is, we are not a homogenous group. Not all feminists are the same, just as not all men are the same, not all women are the same, not all liberals are the same, not all tories are the same, not all cat owners are the same.

3. For me, feminism is the strong belief that women should have equal opportunities and rights to men. (FYI, this does not mean that I believe teh menz and teh womenz are EXACTLY THE SAME. If you think that fighting for equal rights means fighting for recognition that males and females are the same, you’re getting it wrong.)

4. I feel very strongly that women should not be treated differently solely on the basis of their ownership of a vagina.

5. **Breaking news** I don’t hate men. Believe it or not, this is not a fundamental rule of feminism. I like men. I love some men. I dislike some men. I dislike some women. I love some women.

6.As shocking as it may seem, males can identify as feminists too, based on my definition stated in #3.

Me hanging out with fellow feminist Bill Bailey

I am a feminist. I am not ashamed of it, and I’m not going to apologise for it.

Girls and dolls

This video was brought to my attention by a friend this evening. Have a watch and see what you think.

My initial reaction was OMG THAT IS SO CREEPY LOOK AT HER EYEBALLS. But then I began to think – this girl is 15. On a daily basis I see young girls that age who are caked in just as much make-up as this girl, only instead of powder and iris-extending contact lenses, they opt for oodles of fake tan, fake eyelashes, padded bras and fake nails. And I have to admit, I don’t find the doll look significantly creepier than the one I’m more culturally used to.

I also found it interesting that the female presenter said she would be “horrified” if her daughter chose to look like that, saying “it’s not normal, is it?” What is normal for a 15 year old girl these days? I genuinely do not know. I wonder if she would be fine with her daughter wearing the same amount of make-up as she herself does every day. That’s not a jibe at the presenter, I am well aware that she does not control what goes on her face or body, such is the glamorous nature of being a female on television. I’m just saying that personally, in terms of the shit on their face, I don’t see much of a difference between the young girl and the presenter (aside from age).

The issue here is not some teenage girls wanting to look like dolls. It’s that for a long time now, such dolls have become the personification of the ultimate role models for our female children. Dolls have everything a girl could ever want. They have big houses and cute pets and awesome clothes and big pink cars. They are pretty and youthful. You have never seen an ugly, fat, flat-chested Barbie. They never age, they never wrinkle. Dolls are human-like, but are, importantly, objects. They do what you want them to do without questioning or talking back, always with a big, beaming smile on their face. Is that what we want to turn our daughters into? Is that really the best we can offer them?

We shouldn’t be telling these young girls that dressing like dolls is creepy. We should be asking them why the hell they would want to be a doll in the first place. Whether that doll is a porcelain, big-eyed anime character or an orange plastic Barbie, our girls need to know that they can be better than that.

If we don’t want our girls to look like this, how about we stop shoving this kind of ideological imagery in their pretty little faces from the moment they can hand-grasp?

Additional notes added after some sleep: Having watched a few of Venus’s own youtube videos, it becomes clear that this is a very intelligent young lady. She apparently speaks five languages and is clearly very articulate. Perhaps this is just a case of expressive teenage identity and individuality and she is different in that she has the confidence (perhaps built up through a massive following and external gratification on youtube) to pull it off, even though it is a bit “odd”. We do tend to associate femininity with weakness, perhaps what this girl is really doing is rebelling against such a view and combining extreme doll-like femininity with her own intelligent personality. How do we want our teenage girls to look? Should they embrace their femininity or should we encourage them to be more gender-neutral? I have always believed it’s all about choice and if your daughter wished to look like Venus for a while, would you encourage that as a marker of individuality, or tell her she is being ridiculous?

I really don’t know what to think about this one – what say yee, dear readers?

Informal learning: What’s that about?

When people think about learning, they often think about the kind of learning we all experience in school. We sit down nicely, we are given instructions in the form of a lesson, then we perhaps complete a project or a worksheet or a test in order to confirm that we have learned what we were supposed to learn.

But here is a pretty cool statistic that was brought to my attention at the Science Communication Conference (#SciCom12 ) last week: The average adult (this figure was specifically referring to American adults but it’s probably fairly generalisable to the UK too) spends a mere 5% of their lives in the classroom. The same report claimed that evidence demonstrates that most science is learned outside of school. So where are our kids learning about science? Well, from places like zoos, science centres, parks, museums, and through television programmes and websites.

My PhD research will be carried out in an environment which is all about informal learning; a science centre. Therefore it is of particular interest to me to know how informal science learning actually works. How does a museum, or a science centre, or an educational TV show, know that it is making a difference? This is exactly the question that was addressed at one of the Science Communication Conference sessions, entitled “Making a difference? Measuring the impact of informal learning“.

John Holman from the Wellcome Trust began by reminding everyone that you cannot measure impact if you do not know what you want to achieve. What does a science centre want to achieve in regards to learning? I can tell you what we’re not doing: We are not trying to do the same as schools. What would be the point? Schools do their thing in the formal learning world, and they do it well. Science centres, museums and other institutions try to encourage learning in a different way: Children get to explore and discover, in such a way that they don’t even realise they are learning. They are learning through experience, rather than through direction. However, whereas a school can measure the impact of their teaching directly and quantitatively through tests and exam scores, we in the informal learning field cannot. It is therefore much harder to show what impact we are having. Cognitive outcomes, such as those measured by tests and exams, may be easy to measure, but they may not be the most important outcomes.

So what is informal learning? Ben Johnson defined it as “anything that’s not curriculum”. Ben has been involved in science communication and education for over 15 years, working with schools in order to research, create and deliver drama based projects on various aspects of science. He admitted that he and others like him just do not have the resources to properly evaluate the impact his work has on the students, but there are steps that he does take in order to get some sort of useful feedback and an idea of impact. Ben uses observations of what actually happens in the sessions and also feedback from teachers, particularly what they say after a session (e.g. that the kids are still talking about the project a few weeks/months later). Ben also believes it is important to “embrace the anecdote”. In science we are always told that anecdotes are not data, but in some circumstances, a single case of a student giving particularly good feedback or an individual clearly getting something out of a project can speak volumes.

When working with children particularly, Ben stressed the importance of looking for evidence of thinking; i.e. when a child says something they have not heard during the session – a conclusion or a question that they have come up with themselves. This shows impact. For Ben, there are three things to look for when evaluating the impact of informal science learning: novelty, empathy and expression.

All of Ben’s points were really interesting, but what struck me as an academic working in science communication is that there is a missing link between research and practice. Emily Dawson reported that just under 14% of all research on informal science learning comes from UK researchers, which isn’t a bad statistic given the size of the country, but when looking at the quality of the articles (i.e. the top 60 cited papers) it becomes clear that there is just not enough good quality work on the impact of informal learning being done in the UK. The research that is being conducted, Emily stated, includes too few people (usually school groups) and in too few contexts (e.g. science museums).

So returning to the point raised by John Holman at the beginning: What are we trying to achieve through informal science learning? Penny Fidler, CEO of The UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres, believes that there are two answers to this question. The utilitarian answer is that we should be aiming to promote interest in science and encouraging young people. The cultural answer is that informal science learning is a creative and cultural pursuit, which is valid and important in its own right. What we really should be trying to achieve is to instill confidence in young people, and to assure them that they already have the skills it takes to be a scientist as long as they are curious and willing to try things out.

There needs to be more of a focus on the importance of informal science learning. If the average person spends 5% of their lives in the classroom, we need to make damned sure that the other 95% offers exciting, fun and engaging opportunities to learn science outside the walls of the school, and that such experiences are worthwhile and are having a meaningful impact.