Science communications has to change.
It does. It’s important that we change now. We should have done it before.
And I don’t know what changes need to be made but I do feel like science communications and outreach has a few really glaring problems.
1. We mostly talk to children. That’s fine. They are the future. But they aren’t the now and when we don’t get their parents engaged to, we’re asking them to clean up a mess when they’re old enough. And when I say children, I really mean children. I don’t know the last time I was at an outreach event that focused on high schoolers or was made for a high school audience.
2. We’re mostly talking to people who will already be fairly well educated. That’s fine to. But we’re missing people who either have little interest in actively investing in education and people who don’t have access to it. We’re mostly getting contact with people who are already in school.
3. We are talking to people who already agree. We are preaching to the choir. That makes sense – they are who shows up. I don’t know how to talk to people who already think I’m wrong or a waste of tax payer dollars but I would love to find out. Negin Farsad might have some tips, though.
4. We exclude people. We do. We often implicitly exclude religious groups. We often implicitly exclude people who don’t have a higher education. My mother, even, was nervous about having dinner with my undergraduate advisor because, “[she doesn’t] have a doctorate, [she doesn’t] know how to talk to somebody that smart.” I don’t know how to stop that impression but I would love to.
5. Maybe, too many of us are career scientists. That’s fantastic – we have a job we are passionate about. But…then it is a little easy to write off our excitement. I’m not always that impressed by how cool math is when a mathematician gets excited about it. But if my barista got excited about a proof – wow, that must be a really cool proof, right!?
6. We don’t always have the communication skills. This is obvious because the seminars I go to are not as exciting to me as a TEDTalk, even if the subject matters to me more. We need to hone those skills. For me, I’m hoping to take improv classes. Write more. Try different things. But we need to include professional communicators or theater departments or artists in our efforts.
I am 23. I am not a seasoned science communicator. I might not even be a seasoned communicator. I can’t find the answers to all of these but I know they are problems.
On this note:
There’s a whole academic journal (open source, free to subscribe to) called “Communicating Astronomy to the Public” (CAP) that’s worth checking out. I also recommend the @ realscientists twitter account if Twitter is your thing. Lots to learn!
Ended up quitting a local science education group because of the issues outlined here. They’d advertise their events to educated liberals who were middle aged or older, not the public at large, and that’s who would show up to them.
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