The Science & Religion project explored the relationship of science and religion through creative nonfiction stories and public programs. The overarching goal of this work was to investigate whether and how museums can encourage reflection and conversation around big, important, and difficult questions. In this paper, we contextualize the project in the movement to address societal issues in museums, describe some of the design and delivery strategies we used to create public programs that were inclusive of diverse points of view, report the programs’ impact on participants, and offer lessons learned for museum practitioners interested in similar programmatic approaches or topics. We also reflect on our own attitudes and preconceptions as museum educators, considering why we felt this was a controversial topic and why we were surprised to discover that audiences were so receptive to it.
Responsible research and innovation (RRI) is a framework for thinking about the implications of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) discoveries and innovations and shaping them in a way that is responsible to people, future generations, and the natural environment. In this paper, we present a project that engages museum visitors in learning about RRI through hands-on activities inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein story, characters, and themes. We developed a learning framework describing strategies and outcomes for RRI in informal educational settings, then created a set of seven activities that embodied the framework and studied their implementation at 13 museums. Evidence from observations and interviews are consistent with the RRI learning framework and suggest a number of practical implications for its use in museums.The struggles of Victor Frankenstein and his creature still resonate 200 years after the publication of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Shelley, 2018). The characters and key themes of the Frankenstein story are familiar, especially the fatal consequences of prioritizing personal ambition and scientific discovery over responsibility and ethics (Halpern et al., 2016;Hitchcock, 2007;Lederer, 2002). The emerging technologies of today-from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering-raise the same questions and dilemmas that came to Shelley's mind as she
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.