Making Astronomy Culturally Relevant Best Practices Nancy Alima Ali UC Berkeley, Space Sciences Lab, California, USA E-mail:
[email protected] Summary Key Words This article investigates how astronomy can be made relevant to ethnically Cultural Astronomy diverse audiences by integrating astronomical concepts within cultural Archaeoastronomy contexts. A series of Cultural Astronomy workshops is used to illustrate how Public Outreach highlighting the human connection to astronomy makes it easier to relate to. Informal Education Introduction only effective with ethnic minorities, but also with the Caucasian majority. Feed- Do a Google image search using the term back provided by workshop participants “astronomer” and the first image that comes indicated that highlighting the human con- up is Vermeer’s painting The Astronomer nection to astronomy brings astronomy (Figure 1). Illuminated by soft light falling down to Earth by making it easier to relate through a window, the astronomer is gaz- to. Instead of being remote and incompre- ing at a celestial globe. The next image in hensible, astronomy becomes something the search results is a cartoon of a young that can be experienced every day in a boy gazing through a telescope. This is fol- personal way. lowed by a glow-in-the-dark jigsaw puzzle of a wizard in a fanciful observatory. Keep going and you’ll find a variety of photos Cultural Astronomy of contemporary astronomers sitting in workshops front of computers. What is striking about all these images is that, by and large, all The series of three Cultural Astronomy the astronomers depicted appear to be workshops were offered to the general Caucasian.