Most notably, it is also the subject matter rife with misconceptions – both among school students and adults (King, 2012). In schools, students often struggle with science content and find it to be dry or dull (Millar, 1991). Science is an area that many people feel disconnected from as a subject matter (Firestein, 2012). At a broader level, we extend these ideas to science education overall, to consider how popular media can make science education more compelling – and how these ideas might translate to science content in schools. It also considers the affective side of the field of science and technology, in an attempt to bridge the gap between science and arts in educative terms. This paper examines the ideas that emerged based on the noted themes of aesthetic science education, through examples used in this show. We then extend beyond this framework as a coding schema, to include emergent themes and ideas on the topic that arose in the show’s science education discourse. We use Girod’s (2007a) framework for beauty and aesthetics in science and science education, to categorize examples from the show. We examined the discourse in the show to look for examples and ways in which science as a discipline and scientists themselves were portrayed in an aesthetic light. Therefore, the commentary, portrayal of scientists, and general scientific discourse presented in this show provide credible grounds for examining the relationship between aesthetics/beauty and learning in the sciences, and considering what is compelling to public in the presentation of educational science material.
It is based on the original series by scientist Carl Sagan (perhaps the most significant science educator in popular discourse and media of all time), and is created under the guidance and supervision of his protégé, popular astrophysicist and host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Cosmos is one of the most popular and current educational media sources for scientific knowledge in the public discourse. This study focused on data from the television-based documentary series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. This paper involves a qualitative study on the representation of beauty and aesthetics in the discipline of science, and more broadly science education.
Our particular interest here is in how aesthetic ideas play out in popular representations of science. There have been some arguments that this aesthetic perspective (as opposed to an instrumental perspective) in science and mathematics has much to offer educators. Physicists suggest that beauty is an important criterion for theory selection (Gell-Mann, 2007). Mathematicians describe proofs as being elegant. For instance, scientists often speak of their work in aesthetic terms. Introduction Keats famously wrote "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Whether or not he was speaking of science and mathematics, it is an idea that has resonated with practitioners of these disciplines. Although the series itself was about science, we found that, visually, they presented scientific objects, spaces, and people in an aesthetic light. We also found the series to be explaining the science in truth of the grand design and revealing its true beauty. We found that the series depicted science as capable of capturing the sublime, and reflecting the intellectual beauty inherent in the discovery and invention. We used Girod’s (2007a) framework for beauty and aesthetics in science and science education to categorize the recurring themes. The study involved analysis of the general scientific discourse presented in the documentary series to examine the ways in which science as a discipline and scientists themselves were portrayed in an aesthetic light.
Through the ‘Cosmos’: Beauty and Aesthetics in Science Education and Popular Media Abstract: This paper presents the findings of a phenomenological study of the television-based documentary series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (Braga & Druyan, 2014).