This project embodies the author’s response to Alan Irwin’s essay (2014) calling for social scientists to “exercise greater imagination in helping foster a culture of experimentation in citizens’ responses to scientific fact and policy, thus acting to pluralize practice and offer ways of thinking that embrace different levels and ways of knowing”. In particular, this research focuses on museums as sites of public engagement with science through their participatory curricula. The author believes such curricula hold potential for building lay leadership skills by educating members of the public to employ mechanisms necessary to facilitate a type of deliberative democracy, giving birth to engagement as applied to science issues and policies. These necessary mechanisms, as listed by Ryfe (2005, 2006), comprise rules, stories, leadership, stakes, and apprenticeship.