The past year and a half has been a tough time for live events, like the science comedy shows that my initiative Bright Club used to host in pubs and festivals. We’ve been running events online, but it also seemed like a good time to branch out a little bit into something new – podcasts!
With guidance from the wonderful Shaun O’Boyle, we’ve put together You’re Up Next, a podcast exploring science, humour, creativity, and comedy. The first season looked at the basics of using comedy for research communication, and the episodes coming out now are about the really difficult topics: climate change, COVID-19, prisons, death, and more. As the host, I chat to guests who are amazing comedians, scientists, and science communicators, and I have to say it’s been such a pleasure working on this. So please check it out wherever you get your podcasts, or try a sample with our climate change episode below featuring Rose Mutiso:
So how do we bring everythingfrom Homeward Bound – the women, the science, the leadership lessons – together to address complex real world leadership problems? We were very fortunate to have Musimbi Kanyoro on board as our ‘elder’, who has extensive experience from leading the Global Fund for Women and many other nonprofit human rights organisations. Her sessions were always incredibly inspiring, which you can get a sense of if you read her own blog post after coming back from Homeward Bound:
Antarctica has spoken to me…. we are such a small thing in this ocean. We can be supported, and we can be roughed up. We must realise that we can try and do things to help the vulnerabilities we see, and we must also recognise that if we don’t, we will continually destabilise the root of nature and then ruin the only possibilities we have.
-Musimbi Kanyoro
Ice and water in the Gerlache Strait.
Here we come to the heart of why we went to Antarctica: both the epic scale of what we saw and the epic changes which were so visible there show that action is needed to preserve our planet for future generations. And, being in a closed environment with other women in science for 3 weeks created, as Musimbi called it, a ‘leadership laboratory’ where we were able to learn and plan and accomplish so much more than a weeklong course in a conference center somewhere, or an online course once a week. It was an immersive environment for making change, and as the faculty frequently told us, the 13th faculty member was Antarctica. Listening to the voice of that wilderness was one of the most important things we did there, balanced with the task of making that voice more widely heard. As Wallace Stegner puts it, “instead of listening to the silence, we have shouted into the void.” That must change.
From a silent Zodiac cruise, listening.
However, it’s a hard task to bring everyone to the table. Homeward Bound aims to empower women with legacy minded leadership skills, to be collaborative and inclusive rather than self-promoting. I’ve written about how our participants came from many countries and many walks of life, and the age range spanned from 25 to 70. But there was still room for broader intersectionality in who was on board, and what is wonderful is that we discussed this openly, many times, with the leaders of Homeward Bound. Given that the program is based in Australia, it attracts many Australians, lots of English speakers from the US and Europe… but relatively fewer people from South America, Asia, and Africa. These are huge continents to have sparse representation from, and HB acknowledged the difficulty they have found in attracting broader cohorts and wanted our help in making things better. There was also an underrepresentation of LGBTQ and other minority groups who have been historically excluded, and intersectionality was an agreed upon priority for everyone but also, a work in progress.
Many clouds have to clear before we see the sun.
Even though the participants and faculty my year were the most diverse yet, I was glad that the program acknowledged the work still to be done on diversity and showed willingness to go further; to me, this reflects the challenges we all face as leaders in building diverse teams and projects. My own experiences in physics research, working in higher education, and running public engagement projects have all shown me that some forms of inclusion and equity are relatively easy, and some are harder. But we do this work because it matters, and even when we make mistakes, there is always an opportunity to show we can do better. As the brilliant Melissa McEwan described it, allyship is a process and not an identity – each action a chance to work toward our purpose. This also helps us not to be defensive when we fail, a lesson that applies to leadership and life equally.
Now that all 100 of us who went through this intense learning experience together are back home, how can we translate what we’ve learned to our everyday environments? I have found my 100 day action plan a great help (from our strategy work with Kit Jackson), as well as encouragement from the other participants and faculty members. People who experience Homeward Bound purportedly have a higher than average rate of job change or divorce after they return, and I think it’s clear why: the program asks the difficult questions, pushing you to go to the heart of who you are and why you are doing the things you are doing. Fortunately, HB provides a safe environment to explore those questions, and a community to support each other as we all try to act on our values, combating sexism in STEM as well as climate change, and making a world with better leaders for the greater good.
Trying to remember the bigger picture.
The next call for applications to be part of Homeward Bound will be open in March here. Please do feel free to get in touch with me if you are considering applying; it has been an incredibly empowering experience for me which I would wholeheartedly recommend. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to do this, and the support of many colleagues, friends and family – it has been a transformational experience even though I suspect the transformation is still in progress!
Last time I told you about Homeward Bound, the women in STEM leadership program that brought me to Antarctica, and some of the things we all learned about ourselves on the ship. It was quite an incredible environment, intense and self-contained so that we all had space to think about what we were learning, and many people to discuss it with. It was a wonderful environment to learn more about ourselves: our behaviors and our values.
Chinstrap penguins in Antarctica.
Broadening our focus out from the self, we also talked quite a lot with Graciela Szwarcberg about different issues that can arise when managing a team. How do you have a conversation with someone about a miscommunication, about an issue in performance, about a problem that isn’t going away? Graci led us through the 5 dysfunctions of a team, and many exercises which, to me, were about empathy, directness in communication, and considering how team dynamics can evolve and change and how that affects what work can be done. So helpful, and echoed some things I read a long time ago in the book Difficult Conversations, but in a workplace context which was really useful.
People and penguins, having difficult conversations without speaking the same language.
Before we got on the ship, they had us all fill out a tool called the LSI – Life Styles Inventory, and we also had people who worked with us fill out the same questions about us. The LSI has been validated in research as an effective tool for behavioural change, and the idea was to help show us our constructive as well as our defensive behavioural patterns, in hopes of helping us reduce the behaviours that aren’t constructive (and in fact, waste energy that could be spent constructively). I have to say, I was initially wary of the LSI, perhaps from teenage years spent filling out many surveys that purported to tell you about yourself but were really just saying the kind of vague, generalizable things that you often read in horoscopes. But after lots of time working with it, I did see the value of a deep and detailed way to analyze behavior, especially once we were on the ship and could discuss or see behavior patterns in action.
Looking to the bigger picture.
I had an LSI coach over the summer, provided by Homeward Bound, who helped me navigate the ideas and identify patterns I had, of avoiding difficult things sometimes or being competitive/perfectionist in the way that academia often rewards. The LSI coach was especially useful in contextualizing my results in my personal circumstances (for example, bereavement) and framing what kinds of behavioural change could be doable for me. After all, we are all different people who will act in different ways, but there are often ways to break bad patterns and establish new and better habits, which helps both us and those around us. I found this part of the program especially challenging, but I also have to say that it helped having so many others on the same journey with me, and I have never felt so supported and accepted by such a large group of scientists.
Support is important, as this Weddell seal demonstrates.
There was also a strong focus on the ship on science communication, and the many different forms it can take, which of course I greatly enjoyed and appreciated. They warned us beforehand that some parts of the programme might feel easy and obvious, and others might feel challenging and confronting – for me the science communication parts were familiar and fun, from my time organizing Bright Club, Soapbox Science, speaking on the radio, etc. But the science communication content then dovetailed with visibility – the idea of being visible, which is a fraught topic for many women, and what you can do to use visibility for the greater good. As our visibility team of Jen Martin and Julia May told us, ‘visibility without purpose is vanity’, so we talked a lot about why we might need to be visible as leaders and again how that might tie into our values and goals. I think this is really important for women, because women who speak up often face a greater backlash than men who have the same message, and women receive more social conditioning to be agreeable and not upset anyone which makes them more vulnerable to that backlash. Lots was also covered about resilience, and accepting that failing from time to time doesn’t make YOU a failure. If you go outside your comfort zone, and actively try to learn and grow, you will sometimes slip up. But that’s ok if you can acknowledge it, learn from it, and move forward with a better idea of what to do next time. Again, a really important life skill.
So how do we bring these pieces together to solve complex, real world leadership problems? I’ll talk about that next time in my last blog post about Homeward Bound.
Ice seems simple until you observe it in the real world.
When I first heard about a program aimed at women in STEM to develop their leadership potential, over the course of a year, with a capstone voyage to Antarctica, I knew immediately that I wanted to apply. I am a feminist physicist, but have always been a bit wary of leadership and management courses aimed at women that effectively say, you are broken unless you act more like men. But Homeward Bound seemed different – motivated by the greater good, recognizing that we need better leadership to address societal issues like climate change, and honoring the ability that women have to synthesize knowledge, think of others, and cultivate a legacy mindset rather than pursuing short term opportunism. I also really liked the global outlook of the program, with participants from countries across the world and at all career stages and ages of their lives. As someone living outside my country of birth, looking at worldwide issues and trying to find the connections between science, society, and culture, having such a diverse group of women all focused on the same issues sounded incredibly inspiring to me.
A human pride flag, made by some of our cohort and ship’s crew. Diversity in many forms!
And of course, Antarctica! From my experience in the Arctic I knew full well the power that wilderness has to inspire, to provoke reflection, and to show us the consequences of our actions. At the time I applied, I was just coming out of six months of deep grief after losing my father, and it felt crazy to hope for an experience like this. Imagine being on a ship in Antarctica surrounded by incredible women. A dream, right?
A boat full of female scientists and a diving humpback whale, from a dream that really happened.
So it was a shock when I was actually accepted onto the program: I had signed up for a year of leadership training, and a substantial amount of fundraising, followed by a sure-to-be incredible voyage to the bottom of the world. We had monthly video calls with faculty, homework, reading, coaching, and a lot of preparation. It was all pretty interesting, and I enjoyed talking to the other participants I met through discussion groups or our UK/Ireland chat group, but I have to admit that before I arrived in Ushuaia, at the southern end of Argentina to actually get on the ship, I wasn’t sure how all the training they were throwing at us would fit together.
One of the first things we did, which I later realized actually formed the connecting strands between everything else, was a values elicitation exercise. This was led by Fabian Dattner, and the intent was to help us understand our own motivations, why we do the things we do and what is most intrinsically rewarding to us. We considered it in the contexts of our work, our relationships, and our selves, but many people (myself included) found the same values coming across in different forms on all those fronts. When I had identified my own values – creativity, connectedness, empathy – suddenly a lot of my own projects made more sense to me. I have always viewed research as a creative endeavor, and spoken at length about the parallels between research and artistic practices like comedy, music, dance. And my love for interdisciplinary science also comes from a desire to make connections across fields, between different schools of thought. But I also care about connecting people, and understanding them, in both professional and personal contexts. My public engagement work strongly reflects these values, which is why Bright Club for example is so rewarding to run.
Values are the guiding stars behind our own actions and desires.
We did a lot of work with Kit Jackson of Strategy Together to turn our values into a personal strategy: she would ask us, based on our values, to think about our aspirations, what we hoped to achieve, and thus what our priorities were. We eventually turned these into action plans, and it was very interesting to see what actions led naturally from our values – as well as what actions were not there at all, but might be part of our daily activity. One surprising benefit for me of doing this work was discovering how many of the work and life pieces I cared about are things I don’t have direct control over. You can’t control other people, which is both wonderful and difficult, and thinking of the things I wanted to do with my time but then also reflecting on whether or not I could make them part of an action plan was actually a great exercise in finding out what I just can’t control. Which is very important to recognize!
I find the wilderness is also a great teacher of what we can and can’t control. It is easier to accept lack of control when it means you are part of something beautiful.
These workshops and classes lasted about four hours each day, but often we would spend mealtimes and the shore visits discussing the same topics, or self-organising other lectures and projects (including an improv class that I co-led along with Ana Payo Payo!). Next time I’ll talk about how these learnings about the self connected to our interactions with others, and the broader context that we all hoped to do some good in.
Sometimes, science can feel like a joke. Experiments don’t work, simulations produce physically impossible outcomes, and a question that you thought would take two weeks to answer instead can take two years. All too often we hide the messiness of science, presenting progress as linear rather than admitting the missteps and follies along the way. But surprises and setbacks shape the story of science as a human endeavor, and if we are unwilling to share this side of science, to laugh at ourselves, we risk alienating society from science altogether.
You might be thinking, but science isn’t funny, it’s an important and serious business! In my view, that is exactly why we should find the humour in it. Scientific progress saves lives, and technological advances improve quality of life across the globe. This means that public understanding of and participation in science has never been more important, especially as scientific issues such as climate change and energy usage increasingly impact politics and people worldwide. Research in education tells us that playful approaches to learning information can actually aid in retention and understanding, so educators now encourage learners to generate their own content on a topic – to be able to tell a story. Or write a joke.
Áine Gallagher combining research and comedy at Bright Club Ireland.
What is a joke, after all, but a surprising reversal, a change in viewpoint that completely reframes the information that came before? These sorts of reversals happen in science all the time, and scientists are used to having their viewpoints upended by new data. In fact, many of the skills that are important in science are also important in writing comedy: creativity, a willingness to upend the status quo, and indeed a subversive approach to authority in pursuit of a deeper truth. But more importantly, consider the audience. When a person listens to a joke, they are waiting for the other shoe to drop and the punchline to be revealed: they are waiting to change their mind. In this era of polarized news and information bubbles, what other approach to communication of complex ideas could possibly be more powerful than comedy?
It is this ethos that underlies Bright Club, a series of variety nights combining academic research and stand-up comedy. I have run Bright Club events in Ireland since 2015, training researchers from science, social science, and humanities and bringing them together with comedians and musicians for thought-provoking shows. The Bright Club format itself was pioneered in the UK by Steve Cross in 2009, and Bright Club events now take place in many European countries. Before each event, academics are trained in stand-up comedy techniques, a skill set which they often find useful in teaching and other science communication events.
In the 60+ events our Bright Club team has held in Ireland, which take place in informal spaces from pubs to music and comedy festivals, we have found an audience which is diverse and excited to hear from academics who reject the notion of the ivory tower. The talks are always engaging and the interdisciplinary nature of the events helps connect science to the broader constellation of human knowledge, drawing in people from all walks of life. We’ve also found that speakers who take part in Bright Club find comedy empowering: not only does it help them to communicate more accessibly, without jargon, but it helps them to communicate authentically, to find their own voices and their own unique perspectives on their own research. Participation in public engagement events like Bright Club often leads to a strengthened sense of agency and scientific identity, but the use of humour adds an extra level to this by allowing researchers to connect their professional selves to their personal selves. Audiences see researchers in their full humanity, and researchers often report that Bright Club is the first time they have felt that this humanity could be part of their work.
Comedians and academics from all fields, after a Bright Club event.
Science affects all of society, and hence it is of critical importance to bring researchers into public spaces to engage the public with what they do. Comedy is an invaluable tool for engagement, not least because the audience response adds the element of dialogue. Researchers report that the laughter and comments from the audience, as well as the process of writing jokes and reflecting on their own work, gave them new ideas and perspective on their research. And audiences reported great joy in hearing academic research presented so engagingly, in a fun setting, with a mix of different topics. Facts don’t speak for themselves – they need ambassadors. So isn’t it time we all started taking ourselves a bit less seriously?
Perspective changes everything. Seeing things from a new angle, in a new context, can lead to some incredible realizations; just ask the astronauts who look down at our planet from orbit, seeing everything that means anything floating on an island in space. It is hard to have that perspective from close up, as author Ursula Le Guin put it:
If you can see a thing whole… it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
To me, this is the uncomfortable comfort of
wild spaces – of the wilderness. I grew up in the high desert, where what lies
between towns and cities is mainly wild and mainly not for us. It may sound strange, but it gives me a sense
of peace to be somewhere where my presence is incidental, in the grand
mountains and epic skies. That landscape’s vastness was there long before I was
born, and it will long outlast me. There is a temptation when we find a place
with this cosmic perspective, to use it as a kind of blurred backdrop to bring
our own lives into sharper focus. However, this temptation must be resisted.
The wilderness is not a canvas for your projections, not a metaphor for what
you have finally realized about your own life. It just is, independent of you
or your narratives.
Such grand places give perspective because of their immensity – they evoke a feeling of the sublime. But this can affect people in different ways. Sometimes the sublime in nature can inspire us, make us feel that we are part of something greater than us. Other times, being such a small piece of such a large thing can inspire fear, even existential dread, as we realise our own insignificance. But we are unique among creatures in being able to perceive and witness this. I think the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen described it well:
The starry sky is the truest friend in life, when you first become acquainted; it is ever there, it gives ever peace, ever reminds you that your restlessness, your doubt, your pains are passing trivialities. The universe is and will remain unshaken. Our opinions, our struggles, or sufferings are not so important and unique, when all is said and done.
I felt this keenly two years ago when I went to the Arctic. It was incredible seeing the glaciers and the icy seas, a brutal but beautiful environment at the roof of the world. But my sense of peace was shattered by the evidence, all around us, that this wilderness was not so long-lasting as it might seem. Climate change had shrunk the glaciers from their former size, whaling had destroyed formerly huge populations of beluga whales, and even isolated beaches had plastic garbage washing up on them as litter was conveyed on the ocean currents from other parts of the planet. I’ve described these things as if they happened passively, but we humans have actively caused these changes to occur. In the past, we had the excuse of ignorance. We know now exactly what we are doing.
Arctic mountains, glaciers, beaches… and trash.
Our planet may continue to float perfectly suspended in space, a blue marble in an ocean of emptiness, but our place on it will evaporate if we continue our current course. There is a drastic need for change. This is why I am taking part in Homeward Bound, an initiative bringing together women in science to become leaders in climate action. Women are underrepresented in scientific leadership despite high ability and skills, due to patriarchal ideas which we must dismantle if we want to use the full complement of human ability. My cohort of 100 women from across the globe is currently training in visibility, strategy, and science leadership, and in November 2019 we will set sail to Antarctica. This will be the largest female expedition to Antarctica, and there is no more appropriate place than the continent which is most affected by climate change, and which for so long was considered the sole purview of men.
The cost and the carbon footprint of travelling to Antarctica is high. Would it be better to not make the journey, to preserve the place by avoiding the carbon emissions? And more broadly, is it better to preserve wild places by leaving them be? Few naturalists have advocated for our planet’s wild places by avoiding them. But I believe the question is worth considering, and when I was in the Arctic my shipmates and I discussed this at length – if we believed that the Arctic was under threat, then what were we doing there? My own conclusion was that the trip was indeed wasteful, if I did not use it as an opportunity to raise awareness of climate change and produce broader societal value. So I wrote and spoke about the Arctic, I worked with artists to create new works about science, and stepped up my advocacy to be in line with my values. My Homeward Bound journey, similarly, must be larger than the physical trip – like an iceberg whose visible piece is but a small fraction of the whole.
Why not ask about the impact of not just our big gestures, but the smaller choices that make up our lives? What impact does our travel have, our energy consumption online, our food choices? What must I achieve to be worth my carbon footprint? What are we doing to justify this impact, or minimize it?
After coming back from the Arctic, I became
vegetarian. That was the right choice for me, though others may view it
differently and make their own individual choices. But we must remember that we
are not acting on our own – our choices contribute to climate change, to the
destruction of the planet we call home.
How will we justify them to our neighbours, to our children? Why not
choose to act, in both our personal choices and our collective action toward
corporations and governments?
Perspective is important, but perspective
without action will not be enough. We must face our discomfort, and look for
new solutions, if we are to have any hope of preserving what is sublime on our
planet and in ourselves.
I am fundraising for my Homeward Bound journey; you can donate here if you want to help.
It’s International Women’s Day, and people seem to find it
easier to support girls than women.
I’ve noticed this as a Woman In Science, this eagerness to encourage girls into science with no concern as to what might happen to them as they, inevitably, become Women In Science. Isn’t that what we want for them, to evade the leaks in the pipeline and become role models that future girls can look up to? Don’t we want girls to become Women Who Have It All?
And yet, it’s easier to support girls than women – girls
aren’t threatening. Girls aren’t competition. How else to explain the fact
that, at this stage in my career, I face more sexism than I ever have before? I
went off to college in 2001, at the ripe old age of 16, and you’d think things
would have gotten better since then.
But when you’re part of a student cohort, or even a postdoctoral researcher or senior postdoc, you’re classed with other researchers at your level. As a PI on the other hand, running a research group, teaching undergrads, applying for funding, suddenly I am being treated worse than at any previous time in my career. Sure, it’s a demanding job, but I can’t help but notice the female junior academics around me getting saddled with heavier workloads and negative attitudes about their gender that male academics don’t have to deal with. And it doesn’t make my job easier when I can’t go to a conference without being asked ‘who do you work for?’
I have to admit I thought that as a society we’d be over this by now. Naïve student Jessamyn would have assumed there would be no need for gender quotas, in a place as progressive as a university setting, in the year 2019. Lecturer Jessamyn grimly admits that we still need them, and we have a long way to go before we are truly including everyone in higher education, and in science. Science is for everyone, regardless of gender, race, class, sexuality, or background, but it’s a lot of work to make that happen. Initiatives like the Athena SWAN and IOP Juno awards are a step in the right direction, and I’m glad to see my own institution pursuing them, but I think of them as being like the Bechdel Test – a necessary minimum, but not nearly enough to ensure true inclusion. We need to make sure that everyone is part of the story, not just the usual suspects.
Sometimes I find this tough going. I work in physics, a
field with a pretty bad diversity problem, and I am used to being the only woman
in the room. I wish I didn’t have so much experience being put down or
disrespected, and while it may me a minority of physicists who act this way, a
few consistent bad experiences can really change the environment. I sometimes
wonder about the ethics of encouraging young girls into physics, having had the
experiences I have: am I shepherding them into a place where they won’t be
valued?
But you know, when I was an undergraduate at the cusp of either leaving physics or doubling down and pursuing a graduate education, I was lucky to end up working for an amazing physicist who I looked up to. She was an inspiration, a wonderful and supportive supervisor, and a role model whether she intended to be or not. In fact she still is – her name is Dr. Natalie Roe, and she is now the Physics Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. I’m sure she faced adversity in her career, and had experiences that differed from her male colleagues, but when I looked at her as a student I saw an incredible scientist and person, who I wanted to emulate. She paved a road for me into physics, and probably for many other young women who she mentored.
Culture change is slow, and frustrating, and in fighting
injustice we often feel like we are far behind where we want to be. But I am
grateful for everyone who’s pushed for change, and I hope that we can all keep
paying this forward, to make science the kind of place where every girl, and
every woman, is truly welcome.
Growing up, I was a dancer – I performed in salsa, swing, and ballroom competitions, trained a little in ballet, and was the captain of my high school dance team. When I went off to college to study physics and math, I never imagined that I would get to bring science and dance together someday.
But in 2017, when I was selected for a science/art residency aboard a ship in the Arctic, my roommate for three weeks in close quarters was Deidre Cavazzi, a choreographer specializing in interdisciplinary dance projects. Deidre was a wonderful companion on the journey we shared, and is now a good friend, so I was delighted when she suggested that she might be able to come to Ireland during her next sabbatical to choreograph a dance piece based on my research in nanoscience. I felt really honoured, because I had seen her previous work based on things like the Fibonacci sequence and banned books and to me, the idea of translating these ideas into physical movement and shape and tempo was fascinating.
So it was very exciting when Deidre came to Galway in autumn 2018, supported by a public engagement grant from the Institute of Physics. She came to my lab, talked with me about my research, and read everything she could get her hands on about nanoelectronics and memristors and novel devices that are mimicking the brain. We got a beautiful venue courtesy of the Discipline of Drama, Theatre, and Performance at NUI Galway, and then for two nights during Science Week we invited people to a free event where I gave a short introduction to nanoscience, and then Deidre introduced a dance theatre piece that explored the same concepts, with images from my research and movement choreographed and set to music by Deidre. The full show was recorded, and you can watch it here:
Video of my talk and the dance performance that Deidre created.
One of the best things for me about this project was that Deidre asked me if I wanted to be one of the dancers! I had a wonderful time, and seeing how she brought nanoscience concepts to a whole new context was truly inspiring. You can read more about Deidre’s process on her blog here, where she describes her process and her time in Ireland. I enjoyed my collaboration with her so very much, and we are hoping to repeat it again sometime in the future! But I couldn’t actually sum up the project better than this quote, from one of our audience members:
The scientist and the choreographer had understood each other so well… I loved the blending of science and art, I think both can benefit hugely from each other as each has a unique perspective but are trying to answer similar questions.
I’m American, but have done most of my science communication in Ireland and the UK. That’s pretty much a fluke, a result of the fact that I didn’t have the time or confidence to pursue science communication during graduate school, and that the timing of my move to Ireland coincided with an explosion of opportunities – Soapbox Science, Pint of Science, Famelab, and of course Bright Club – for talking about science.
That means I do a lot of my science communication outside of the culture and educational system I grew up in, which can be a challenge. References, attitudes, and even just ways of talking about science are different in different places, and most places are pretty different from the science town where I grew up: Los Alamos, New Mexico.
I’ve been working with scientists in Nairobi, Kenya, to challenge myself even more. The Institute of Physics have funded me to work with the Mawazo Institute twice now, a research institute which funds and trains female African scholars in science and social science policy-relevant disciplines. I’ve helped them put on public-facing events, connect to local universities and informal science educators, and most recently returned to Nairobi to run a full day course about effective communication of research.
Working with the amazing Mawazo Fellows in Nairobi.
On my science communication walkabout, here are some of the things I’ve learned:
Metaphors are great but they may not translate. See for example, all my baseball and basketball metaphors (it’s a home run! a slam dunk!) that I left back in the US.
The slang of where you grew up is as much a sort of jargon as scientific terminology can be. Change how you talk, or at least define your terms.
How direct and emotive a communicator your audience expects may vary wildly between different places! This can work to your advantage or disadvantage, but at the very least you have to be aware of it.
Also consider the level of formality your audience expects, and be conscious about your choice to match or subvert it as this can have different meanings across cultural divides. My personal style as well as my nationality is less formal than lots of the places I end up speaking, and I have to think about what cues I can use to show I’m worth listening to.
And finally, consider how fast you talk! You may have been told to slow down when doing public speaking in the past, to be easily understood, but consider that fast talking will compound when people aren’t familiar with your accent (even in a country speaking your native language).
It’s a tough feeling when you move somewhere new, or go on an exciting trip to talk about science, and suddenly realise that in this new context you are not the effective communicator that you were back home. But I think that most of the skills we develop by talking about science are transferable, it just takes some thought and attention to the new context. And as always, know your audience!
To me, teaching at the university level has three specific roles:
Student empowerment
Democratization of knowledge
The betterment of humanity
As an educator, my job is first and foremost to empower students by helping them to learn, access information, and create new knowledge. This process is inherently democratic as it is meant to equalize access to knowledge, so that any student can learn any subject regardless of their gender, race, socioeconomic status, or other factors which they cannot control. Empowering individual students in this way leads to a society that contains more and more well-informed, competent and capable individuals, who will use their knowledge and talents to contribute to the betterment of the human condition. My teaching is meant to be a public good.
The author closing TEDxTUM 2017. Photo by Wade Million.
This may seem like an obvious, if lofty goal. However, there are challenges which must be addressed, especially in the teaching of science generally and physics more specifically. Physics requires not only topical knowledge and strong math skills, but also critical thinking and problem solving, which can at first seem at odds with the way that many students have prepared themselves for the Leaving Cert. In the Irish context, teaching first year physics, I try to help students transition from a rote learning mentality to embrace more complex modes of understanding. I must also address a common fallacy about science, that it is a collection of facts. Showing students how these facts are connected, and that science is a creative endeavour at heart, is needed to progress their understanding.
There is also an elitism around physics, sometimes perpetuated by physicists themselves, that must be broken down. Physics relies on math in a way that few other subjects do, and while math is essential to understanding physical concepts, many students experience ‘math anxiety’ that must be addressed. Using language, demonstrations, and math together helps students cement the basic concepts. Studies have shown that the use of humour in lectures also aids students to remember information better, which comes as little surprise to me after my experience running Bright Club.
A talk I gave about using humour to communicate tough topics.
Often, whether or not students choose to pursue a topic depends not so much on the topic itself as on their own identity: whether or not they can see themselves in physics, whether they ‘fit in’. My own experience growing up surrounded by scientists helped show me what a scientific career looked like and how to access it. But students without this background need more from their instructors: to see scientists as real people, to understand the steps to a scientific career and where it can lead them. This is especially important for women and other underrepresented minorities, who are still sorely needed in physics. Even if the students who take my classes choose not to study physics, I aim to leave them with a solid understanding and positive attitude toward physics, to understand that physics is a way to understand the world around us, and an important part of everything we do.
I do my best to actively engage students in lectures, problem-solving, and laboratory, remembering that people often say that you cannot teach anyone physics, but empower them to learn it themselves. My role is to find as many ways as there are students to present the information and connective ideas of physics. I am inspired in this by my own undergraduate physics mentor, Richard Muller at the University of California Berkeley, who was famous as a teacher for his course Physics for Future Presidents. He understood that everyone, not just future physicists, will benefit from a solid understanding of physics, and designed a seminar style course focused more on interesting and relevant science topics rather than historical sequences of discovery. I take the liberal arts view that physics is for everyone, the same way literature is for everyone.
My aim as a teacher is not merely to get as many people as possible to study physics. It is to improve engagement, understanding, and attitudes toward physics, which is a central science of relevance to every single person. I want to empower students to understand physics, improve their access to that knowledge and understanding of how it is connected, and help scientists and non-scientists alike to work for the betterment of humanity. This makes better physicists, but it also makes better people.
erindubitably
Jessamyn Fairfield
letstalkaboutscience 