Popular Science Between News and Education: A European Perspective

Abstract

Typically, scholars that do research on models and structures of science education understand their work as rather independent of issues like popularization and journalism. Further academic pursuits that ask about the history of popular science including its specific audiences and genres on the one hand and that try to explore the preferable ways for journalists to write about news from science and technology on the other hand may exist in their own right. Systematic science education, one may hold, in particular as it is related to institutions such as schools and universities must be confounded neither with popular readings that blend entertainment with telling stories about science nor with science news within the daily press. While the latter would be too unsystematic to count as education, the former may not really teach new skills but rather amount to second-order discussion on scientific developments. Education, popularization, and journalism may hence appear as distinguishable endeavors that all relate to science but do not necessary function in connection. The collection of five papers in this special issue intends to disproof this view—at least to some extent. The argument becomes particularly strong from a wider European perspective, and rather than concentrating on the ‘‘big’’ science nations like Britain, Germany and France one may consider the developments in the European periphery, where educational institutions (even in the twentieth century) still had to develop a wide availability and an independent standing (Daum 2009; Papanelopoulou et al. 2009). Within the process of creating a general scientific literacy the Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish cases show to what extent popularization and science news in the daily press have contributed to a complex educational project. Along the same lines it is often hard to distinguish popular books on science from early science textbooks, a distinction that is just so obvious for academic professionalism in the ‘‘big’’ science nations. For this reason it appears reasonable not to divide the various discourses on science too quickly into education, popularization, and science news and better to concentrate on the circulation of knowledge— or on ‘‘knowledge in transit’’ (Secord 2004)—in which all three fields may participate and interact. This view opens up a particular diverse field. Events like earth quakes or solar