I keep a perennial list of topics that had made me think, “ooh, that would make a good post.” The present one has sat there for years, but I never was inspired to flesh it out until now, prompted by a couple posts over at Dynamic Ecology. Meghan Duffy
Totally agree, Terry. I've been thinking many of these same things since reading those other two posts. I approach understanding different points of view and engaging them to share science quite differently in my scicomm courses and workshops. The central ideas are articulated in this paper that details a values+goals+storytelling approach to inclusive scicomm: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/hwi/vol15/iss3/27/. I've also been pondering how to write up how I facilitiate this for students, but that's not alive in the world yet. All this stems from me (a) doing competitive speech and debate in high school and (b) coming from an extensive family that loves to debate but is also very conservative. Debating has *never* worked, but dialogue with individuals has. Most of the people I work with, teach, or train these days have similarly fraught situations and actually want to do more than argue. It's important we give them models and skills for that. It's also vital that we don't imply to students (or colleagues) that debate works. (See all the literature on why the deficit model is a dead end.)
Totally agree, Terry. I've been thinking many of these same things since reading those other two posts. I approach understanding different points of view and engaging them to share science quite differently in my scicomm courses and workshops. The central ideas are articulated in this paper that details a values+goals+storytelling approach to inclusive scicomm: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/hwi/vol15/iss3/27/. I've also been pondering how to write up how I facilitiate this for students, but that's not alive in the world yet. All this stems from me (a) doing competitive speech and debate in high school and (b) coming from an extensive family that loves to debate but is also very conservative. Debating has *never* worked, but dialogue with individuals has. Most of the people I work with, teach, or train these days have similarly fraught situations and actually want to do more than argue. It's important we give them models and skills for that. It's also vital that we don't imply to students (or colleagues) that debate works. (See all the literature on why the deficit model is a dead end.)