Fun with Electromagnetism and Art: The role of a museum exhibition in the formation of educators for scientific communication

Author: Matheus Barros – Dica Museum / Federal University of Uberlândia, Brazil

Co-authors:

• Silvia Martins – DICA Museum / Federal University of Uberlândia, Brazil
• Natália Nunes – DICA Museum / Federal University of Uberlândia, Brazil

Science museums offer lots of possibilities for science communications as the science contents may be considered the main heritage and the exhibitions represent opportunities to engage public with science. Besides that, the exhibition bears the marks of the team and its creation process. Therefore, we present here three moments that marked the process of elaborating strategies for an exhibition about electromagnetism for a science museum in Brazil linked to a local university. The first moment was marked with a team of museum educators discussing philosophic, historic, and scientific contents to develop a narrative for the exhibition focused on Physics, that was presented to the public in 2015. In addition, with the engagement of physics undergraduate students, the educational team of the museum elaborated some new digital strategies were developed to incorporate to the exhibition in 2016. In a third moment, the purpose of the exhibition was revisited and a new team, involving physics and biology undergraduate students, to purpose a new narrative interweaving concepts of physics and sustainability. In this scenario, we could see that each of these three moments represented a different way for the presentation of scientific concepts, allowing the public to have different views on the science of Eletromagnetism, highlighting the team’s marks in the exhibition. In addition, we believe that the process of elaborating the exhibition not only highlighted the views of the team but also left marks on them, provided by the involvement of people from different backgrounds and creating narratives to tell the stories. Thus, we understand that the Dica Museum, being a university museum, fulfills its role of training people, providing undergraduate students of physics and biology the opportunity to develop skills to elaborate narratives for the communication of science.

The author has not yet submitted a copy of the full paper.

Presentation type: Insight talk
Theme: Transformation