Astronomy Continuing Education

I went to NAM; not as a US conscript in the 1960s, but as a UK Astronomer attending the National Astronomy Meeting in March 2012. So there was no Agent Orange, nor Ride of the Valkyries dawn raid. Instead I took a poster on Christina's work, and I gave a talk on Continuing Education in the session on "Outreach". NAM is always a big meeting with sessions on most areas of Astronomy.

I think Christina's work is really interesting; a bit technical for the blog, maybe. I might have a go at describing it another time. But I'd like to share some of what went in the talk.

"University Continuing Education" (let's call it UCE) kicked off officially in 1873. That year Cambridge University offered its first formal classes for people who were not students working towards a degree. They were offered by the Scot James Stuart, first Professor of Engineering at Cambridge and, later on, a rather interesting if not hugely successful politician. This was a formalisation of lectures Stuart had been giving already, first to Women's Groups and then also Working Men's Clubs, in the North of England. The first group to contact him suggested education as a topic. Instead he suggested "history of astronomy" as a topic he could deal with more easily. So there's Astronomy, right at the very beginning of UCE. Scientists from other fields have always known where to turn for stories that will hold anybody's attention.

A couple of decades earlier there were already educational opportunities for "working men". James Clerk Maxwell, no less, relished this sort of teaching, preferring the "working men who are getting up classes" to the "pups who are in the main a vexation" - i.e. normal students! This is still one of the rewards of UCE for the academic.

(Not heard of James Clerk Maxwell? Shame on you - one of the three biggest names in Physics, with Einstein and Newton, and a Scot too. Radio communication, TV, mobile phones... all follow from the laws of electromagnetism he discovered. This modern, popular book discusses his life and work. The words I quoted are from the old biography by Campbell and Garnett, available online in its entirety.)

Maxwell seems to have been involved in early projects by F D Maurice, founder of the Working Men's College. Did Maxwell teach there? Or in some poorly documented scheme closer to Cambridge? I'm not sure. Anyway, in the history of the Working Men's College we find great words that still sum up "liberal" (note the small "L"!) education: "something you can enjoy for its own sake, something which is a personal possession and an inward enrichment, and something which teaches a sense of values"; as well as a typically modern disagreement over values.

So I stood up at NAM to mention a little of this history, some of our own, local slant on it, and how Astronomy sits among it. In front of this audience I was also conscious of just how much has changed since the early days of UCE: loads of popular science books, internet discussion groups, Cloudy Nights, blogs (like this one), news stories that turn into entire communities of interest, Science Centres, Brian Cox et al.; and indeed research council support and encouragement for outreach activities. Many professional researchers regularly meet school kids a hundred at a time.

I have no doubt that what we do remains valuable for loads of reasons, many of them now documented in detail by the submissions to the DACE consulation last year. As an astronomer, against this outreach backdrop, I can add: creating informed, articulate advocates for our subject in the wider community (so that the numbers may be small but the effects are disproportionate). But I also know that we need to make more connections between what we do in UCE and the broader outreach story. How? I've various ideas, of course, but I know yours would be interesting. Comment away....