Students say science is one of their favorite subjects, regardless of how well they do in it, said Mae Jemison at the Closing General Session. "What do they find fun about science? It's the ability to be creative, to do experiments—not to sit and memorize the periodic table."
Mae Jemison
Science education should be hands-on, said Jemison, a former NASA astronaut who is now a professor at Dartmouth College and head of the Jemison Group, a scientific consulting firm. "It's important to have children doing the experiments," she asserted. "Kids come into school in 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade excited about the world around them. They pick up bugs, snails, slugs, stuff between the couch cushions, and they ask you, ‘What is this?' They're collecting data every day, trying to understand the world around them. But when they get into classrooms, we tell them to leave that experimental, experiential system behind them."
Jemison is the developer of The Earth We Share, an international science camp where students work together to solve current global problems. The students are asked to predict the hot public stocks of the year 2030, or to design the world's perfect house, or to grapple with the question, How many people can the earth hold?
"These 12- to 16-year-old kids—who get together for four weeks from places around the world—answer these questions," Jemison said. "They understand that there are social components to the questions; there are political, economic, and physical science components. Then they brainstorm." When they have developed their solutions, the students work on presenting them effectively.
"We are really trying to educate our students to be transdisciplinary," Jemison noted. "The decisions that they're going to have to make in the world cut across sociology, the humanities, physics, biology, chemistry, law—all of those," she said. "We can't just train our students to operate in one area. They must understand many different areas, though not necessarily be experts in them. And they must develop problem-solving and critical-thinking skills."
"So many people think of the social sciences and the physical sciences and technology as separate," Jemison said. "But what science we decide to research and what technology we decide to develop depends on who we are as a society. Do we use a certain combination of minerals to create a beautiful fireworks display or to propel a bullet? Do we use our understanding of nuclear physics to design nuclear bombs, nuclear power plants, or nuclear medicine? It really is our choice."