This is the World That Science Built: Telling Science Stories

Cindy Jenson-Elliott, author of The Doomsday Detectives: How Walter and Luis Alvarez Solved the Mystery of Dinosaur Extinction, joins The Open Book Blog in this guest post about the importance of telling science stories and how it influenced the writing of her book. 

Like “The House that Jack Built,” science stories are cumulative. You won’t arrive at Z unless you have Y figured out, and you can’t know Y without uncovering X. To introduce young readers to how Walter and Luis Alvarez came to understand what is now called the Alvarez Hypothesis (spoiler alert! – it’s the asteroid impact that led to the demise of dinosaurs), I had to tell them the “back story,” so to speak. They needed to know how it all began. Not only Walter and Luis’s family immigration story, but also the worldwide science story of how Earth changes over time, and how we know what we know about our planet’s long history. Science stories never end. They’re written by every scientist who has ever lived, question by question and chapter by chapter.

Whenever I do school visits or other presentations, I’m always clear with the audience about my role; I’m not a scientist. I’m a curious nerd, a science fan girl, and a storyteller. I’m not a specialist. I’m a generalist with questions about everything. In a lot of ways, that makes me the perfect person to tell a story like this that cuts across time, disciplines, and continents. I know what I don’t know, and I’m not afraid to put my ignorance on full display. I ask a lot of questions of people who know a lot more than I do. Then, I try to explain what I’ve learned in the plainest of language. In the end, I either get verification from scientists that I’ve gotten it right, or that I need to fix what I got wrong.

I grew up in a science community, and many of my friends’ parents were scientists. Some of my friends even grew up to be scientists themselves. I loved asking them to explain their work to me. Some were good at it; explaining big ideas in plain language. Others, not so much. That’s a problem. If we want to live in a world that is driven by facts and protected and preserved by real data, the public needs to understand how science really works. They need to know that science ideas aren’t just made-up fluff. They need to understand the processes that scientists use across disciplines and across the world to answer important questions.

Those interdisciplinary science processes include observing phenomena, asking questions, hypothesizing and creating models, testing ideas, collecting and analyzing data, arguing with real evidence, and communicating and collaborating with others. As a teacher, I recognize a lot of these science processes are what have been coined as “21^st Century Skills.” These are the things we want students to be able to do in a world that demands creative problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. Science processes are life skills.

Science storytelling helps kids understand that they are already scientists when they use these processes and are a part of a worldwide community of truth seekers and wonder collectors. Telling science stories reassures kids that those stories are far from over, and that they have a role to play in writing the next chapter — and the next one, and the one after that, ad infinitum.