DEVELOPING HOLISTIC APPROACH IN WRITING POPULAR ASTRONOMY

• Main Author: RIZQAN AKBAR NIM: 20316006 , MUHAMMAD
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/29327
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

<p align="justify">As in science in general, communicating astronomy is very important, to which we see a lot of effort has been given. In addition to academic communication, astronomy appears in a wide variety of media, such as prints, websites, videos, hands-on learning activities, seminars, workshops, public nights for students and public to observe the night sky, and various others. In this research we put forward a new method of communicating astronomy using the ideas usually expressed in holistic approach in education which covers aspects of material (thing), scientific knowledge, aesthetics, humanity, and spiritual. For this, we study and elaborate a number of holistic ideas to be implemented in astronomical exposition in form of popular articles. This elaboration includes understanding and thinking of each aspect and relations among those aspects in the holistic idea, and then map them onto the astronomical phenomena to be exposed. We then design three writing models which vary in the sequence the aspects appear in the writing which associates with the holistic mind framework. We experimented each of these three models on two popular astronomical topics and invite readers to respond to each of the writings. The readers’ responses are evaluated to see the success rate in raising each holistic aspect, the level of comprehension and comfort in reading the articles, and whether this kind of writing is preferable to articles commonly found in mass media. We found that the writing model that receives the best response is the one with openings closely relate to the readers and which the humanity and spiritual aspects are strongly drawn in following the mind framework. The second model which opens with philosophical quest, and the third model which is strong in the scientific knowledge, receive, on statistical average, less enthusiasm. This holistic approach could be used as a good option in communicating astronomy, even though we need to work also on the technical aspect of writing while still refining the various aspects of holistic ideas for science.<p align="justify">