Presenter: Richard Morton, Joe Shimwell, thanks to Frances Leviston
Theme: Creative engagement
Reporter: Charlotte Thorley
One sentence summary: Showing how poetry techniques can help young people engage with solar science.
Description
Solar Stanzas is a schools-based workshop that formed part of the larger Imagining the Sun project hosted by Northumbria University and the STFC Nucleus award for Exploring Extreme Environments. The project saw solar scientists, including Dr Richard Morton, come together with experts from NUSTEM (Joe Shimwell) and artists such as Helen Schell and Katrina Porteous to create different ways of representing solar science data through creative means.
Richard and Joe introduced the project and went on to explain how Solar Stanzas was particularly valuable in reaching the young people they were working with. Central to the activity was the concept of looking for patterns, something which is important in both poetry and science. We were then invited to take part in a mini version of the schools’ workshop.
Richard showed us a NASA helioscience video, whilst giving us the science words for what was happening on screen, this included images of corona, sunspots and strong regions of magnetic field, and made sure to include any curriculum relevant terms. (Students are given a workbook to document what they know about the sun).
We moved on to the poetry element, talking about how metaphors are informed by patterns, and how poetry can demonstrate a range of patterns and shapes. We discussed the poem Crown by Kay Ryan looking for those patterns ourselves. Then we got to writing. Richard started the video again, and set us the following challenge:
- Notice something in the video and describe it in some way, something that interests you
- Use an animal kingdom metaphor to help describe it
- Do all of that again
- Add a sensory element to the writing
Joe and Richard told us that the session was always delivered to the scientist volunteers before they went to schools so that they had experienced it first. In school some students would read out their poems, but all of the class is encouraged to appreciate it, and feedback is always given in a constructive way by the session leaders. The students are reminded that these are just ideas and starting points and are given two weeks to work on their poems, before the delivery team go back in.
There’s no requirement for the final poem to be ‘perfect’, scientifically or artistically. The idea is that all poems are perfect, because they are your interpretation or what you have experienced, shown in a way that means something to you. The science is treated the same way, this activity is about pattern recognition and noticing things not about a perfect representation of physics.
For what it is worth, here’s what I came up with…
I want to touch the woolly, fibrous texture of this sphere that’s only made of light and heat.
Spots of energy erupting, no longer contained, hint at a growing, living centre.
They pass, a brief moment in time. They cannot be captured
Any more than I can hold the Sun.
Key messages
- Collaboration between scientists and artists led to an understanding that poetry and solar science have common practices, such as pattern recognition.
- Being creative allows students to feel ownership of the science they’ve been shown.
- Outputs from sessions don’t need to be “perfect”, rather they are perfect in their own ways.
Resources
The “Imagining the Sun” project website https://nustem.uk/imagining-the-sun/
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