Why people care about chickens and other lessons about rhetoric, public science, and informal learning environments

When, where, and how do people learn science? In response to this question, the National Academy of Sciences report “Learning Science in Informal Environments” (National Research Council [NRC], 2009) stressed the importance of everyday experiences, designed spaces like museums and science centers, nonschool science education programs, and science media. The report built on an array of scholarship attuned to science learning as a lifelong, often self-motivated endeavor. The fi ndings are not surprising. In all cases, we spend more of our lives learning outside of classrooms and other formal learning institutions than we do inside them (Gerber, Cavallo, & Marek, 2001). The situation is analogous when we think about when, where, and why people engage public science. Often the scholarly literature focuses on deliberation in related normative forums, yet most of us engage science issues in ways (and in places) less structured and more connected to circumstances of daily life (Barron, 2006; Falk, Storksdieck, & Dierking, 2007). Indeed, in these less structured forums, what we do would not often be considered “deliberation” at all by scholars. This is particularly true for learning and engagement online, which can be easily understood as too messy to be useful (Grabill & Pigg, 2012).