Engaging With Others Across Divides

Stamatis Vokos, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

On Christmas Eve 1914, British and German soldiers stuck in dreary trenches stopped killing each other long enough to sing carols together, share drinks, and wish each other Merry Christmas. (The superior officers soon moved the troops to new positions, alarmed at the fear that the determination to kill might be dampened when one has treated the enemy as a human being.) In 2018, our country is ravaged by political tribalism in which not even facts can be agreed upon, anti-science sentiment pervades our national policy debates, and dreary entrenchment scars the landscape.

Question: How should we engage in dialogue with others, including public officials, who do not necessarily agree with us on issues of science or science policy? Answer: Pedagogically. I confess that although this answer makes perfect sense in English, my Greek side reminds us that in such interactions we are not “leading children,” which is what pedagogy means. We are to be approaching adults as intelligent and moral agents. This article is about considerations to bear in mind as we converse with others, equipped with the curiosity, knowledge, and skills of educators who are convinced of the inherent productivity of their interlocutors’ ideas, even when we can see that the ideas themselves are factually or scientifically flawed.

In the last fifteen or so years, I have had the opportunity to participate in a variety of dialogues across epistemic tensions. After 9/11, I was part of a panel of members of different faiths who—while avoiding the facile (and false) “All religions are the same” motto—communicated the unambiguous message that although every religion can be and has been historically hijacked by extremists, extremists do not speak for the inner beauty and outward positive manifestations of religious faith. In the following dozen years, at the invitation of my students, I dialogued with their pastors who preached erroneously, in my opinion—on both scientific and theological grounds—that human evolution is incompatible with scripture. I have co-taught honors courses on the complex two-thousand-year interaction of natural philosophy and science with Christian theism. I have taught physics to Tibetan Buddhist monks in India and discussed scientific, Christian, and Buddhist epistemological points with senior Buddhist monks. I have taught professional development courses to science teachers about the energy balance in the atmosphere and the impact of warmer oceans on extreme weather events, giving them scientific tools to use with their students and their students’ families. I have used multiple physics education efforts in the Middle East as a vehicle for developing critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning skills. I have worked with K-20 systems that interpret the needs of teachers and students of physics in profoundly different ways than I do. And I have attempted to understand physics learning environments in which more students, especially women and persons of color, can thrive.

Twenty years ago, I thought I had all the answers to the framing question above. Nowadays, I believe that I have few answers but I have instead struggled with some important points that may be worth sharing.

1. Benefit to the other person
The research literature on conceptual change documents that human beings have good reason to believe what they believe. We know that star baseball pitchers achieve greatness despite believing that “their force on the ball runs out.”

We need to seek to understand what benefit will accrue to the other person (student, politician, school board member, community member) if they were to change their mind. Why do they believe what they currently believe? What do they gain from this perspective?

The word why here is often not a causal, mechanistic why. Rather it signifies an invitation to try to put oneself in the other person’s skin to understand their reward structure and to attempt to feel what they feel.

2. Potential loss to the other person
We do not usually change our minds under psychological stress. When emotionally challenged, we tend to dig in and defend our point. There is an evolutionary advantage to this. Having decided that we will not flee or freeze, the mind goes into a fighting mode, which is hardly a promising physiological setup for perspective-expanding stances.

We need to seek to understand what is at stake for the other person. What precious thing do they feel they would have to give up in order to consider our position seriously? People are very unlikely to adopt a worldview that threatens one of their core identities.

In our research on student understanding of the relativity of simultaneity, Rachel Scherr discovered that advanced special relativity learners (including graduate students and physics faculty who had not thought about the subject in many years) became silent—totally still—when confronted with the unbelievable implications of the train paradox. Having faced several intellectually unpalatable possibilities, they were deeply preoccupied with trying to identify which of their commitments they could afford to give up and which they should retain at all costs. Similarly, in a physics classroom, an evangelical student or a woman or a person from a minoritized community might be trying to reconcile what they think are two irreconcilable, for them, positions. A physicist who expresses themselves without appreciating the identity-type Sophie’s Choice nuances that the interlocutor may be facing can do psychological violence to them in the short term, and most surely does little to help them re-organize their internal understandings in a way that does justice to all parts of that person’s worldview.

3. The appropriate role of evidence
On one hand, we can all agree that either we landed on the moon, or we didn’t. (Similarly, either he used an expletive or he didn’t.) On the other, physicists of all people know that data never speaks for itself. When I was a teenager disputing the time my sainted mother claimed I had returned home the previous night, I loved to remind her that Nietzsche presciently had said that there are no facts, only interpretations of facts. This statement on its face may be the hardest thing for a physicist to swallow, especially in a political climate that seems to disparage scientific evidence. And yet, if data alone were sufficient to change someone’s worldview, no physics faculty would doubt the implications of the vast body of research results on the learning and teaching of physics. As a teenager, I had an agenda—I was not interested in agreeing with my mother. It is clear that some people—of all persuasions—manipulate, deny, or distort certain facts in service of a particular agenda. But most people do not. Most of us just subconsciously cherry pick data that agree with our foregone conclusions.

We need to find out through continuing dialogue what the other person cares about and which type of argument works with them, fully realizing that no single argument will work for everyone. Unless data is part of a convincing overall narrative, data will rarely do the trick. PER has taught us that instructors cannot exorcize a “misconception” without allowing a student to reflect on their ideas in the context of a new, student-constructed conceptual framework.

4. The ineffectiveness of derision
Lecture full of righteous indignation is rarely effective rhetorically. Every teenager knows this but many of us tend to forget it. I have listened to many lectures presented by otherwise stellar, wildly popular physics and astronomy communicators whose undisguised contempt, however, for some of their audience members’ values did not allow the speaker to engage with the substance of their listeners’ concerns or doubts.

We need to approach others with the human dignity they deserve. In the context of the extreme current political polarization, most of us—including yours truly—have fallen in the trap of deriding others. Any diminution of our interlocutors’ human dignity transforms our noble scientific motives into a desire to win the verbal or political contest by defeating what we consider as the opposition’s lame, ignorant, self-inconsistent, self-serving, duplicitous, and hypocritical arguments. Our rising anger, sense of self-righteousness, and feeling of intellectual or moral superiority fuel this desire and further pervert our motives from wanting to crush the opposing argument into wanting to crush the opponent.

Galileo putting the words of his erstwhile admirer Pope Urban VIII in the mouth of a character he called Simplicio (Simpleton) was probably a greater influence in the Galileo episode than the scientific debate. When approaching sensitive issues we need to understand deeply the perspectives of others and reflect their ideas and arguments in the most positive light for our conversation partners to take us seriously and feel heard and understood.

5. Our professional responsibility
Ultimately, we need to own up to one thing. The main reason why most physicists who are not climate scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming or the discovery of the Higgs or the dawn of multi-messenger astronomy is not because we all understand the ins-and-outs of the LHC Monte Carlo simulations or the LIGO sensitivity curves or the inner guts of climate models. We believe in these things because we trust our colleagues and we know first-hand how scientific sausage is made. We believe in these things while we also allow for new developments and are thrilled, rather than crestfallen, with the prospect of new physics. We believe in these things because we are cultural natives in a science-y (and physics-y, in particular) way of being. This cultural immersion did not come to us by solving kinematics equations or drawing free-body diagrams. It came from being in the lab for hours tending to an experiment that stumped us. It came from wastebaskets full of calculations. It came from poring over video data of students working together and messy interview transcripts with coding schemes that ended up being contradictory. It came because we engaged in authentic scientific practices. It came from developing well-deserved trust with the people down the hall. We developed scientific habits of mind and habits of practice over many years in a community of apprenticeship.

If we want policy that is consistent with science we need to work smarter in educating the future policymakers. They don’t need scientific facts only. They need to understand deeply how the scientific community makes progress. And they can only understand this as learners by participating in the authentic cultural practices of our community.

In the long run, if we want citizens who are critical thinkers we need to rethink our physics teaching. We claim that we teach people how to think. An assessment of the public square indicates that all of “them” are products of “our” education. We failed them the first time around. In our continuous engagement with them, for the sake of democracy, science, peace, and human thriving, let us not fail them again when we engage in dialogue.

Stamatis Vokos is Professor of Physics and Director of the STEM Teacher and Researcher (STAR) Program at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He conducts collaborative research on the learning and teaching of physics.

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.