Disrupting the Norm: Looking for Magical Spaces in Science
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| Title: | Disrupting the Norm: Looking for Magical Spaces in Science |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Sarah Hewitt |
| Source: | New Directions for Teaching and Learning. 2025 (184):45-47. |
| Availability: | Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 3 |
| Publication Date: | 2025 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Descriptive |
| Descriptors: | Biology, Science Instruction, Teaching Methods, Inquiry, Neurosciences, Researchers, Scientific Research |
| DOI: | 10.1002/tl.20653 |
| ISSN: | 0271-0633 1536-0768 |
| Abstract: | Focused on the discipline of biology, this chapter reports on the author's personal and professional revelations around their approach to their discipline as uncovered through participation in a Disrupting interview. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2026 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1491459 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwGUCYJVb1yFJpatfYtLIdbSAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDKfV5OapvMvkUcpyLgIBEICBm0AGjQvo2DtkrAbr2cKogPPfhVvY0g4u-26tWlBytfGMdBAQ2SsxpWVRRxyoGsH9-slCSsaNhA4wSsG52UBhs5fRfjEvTu8GIH7CuWjaGJbGFJ7PfEgYhhdzekkpUarcijAfRvqq1cC9t2-Y6Pz14CKWsjYAPcY7QyhCn8Irb4AeNBwpN_ZZH-WzBUO-mU7YkDEmn_03wfA4OJPI Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0190212489;ndt01dec.25;2025Dec15.06:38;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0190212489-1">Disrupting the Norm: Looking for Magical Spaces in Science </title> <sbt id="AN0190212489-2">Introduction</sbt> <p>Focused on the discipline of biology, this chapter reports on the author's personal and professional revelations around their approach to their discipline as uncovered through participation in a Disrupting interview.</p> <p>When I first heard about the project called "Disrupting Interviews: A Method Towards Decolonization," I had no idea what was involved. However, I took part in a previous "decoding the disciplines" project, and I soon found that there were similarities in the interviewing process. For this one, however, the investigatory team was using what they called a "Disrupting interview." The goal of a Disrupting interview is to encourage faculty to explore their perception and understanding of their own discipline and themselves as it relates to colonized knowledge structures and the relationship to Indigenous knowledge structures. For me, as a scientist, it involved starting with a big picture question about identifying any colonial structure or process in my discipline that I wanted to explore. So, I began where I thought any conversation about colonialism and science should begin—the scientific method.</p> <p>I am a neuroscientist by training who teaches human physiology and neuroscience at my institution. I am also a science writer who travels around the world to work with scientists in the field to learn about and write about what they do. So, I have spent years trusting in, teaching, and writing about the scientific method. In Western science, the scientific method has been the only broadly acceptable methodology used for centuries. It is hypothesis‐driven, and researchers control as many variables as possible, ideally leaving only one to measure, quantify, and analyze objectively. This is how I learned to approach science in my formal schooling. However, I have come to realize that my upbringing, my natural curiosity, and my experience teaching and writing about science have all shaped my relationship to how I now think about knowledge generation. Doing this Disrupting interview allowed me to explore more fully what this looks like and gave me some new language to talk about it. Here, I want to address two main points we discussed—the idea of "magic" in science and how we generate knowledge.</p> <p>Our conversation covered a lot of ground, and I am still processing much of it. Some questions were challenging to answer adequately because I felt conflicted about speaking from my own experiences versus trying to answer more broadly for the discipline. Of course, I can <emph>only</emph> speak from my experience, and I realize that plenty of scientists will disagree with what I am saying. In the end, my own perspective, the summation of my experiences personally and professionally, led me to talk about a sense of magic that I feel toward the natural world.</p> <p>I use the word "magic" to describe my curiosity and excitement as I walk through a landscape for the first (or the hundredth) time. Maybe the terms "wonder" or "awe" are more accurate, but as a lifelong lover of fantasy novels, the word "magic" is at my fingertips. I do not mean magic as something that is conjured out of nothing. But magic (awe or wonder?) can fill the spaces for things we do not yet understand. It can express how I feel when I get to be in an environment with someone who has a connection to that place and I am lucky enough to listen and learn from an expert. "Magic" is also the willingness to accept that there are countless unknown interactions occurring around me all the time. The more I learn about a place and the more in‐depth understanding I have of the people and the living things within it, the more of a sense of wonder I have about it. This is what I mean by magic. If I spend time in a place with someone who has fostered a relationship with the landscape, it helps me feel those same connections to the land. I think this is part of me because I spent a lot of time outdoors as a child. On any given day, you could find me wandering in the forests and grasslands around my house, always with a picnic, novel, and notebook packed into my Explorer's Kit. I used my magnifying glass on everything, and I wanted to understand how each living thing I saw co‐existed—the relationships between the ants, coyotes, deer, hawks, and the poplars and spruce trees. Now that I am older, I am not much different, except that I have added a camera to my kit. I still bring a magnifying glass and, of course, a picnic.</p> <p>My drive to wander, explore, and make connections is what ultimately led to me traveling the world to work with scientists and write about their work. The experiences I have in the field bring me the element of science that I think is missing from our Western way of teaching it—sitting in a classroom, teacher at the front, using diagrams and textbooks. What is missing is plunging your hands into the thick moss on a forest floor after a rainfall, smelling the soil, and feeling the cold water squeezing between your fingers. It is from these sensory elements that the magic, for me, arises. It is this type of experiential learning and building relationships with the land that much of our Disrupting conversation was linked to, but we got there by first talking about the evolution of the scientific method.</p> <p>Dr. Gabrielle Weasel Head (Lindstrom) was one of the researchers involved in the study, and during the interview she asked me about "how we know what we know in science"—"Is there another way of understanding science outside of that (scientific) method, or would it be considered science?" I do not know that I gave an adequate response to this. But I think this is the question that many scientists do not get past because of the norms of the field and the ways in which our work is traditionally disseminated—through journals and textbooks, carefully disregarding personal experiences as lacking objectivity and therefore, rigor.</p> <p>We talked about this with respect to my home field of neuroscience. In neuroscience, we learn about the brain mostly by studying other species' brains and by investigating things at the microscopic level—neurons, glial cells, ion channels, neurotransmitters, and so forth. We cannot see them, but we can see the end results of their functioning in the form of electrical signals and changing brain activity. But in the big picture, what we are interested in is how this brain activity translates to behavior, decisions that we make, memory and learning, how we respond to a soft touch, colorful lights, the voice of a loved one, the smell and flavor of a favorite food, and how we process the gamut of emotions. In other words, we are really interested in the human experience. Everyone moves through the world, our brains processing these inputs differently and giving us unique experiences and realities. Our perceptions, however, can be altered through things like meditation, but also disease, drugs, or injury. So, while we may have advanced techniques to measure changes in brain activity, neuroscience, and the related field of psychology, are less able to quantitatively measure the human experience of these changes. This point was expressed so beautifully in our interview when Gabrielle talked about taking part in a sweat lodge ceremony:</p> <p>I remember when I first went into a sweat lodge ceremony and the sweat lodge keeper called in the spirit of an eagle and I couldn't believe it! Everything is black in there, but you felt and you heard the eagle in there, the warm wings and the flapping of its wings as it goes over you. Or calling in the spirit of the bear and you can hear the grunting. How do you explain that?</p> <p>This type of human experience is what Western science misses with its focus on quantifying measurable responses. To capture the human experience is where qualitative data matter. Both quantitative and qualitative elements make up what I think of as science. To me, science is not only the set of tidy results on a page, arranged into tables and figures, each data point analyzed, cleaned up, and presented as a cohesive narrative. It is a lot messier than that.</p> <p>Science is necessarily messy because it is a human endeavor and it comprises all the things that are human—individuals with their own values, goals, experiences, knowledge, and emotions. Furthermore, it is messy because research is hard to do for countless reasons. My science writing work mostly brings me out to the field. I work with scientists in rainforests, on the tundra, in the mountains, grasslands, or remote beaches. And when you are in the field, anything can happen. Inclement weather, wildlife, vehicles or equipment breaking down, and a million unforeseen conditions can result in false starts, delays, or force a change in tactics on the fly. Every one of these things brings out the best and worst in people, testing their ability to cope. And this is where all the truly interesting parts of science take place. For me, at least. What gets published in science journals is stripped down to show the results and only the results. But the richness of the experience is left out. That is not part of the scientific method. But it is absolutely part of any scientific endeavor and it is the part that resonates with me and with students too. It is also what connects with people outside of science because it is part of the human experience. These experiences, I think, are what help build a relationship between the person and the land they study. And it is around this that Gabrielle asked me, "What is the difference between studying something in a scientific context and creating a relationship with it? Is there a difference?"</p> <p>I think it is inevitable that researchers develop relationships with whatever they are studying, living or non‐living, microscopic or macroscopic systems. For myself, the more I understand about the system I am studying, the deeper my relationship with it becomes. This is an argument I have had before with some non‐scientists who tell me that learning the specifics about how something works detracts from the wonder they first had for it—the magic that they initially felt. But for me, the sense of wonder only increases and makes me want to know more. That knowledge can come from both quantitative measures or qualitative experiences that help strengthen the connection to the subject of study.</p> <p>I know that some of the researchers with whom I have worked around the world feel a deep connection to the place and the species they study. Whether they are studying spider monkeys or epiphytes, permafrost, or seabirds, they have developed a relationship to the land and they use a different vocabulary when they talk about it. They talk about the places and living things with emotion. In one case, a researcher gave names to over 70 individual spider monkeys. She can identify each one by their markings or calls and can tell me about their lineage, what they prefer to eat, and whether they are affectionate parents. Another researcher, a botanist, walked me through a rainforest, lovingly caressing every slender leaf, picking certain ones for me to feel or smell, marveling at their varied shapes, and talking about them as if they were sentient beings who talk back to her and who she loves. It is clear that these people feel a sense of wonder about where they are, the magic in that environment, and that the more they know and understand about it, the deeper that feeling grows. When they walk through the landscape, it is not objective and dry. It is rich, emotional, and messy—like every relationship. These researchers, at least, are trying to honor that landscape by studying it and learning more about it. One researcher I worked with told me that the more she learns about a place, the closer she feels to the trees, the birds, and everything else living there. I am not saying that all researchers feel the same way or would value making that relationship. In fact, some would specifically value staying at arm's length to be more objective. But the experiences that I remember the most are those times spent with people who allow themselves to feel something for the places and things they study. Perhaps I feel a kinship with them because they open themselves to the richness around them and are more attuned to other ways of learning about a place.</p> <p>For me, one of the main takeaways from the interview was the idea of being willing to engage in conversations and make knowledge systems more accessible by decreasing barriers. We need to actively seek opportunities to find crossover points, commonalities, or just engage with each other. We talked about how the Indigenous and the scientific paradigms can coexist, and Gabrielle described the land itself as an "ethical space for this coexistence." My own experience of having conversations about the land while being on the land is entirely different compared to the same conversation taking place in a classroom, laboratory, or reading it in a journal. People even use different language when they are standing there holding a clump of soil that they have just dug from the earth or a leaf they have clipped from a tree. We know that learning a language is part of acquiring disciplinary identity and science students learn the language of science. But we limit that to the language of the quantitative aspect, the parts that relate directly to the scientific method. We often ignore the value of the experiential aspects of learning about science as if there is only one way to learn something. But this is one of the many places where there is room to explore that space of coexistence of the Indigenous and scientific worldviews. One way to do this is to think about the passing along of knowledge as being sacred. Gabrielle spoke about the ancient protocols for creating and passing of knowledge:</p> <p>There is the sacred knowledge that can only be transmitted using very specific protocols that have been practiced over thousands of years. You sing these songs that have been sung for thousands of years, and you dance these dances using the exact same sort of movements and for thousands of years in order to generate and create that knowledge, and so that is sacred. And then you pass that on through sort of the same kind of specific transfer ceremonies, so it is highly structured. And so when we think about science as this highly structured method—the scientific method—there are these certain steps, there are these certain things, and then in Indigenous life‐ways we say we have always been practicing science.</p> <p>Since our discussion, I have been thinking of ways to acknowledge this idea in the classroom, but I do not yet have a clear path forward. A valuable starting point may be in how we engage with new ideas, share stories, and consider knowledge as a gift that we are granted. Thinking about knowledge as a sacred thing to pass from one person or one generation to the next is a shift in mindset for how we approach our classrooms.</p> <p>I want to finish with one of the most interesting topics and a difficult one from a Western science perspective. Gabrielle talked about Indigenous people experiencing unseen energies during ceremonies and these being defining experiences for people. She described her grandfather as someone with a special relationship with some of the forces that Western science struggles to embrace or understand:</p> <p>I can think about my grandfather who I consider to have mastered the science of engaging with the unseen, and to be able to manipulate those energies through the relationship building, through the songs he sung, the dances, all of that, specific protocols that have been held in place for tens of thousands of years in Indigenous communities, and without question as a little girl I witnessed.</p> <p>She also told a story about members of her family seeking medicines on the land, knowing where to find it but that finding it depended on the seeker's mental and physical state. The medicines show themselves to those who are ready to find them. I do not know how to reconcile this with the tenets of science that I have spent a lifetime learning. But I do know that 2 weeks after she told me these stories, I was in New Mexico, hiking alone through a canyon with hundreds of ancient petroglyphs carved in the rocks around me. They were carved by the Ancestral Pueblo people and one of the signs on the trail relayed the story that the people who carved them believed that the petroglyphs would only reveal themselves to someone who was ready to see them. I saw countless carvings of faces, animals, and shapes, and with every one, I felt a sense of connection, a jolt of electricity, and I was immediately brought back to Gabrielle's story. Was I somehow ready to see them that day? Was it because of our previous discussion that I was able to? If I go back again, would I see more, or less? I do not know. But I spoke to someone in the carpark at the end who was disappointed with the hike—they had not seen any petroglyphs at all.</p> <aug> <p>By Sarah Hewitt</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> </aug> |
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