Canada needs a new science culture framework that is equitable, community-centric, values Indigenous and other kinds of knowledge, empowers marginalized populations, and is relevant to people’s everyday lives.

That’s the consensus several stakeholders in Canada’s science community arrived at during a Canadian Science Policy Centre webinar titled “Towards a (New) Science Culture Framework in Canada, moderated by Tracy Ross (photo at right), vice-president, network membership, at Actua.

Research shows that a strong science culture is a key contributor to health, innovation, economic growth and both individual and societal wellbeing.

However, science culture has evolved to include concerns about structures, institutions and interconnecting systems, as well as broader changes in the economy, society, the global geopolitical environment. Developments in science and technology themselves demand new thinking.

A new framework for Canada’s science culture requires a definition, as a strong foundation, of what science culture is, said Dan Munro (photo at left), director, research and innovation, at Actua. He’s also senior fellow in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

Ottawa-based Actua is Canada’s largest STEM outreach organization. The non-profit, charitable organization works with a network of 43 universities and colleges in transformational STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) learning experiences for youth aged 6 to 26, to build critical employability skills and confidence.

Munro said a definition for a Canada science culture framework would add a “distributional lens,” (also called an equity lens or a belonging lens), to the framework, rather than just measuring only individual data points.

This means combining individual data points, observations, or components into a single, summarized metric to analyze broader trends.

We want to measure the aggregate levels of skills, attitudes, engagement, knowledge attitudes and opportunities, “because those are the things that help us understand how you get to the outcomes that we want: big innovation, prosperity and health outcomes,” Munro said.

“We want to know how opportunities to participate in and benefit from science are distributed by, for example, gender identity, Indigenous identity, socioeconomic circumstances, geography – all of these things,” Munro said.

Secondly, a systems or structural lens also needs to be added to the framework, to measure the health of Canada’s science culture, he said. “We want to know how different institutions, organizations, norms, resources, behaviours, how all of these structures or systems, shape the development of science culture.”

“We want to know how those structures shape and constrain that distribution of opportunities to participate and benefit from science. Do the systems include or exclude?”

Thirdly, Munro said, the framework requires a participatory or democratic lens.

“The relationship between science and society has changed a lot over the last 10, 20 years, but we have not yet settled on a really good or clear vision of what that relationship should be,” he noted.

There is some good evidence that democratic engagement is critical to having a healthy science culture, he said.

“We want to ask things like, ‘Do people have opportunities to share their views and values and knowledge and experience in and about science and technology?’ And we want to ask, ‘Are people empowered to help shape the priorities, direction and pace of science and technology and society?’”

Seeing science culture through an ecosystem lens

Having a strong science culture framework is necessary if Canada wants to address global challenges, particularly conversations about what's going to happen when there's another global emergency, said Marianne Mader (photo at right), executive director of the Canadian Association of Science Centres.

The association is Canada’s largest network of science engagement organizations, representing more than 50 institutions – including museums, science centres, zoos and aquariums – that reach over 10 million people annually.

Mader said a science culture framework is necessary for addressing questions such as how can Canada be ready for another global emergency and how can the country build resiliency in advance of such an emergency.

A key is to think about science culture through an ecosystem lens, or the connectivity of organizations and sectors that make up that culture, she added. “That’s why I think having a framework is critical, because you can't really understand the whole thing unless you have this framework.”

A new Canada science culture framework should include key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure how we understand science culture health at the ecosystem level, Mader said. This could include measuring the strengths of relationships, collaboration, co-creation, partnerships, and shared spaces of dialogue as a key aspect of a health science culture.

Such KPIs could consider things like: Do people know where to look for information? Do they feel they have trusted people in their lives to turn to for this information? Do they trust institutions like science centres for this information? Do they have many entry points into science culture?

At a systems or community level, this means co-designing and co-governance with Indigenous Nations, recognizing Indigenous knowledge systems as essential evidence for decisions about such things and land, health and climate, Mader said.

The approach also means building in concrete levers, such funding rules, accountability structures and protections that follow Indigenous leadership rather than only extracting knowledge from Indigenous communities.

“Everything is a ripple effect in science,” Mader noted. “Culture itself is more comprehensive than the individual.”

She said the Canadian Association of Science Centres is about to embark on a systems mapping initiative to create a model that shows the interrelationships and structure of Canada’s  complex science ecosystem.

“This is inherently complex. There's a lot of moving parts. And ultimately, after mapping, we want to understand what are some key leverage points where we can influence change to have the biggest impact towards what we're working towards,” she said.

The mapping initiative is aimed at identifying leverage points in Canada’s science culture through a systems innovation lens, and then ultimately shifting of structures and mindsets to the co-creation of solutions, she added.

The initiative is a collective approach, so it's not just looking at individual organizations and their success, but together how are we identifying kind of common challenges and how do we have shared measurements and address reinforcing activities and communication, Mader said.

She pointed to another of the association’s new initiatives, the Niigani-Miinigowziiwin accelerator program led by Dr. Melanie Goodchild. Goodchild is vice-president of Indigenous Knowledge, Scholarships and Research at Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamag, an Indigenous postsecondary institute located on Algoma University campus in Sault. Ste. Marie, Ont., in Baawaating (place of the rapids) within the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy.

The accelerator’s vision is a collective learning journey to support members of the association’s network as they grow relationships with local Indigenous communities and engage more deeply in Indigenous knowledge systems.

Cohorts of at least four people from each organization will be on this learning journey for at least two years, Mader said. “So then when they get to a point of creating new programs, it's in this supportive environment and it can be in a co-creation capacity as well.”

Making equity a design principle in creating a science culture framework

Desirée Sylvestre (photo at right), director of education at Visions of Science, stressed the importance of creating a science culture framework from a local or community-based perspective.

The relationship between science and many of the under-resourced but equally deserving communities that Visions of Science works with is very complex and fragile, while Canada’s narratives about science culture are strong, she said.

Visions of Science is a charitable organization that provides free, hands-on STEM programs to youth aged 3 to 25 in underrepresented or underserved communities. Visions of Science works closely with families, schools and local organizations.

Young people and their families are often curious and skeptical about science-based systems at the same time, Sylvestre said. “They want good information and at the same time they remember these systems have not served them well.”

“So I think a framework really helps us [retain] that reality honestly, instead of assuming that there is a single neutral-like public that needs to be convinced.”

Also, most tools for thinking about science culture are still very individual and short term, she said. “So we tend to ask questions like, ‘Does this young person like science or do they know certain facts about XYZ?’”

But what really shapes young people and their families’ relationship with science is the context around them – their school, family, neighborhood, housing situation, experiences with health care and public institutions, and where they see themselves in the positions of science authority, Sylvestre noted.

Visions of Science is interested not only in whether young people enjoy science, but whether they experience belonging to a trusted agency, can trust who is speaking on their behalf, can see themselves in science, and feel that they can use science to solve problems that matter to them.

Visions of Science has learned that you don’t shift science culture through workshops or outreach, Sylvestre said. “It has to shift [through] through this long-term presence [in communities].”

That means creating trusted relationships and youth being able to have many different entry points for themselves and for their caregivers, to engage your science on their own terms, she said.

Structural questions need to built into the framework itself, she said. “So we're not stopping at, ‘Who is participating?’ We're also asking questions like: ‘Who is setting the agenda for science education and engagement? Who is controlling the funding criteria and evaluation? Whose knowledge lived experiences are treated as legitimate evidence in this space?’”

“Without a framework that takes those wider conditions really seriously, we are risking putting all the responsibility on these individual kids to be more resilient or more interested, rather than asking what needs to change [including] in the systems that they are navigating,” Sylvestre said.

A lot of great work is happening right across Canada in terms of networks, investments and organizations, she added. “But they are unevenly distributed and we don't have a common language for what we are actually trying to do.”

“I'd want any framework we developed to build equity, right belonging and community power in the centre,” Sylvestre said.

Equity should be treated as a design principle in co-creating a new science culture framework, “

and not as a retrofit, which is sometimes what ends up happening,” she said. This means starting from the needs and strengths of communities that have been furthest away from science’s opportunities.

“So that shifts our focus in thinking about this one-size-fits-all approach. It shifts our focus from ‘How do we bring marginalized communities into existing programs?’ to ‘How do we design programs and policies that share power, resources and decision-making with these communities?’”

“For me, a meaningful framework would be not just tracking attendance data, how many people we're bringing into our existing ecosystems. It would really ask, ‘Are we redistributing voice, resources, legitimacy within that ecosystem, so that communities who have been historically been on the margins can actually shape what science culture in Canada becomes?’”

Quantitative and qualitative evidence are both needed for a new framework

A Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) expert panel produced a report in 2014 on the state of Canada’s science culture. It was one of the first projects that Suzi Loney (photo at left), now research director at the CCA, worked on.

Science culture means different things to different people, she said. Science culture is very fluid and not static, “and the way that society engages with science matters [and] profoundly shapes so many of the different kinds of decisions we make, from what we eat to how we manage our health and how we vote.”

Canada does need to revisit what it means by science culture, and also ask what the country wants a science culture for, what are the goals and performance against those goals, and how is the country achieving that, she said.

“Just so much has changed in the last few years with generative AI, with the pandemic. We might have our ideas and assumptions about our science, where we stand today, where our strengths are, where our weaknesses are. But we've just so much we don't know right  now,” Loney said.

“So coming up with that framework really helps us figure out what do we understand and what don't we understand and where do we need to go from there.”

The CCA’s report presented a set of quantitative measurements around the state of science culture in Canada that was primarily informed by a survey of around 2,000 Canadians, she said. The survey collected individual data relating to four different dimensions of culture: knowledge, attitudes, engagement, and skills.

Generally speaking, relative to other countries, Canada performed very well in terms of engagement and knowledge, Loney said. When it came to engagement, 93 percent of Canadian respondents were interested in understanding and following new scientific discoveries and technological developments – the highest result among the 33 countries compared.

When asked about engagement by visiting science centers and museums, 32 percent of Canadian respondents reported doing so in the last year. That was the second-highest result out of the 33 countries.

When it came to knowledge-based science literacy, Canada was at the top across all countries, with the strongest scored by some margin.

As for attitudes, Canada had an average score across the 33 countries for a sense of the promise of science. But Canadians also had very little reservations about science in Canada compared to other countries.

As for skills, the survey found that about 20 percent of university graduates were coming out of natural science and engineering programs, which was 19^th out of 29 countries.

 “Bottom line, in 2013, Canada was doing well by this sort of by this conception of science culture,” Loney said.

It’s important to keep in mind is that if you try to oversimplify the concept of science culture – which is in fact complex – and boil it down to a few indicators, you’ll lose a lot of the important substance, Loney noted.

While it’s important to articulate the framework Canada is working toward and measure aspects that lend themselves to measurement, “it also important to try to understand [science ] in a whole bunch of other ways. So it's really just thinking about what are the measures that are going to be meaningful,” she said.

“We'll have to bring in quantitative and qualitative evidence to get a meaningful picture and to point towards where we need to go, how we need to move forward,” Loney said.

Deciding on the right things to measure in science culture

Munro pointed out that research clearly shows a strong science culture is associated with benefits such as innovation, prosperity, better health and wellbeing, and stronger community resilience.

Science culture is thinking about it in a systematic framework way so that we can design better policies and programs to get to those good things, he said.

“Our understanding of who gets to participate in and who benefits from science has really evolved over the last 10 or 20 years. But those sorts of insights, those changes are not well reflected in our thinking about science culture, not well reflected in our framework,” he added.

“So there's a need and I think an opportunity to bring those science culture frameworks more in line with our understanding of what science culture is and what it ought to be, so that everybody can share in those good things through science culture.”

A strong science culture values diverse norms, attitudes, behaviors and knowledge systems, Munro said.

It equips people with basic and advanced skills in order to practise constant inquiry and engage in public dialogue, he added. It uses science to support evidence-informed decision-making and to champion discovery and responsible innovation.

“Science is in culture. Science is something we are all – every single one of us – engaging with one way or another every single day, almost, almost all the time,” Munro said.

To create a new framework for science culture, in some cases we know what we want to measure and we've done so in the past, but we just need more current data, he said.

There’s also a second category of things we know how to measure, but haven't done so in the past or haven't done so especially well, he said We need to data to flesh out the distributional lens and try to get a picture of the institutional or structural health of the ecosystem, he added.

There’s also a third category that are things we know matter and we want to measure them in order to track progress, to inform policies and programs that would empower people and improve science culture generally, Munro said. “We haven't quite figured out how to measure them. They're complicated things.”

For example, he said, we’re pretty good at measuring whether or not an institution or a group of people were trusted. We can ask people in society, ‘Do you trust scientists?’ or ‘Do you trust the health agency of a particular country?’ and get a pretty good answer.

“What we're not really good at is understanding whether those institutions or groups of people are trustworthy, which is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge when certain institutions and certain countries are changing how they behave,” Munro said “Are they generating things that might not be trustworthy?”

Thinking about how to actually measure that kind of thing becomes much more difficult and there are a bunch of gaps, Munro said.

Next steps in creating a science culture framework

As for the next steps in creating a framework for science culture, Mader urged: “Let's  be action-oriented. Let's build a symposium. Let's use a co-creation model when we're doing this work.”

It will be critical to include the funders and researchers, and to promote the need for a framework, she said.

“If you want the public to support science, you need to be involved and engaged and understand. It’s all hand in hand,” she added.

Mader said Canada could also learn from other countries, such as the U.K.’s science and technology framework. The Ontario Science Centre, for example, is adopting the U.K.’s “Science Capital Teaching” approach to make its exhibits and programming more inclusive and engaging for diverse audiences.

Sylvestre said she wants the conversation about a science culture framework “to lead quickly to something very concrete.”

The effort could start with a few communities and organizations to pilot the framework in real-world contexts, and then use what’s learned to reshape right funding criteria and metrics, she said. “So we're resourcing long-term relationship-based equity-oriented work rather than just short-term accountable outputs.”.

She said she would want to centre the pilot around caregivers from equally deserving communities alongside community organizations, teachers and Indigenous partners who work with them every day.

“I would also want the funders and policymakers in the room, so that when these communities tell us what a just and inclusive science culture needs to look like, we’re positioned to actually act on it – not just admire the analysis,” Sylvestre said.

Loney said the CCA is seeing a lot of ongoing sustained interest in the topic of science culture from the informal science learning sector, but less so from the groups that play critical roles in shaping science culture in Canada, including, the K-to-12 education system, industry, media and different government policymakers.

It’s important to bring those groups into the conversation as soon as possible, so creating a new science culture framework has as much buy-in from as many groups as possible, she said.

During the Q&A session, one participant questioned whether spending money on creating a new science culture framework is a good use of public funding in a time of limited resources.

Loney said Canadians first need to understand what they’re working toward in a new framework for science culture. “We need to understand collectively what is science culture.”

“If we have a clear sense of what we're working towards and there's more consensus around what we're working towards, then it could be easier to be clear about where resources are most needed,” she said.

One approach is finding the opportunities to connect among organizations and sectors to share resources and collaborate, rather than compete for limited resources. 

Munro said a lot of the snapshots or pictures generated of how science culture are so infrequent and ad hoc that the importance of science culture and how Canada is performing both slip off the radar.

“So I'd like to see some something that's more regular, something that’s predictable in terms of giving us a picture of how we're doing, and the tools or metrics of science culture distributed across communities,” he said.

Part of the conversation about science culture has to be reminding Canadians why science culture itself is important and linking it to the kinds of things that are priorities for governments and for society, Munro said.

“Hopefully people begin to see that science culture is not a nice to have. It's actually a necessary to have,” he said. “It's actually how you operationalize your investments in a lot of these other areas or how you get that return on investment.”

NOTE: Actua has produced three discussion papers on science culture, available here, and here, and here.

Also, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and Acfas (the principal French language learned society in Canada, particularly in Quebec) produced a report on a youth science survey, available here.

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