Book review essay: Visible and invisible workings of science communication

摘要

John Durant, when he was the founding editor of this journal over 25 years ago, questioned the assumptions underlying the movement from which this journal got its name. He proposed that science literacy for the public should be considered in the following three parts: literacy about the knowledge science has produced, literacy about how science works, and literacy about how science really works (Durant, 1994). He was drawing attention to the difference between idealised science and real science, as John Ziman (2000) went on to unravel it. Awareness of this difference and of its implications is a key part of the necessary literacy of the science communicator. As demand and opportunity for science communicators increase, so too do training and educational offerings. It might be useful to think about these offerings in terms of their contribution to understanding how science communication has evolved, how it works, and how it really works. For this third dimension, we need tools and knowledge from as wide a repertoire as those needed to make sense of society and culture.