The gift of questioning
Last weekend, I served as speaker and workshop facilitator for the Department of Science and Technology’s Science Education Institute (DOST-SEI), to kick off the first of several boot camps for the Scholars Technopreneurship Training Program.
I helped with the flow of the boot camps, which follow human-centered design (HCD). I wasn’t too sure of the venture at first: HCD forces people to focus on the needs of a specific group, then do the research and creation afterward. I was about to work with over a hundred college students from across the country, all of whom were science majors already focused on their research specializations.
I thought I would be greeted with resistance. My first talk, after all, was on using different paradigms as lenses to see the many dimensions of the world’s problems.
This approach requires questioning what one has been taught about reality and objectivity. It asks students to acknowledge that not everything can be described by patterns, observed by scientists, and solved by science alone. It makes students see science as a field with blind spots and a culture that has to be examined critically.
Within the first few minutes of the talk, and contrary to my fears, I felt the room relax. The students took notes and photos, shouted out answers to my questions, laughed when I joked.
When workshop time came, they identified different aspects of their problems in mere minutes: they could see both technological and social issues, and knew that these issues needed different approaches. They could talk about indigenous knowledge not as something from which information could be harvested, but as a system to be respected and an indicator that all people have the capacity to help themselves even without a high-tech solution. They could name their stakeholders and why every person was valuable.
After the first round of workshops, students came to me for consults (and selfies). They could see their problems vividly and describe them with specificity—the ultimate dream of anyone teaching HCD.
One group wanted to standardize tricycle fares in their city, but now recognized why tricycle drivers had to be part of the consultation. Another group wanted to create interactive images for medical technology students who had no access to microscopes, but now realized they first had to ask what teachers and students needed. Another group wanted to focus on functional literacy in young students and now saw the multiple layers and people in the problems they thought were simple—but they were so excited to keep on going.
A student shared that HCD was such a different approach to problem-solving. He had already taken a technopreneurship class back home, where he had been taught to focus on just making a product and getting it to market. To think about people first, he said, was new. And it was comforting, another student added, because it meant that science didn’t know everything and didn’t have to solve all problems.
I was floored by the response, and my heart wanted to explode after a long day of laughter, sharing, discussions, and workshops. I saw students who had been so close to issues that they thought they knew so well and were now raring to get back to their provinces to map their complex problems. I saw young people who recognized that they were not the only experts in any issue, that there was so much they still did not know, and they had to keep seeking help. I saw students who were not afraid to question their previous assumptions about what it meant to make an impact, to communicate, to design, to empathize.
Part of the reason I was uneasy is that I’ve seen professionals plunge so quickly into work without consultation, believing that they alone know the intricacy of the situation—only to be humbled when they realize they should have never done the tasks on their own. I’ve seen scientists resist the invitation to question their practices. I’ve heard people laugh at HCD for taking too much time in a world of urgent problems.
The DOST-SEI scholars reminded me of Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David’s letter to a young person who had written an essay about falling away from the faith. He chose compassion rather than reprimand in his counsel: it was healthy to question the faith that one inherited, he said, for faith questioned is stronger. It becomes one’s own.
This also reminded me of an interview I did over a decade ago, during my Ph.D. A Purdue scientist laughed when I asked what the difference was between science and religion.
Science is actually faith, he told me. You base your work on what came before, trusting that the scientists did their job well. You can’t see what happens in your experiments. You can’t control everything. So much is uncertain. So much can be questioned. It’s how the field grows.
Last weekend, I saw students question their field with joy. I witnessed their genuine curiosity. I saw them never settling for truths told, taught, or simply handed over for memorization.
I saw them become real scientists.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
