This text is part of the special Acfas Congress booklet
As luck would have it, a global pandemic occurred as the centenary of Acfas approached. “However, this organization was founded in 1923, at the end of another great pandemic, that of the Spanish flu, and when scientists were trying to understand which train had hit them”, explains Pierre Chastenay, professor in the Department of didactics of UQAM and organizer of the colloquium One hundred years of dialogue between science and society at the next Acfas Congress, which will be held on May 11 and 12.
The symposium is one of the signature events that Acfas has created especially to mark its centenary. It will extend over two congresses, this one which opens the centenary this year and the one which will close it next year.
“It’s meant to be a launch platform,” notes Pierre Chastenay. We are going to take stock of knowledge on the communication of science and scientific culture, but this symposium should above all serve to launch joint research projects in which scientists and popularisers will collaborate,” he specifies.
“The pandemic has revealed how important and even crucial the communication of science is”, observes Pierre Chastenay, a great science popularizer, since he acted as head of educational activities and spokesperson for the Planetarium of Montreal for 25 years, in in addition to hosting several science shows, including Telescience and The Chastenay Code at Tele-Quebec.
“The purpose of popularization is not for people to understand an article in Nature, but that they understand why it is important to study quantum mechanics or genetics or a new vaccine. The challenge for society is to get the public to understand the processes, the results of knowledge that is always perfectible. Because it is society that pays for scientific activity. She must take advantage of it and understand how it is done in order to be able to use it wisely. »
The dazzling development of the Internet and the Web, then of social media, which broke the monopoly of traditional media on scientific information and multiplied pseudo-information, had raised many questions. But these have been exacerbated by the pandemic emergency.
“People ask, ‘What does science say? Well, science is trying to figure it out. Our evidence is the best we have, but it is imperfect and modifiable. The production of knowledge is a process of self-correction which sometimes even requires that we reject what we believed to be true, emphasizes Pierre Chastenay. During the pandemic, we have witnessed this, in real time. I have a lot of admiration for what Horacio Arruda was trying to do [l’ex-directeur national de santé publique], but he was caught between a rock and a hard place, because he had to communicate science when it was changing very quickly. »
Interdisciplinarity
During the two days of the symposium, researchers – professors, doctoral students, lecturers – will deal in particular with “culturally anchored” demonstrations, initial teacher training, French-language online resources, French experiences in terms of science-society dialogue , scientific misinformation in Brazil and how to explain technologies.
“Studying how we judge information is fundamentally interdisciplinary. Me, my work is at the limit of the didactics of sciences, communication and librarianship”, explains Gabriel Lecompte. The lecturer at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières, a master’s student in education and future doctoral student, will give a presentation on a study he has just undertaken on the way in which young people in the fourth secondary evaluate the information presented in images and videos on social networks (see box).
The symposium will give a voice to researchers who have studied communication and scientific culture, but also to scientific mediators, whether they are journalists, communicators or museologists. One of the workshops, for example, will raise the question of whether scientific communication is useful. “Not to question their work, but to spur more research on the impact of a show, a column, a series of articles. We can put in place protocols to study these questions”, specifies the person in charge of the conference.
Pierre Chastenay has a dream, that of seeing the birth of a Quebec observatory of scientific mediation that will map out what is being done in terms of communication on science. “Because we do very good communication at home, even if there are things to improve,” he said.
More modestly, he hopes that this symposium will give rise to the study of new fields, such as the use of the TikTok platform for scientific communication. “I want this symposium to provoke things and for ideas to emerge that we hadn’t thought of when organizing it and which will be presented to us at the second symposium in 2023. And after. »
Know how to judge scientific information