Composition Forum 52, Fall 2023
http://compositionforum.com/issue/52/

Grappling with an Evolving Field: Developing an Undergraduate Writing Minor in Science Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Karen J. Lunsford and Amanda Stansell

Abstract: In this program profile, we describe the development of a new track in Science Communication (SciComm) for an existing Professional Writing minor offered by an independent Writing Program. We identify the international and local exigencies for improving SciComm; the resources needed for this new track—both those already in place and those created; the three lines of SciComm theory that underpin the course designs; and the challenges and opportunities we have identified. Throughout, we offer examples of specific assignments and activities that may interest readers who are considering incorporating more SciComm approaches into their courses and/or programs.

Introduction

As we were writing this introduction, we noted the controversy that went viral between climate-change denier Andrew Tate and Greta Thunberg. We were reminded that, as a 16-year-old, Thunberg was nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, after two years of organizing youthful climate activists for worldwide strikes, walkouts, and testimony. For her own testimony before the United States Congress, Thunberg submitted a copy of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Global Warming and then urged congressional members to “listen to the scientists” (Milman and Smith). Her testimony, as well as her choice to travel by boat instead of by plane to the US, was covered widely on blogs. Meanwhile, on other social media, Thunberg was both praised as a modern Joan d’Arc and compared to a young woman in a Nazi propaganda poster. These events represent just one example of the recent exigencies that have inspired initiatives to improve Science Communication (SciComm), and that, in turn, have raised questions about what science writing courses should offer. These exigencies include: a) challenges to traditional channels of communication about science, such as the channels between governmentally funded scientists and policymakers; b) increased calls for scientists to communicate more effectively with nonspecialists and to collaborate internationally to resolve global issues; c) shifts in how science journalists cover STEM topics; d) the ease by which writers can circulate both information and misinformation online; e) the impact of multimodal genres on the uptake of that (mis)information; and, (f) significantly, the need to pay attention to how young people engage with STEM. Given this urgency and the potentially broad range of the issues associated with SciComm, several faculty members in the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Writing Program came together to develop a new SciComm track in an existing Professional Writing minor, a track designed to leverage individual faculty interests and to appeal to both STEM and non-STEM majors.

As we worked to create this new curriculum, we drew upon our collective expertise. At UCSB, individual faculty members already had been teaching technical and scientific writing courses for 15 years or more, and they had developed specialized courses for engineering, the environmental sciences, the health professions, and journalism. Moreover, beyond developing a wide range of SciComm courses, faculty members had collaborated with local STEM programs (such as the Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships) to create and lead workshops for advanced STEM graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty. For example, in addition to hosting grant-writing workshops, Karen led a series on writing short-form news articles and on developing social media campaigns for introducing the public to scientific research. Most recently, Amanda has developed a workshop for graduate students participating in an “Art of Science” competition[1], teaching them to craft effective exhibit labels to describe the significance and technical details of the image of their research they had created, as well as to guide viewers in interpreting that image. From these years of teaching and collaborative ventures, faculty members began to imagine how to extend existing assignments and to create new opportunities, such as internships, for a SciComm minor track.

At the same time, we sought to better situate our collective expertise within the broader landscape of recent SciComm scholarship. We discovered that SciComm is best described as an evolving field, one that is expansive, complex, and international, yet one that must be interpreted to address local contexts. We anticipated and agreed with a claim that Han Yu and Kathryn Northcut articulated in their introduction to Scientific Communication: Practice, Theories, Pedagogies (2018): Our field of composition studies would benefit from a renewed “focused attention” on “science communication” as distinct from technical or professional communication (9). Often, as at UCSB, funding for SciComm initiatives has concentrated on advanced graduate students, postdocs, and STEM faculty. With few exceptions nationwide, undergraduate curricula addressing SciComm have been enfolded into technical communication programs or into single, disconnected science writing courses. The relative absence of targeted, cohesive undergraduate curricula catalyzed our interest in designing a more comprehensive and more inclusive minor track in Science Communication. This track was first offered in 2016-2017.

Now, looking back after seven years, our understanding of the pedagogical development within SciComm has evolved. This program profile summarizes both our initial thinking during the curriculum development process and our new understandings after teaching the courses. Throughout this profile, we offer examples of classroom activities and assignments that demonstrate how we bring together and continue to develop materials from the different theoretical strands and disciplines that make up SciComm scholarship. These different influences include, but are not limited to, the rhetoric of science, the (re)positioning of expertise suggested by research on the public understanding of science, and the expansion of communicative media and participants called for by scholars interested in public engagement with science. We end with reflections for future iterations of our program, as well as proposals for research to address unanswered questions within SciComm pedagogy.

I. Local Context

UCSB is a particularly appropriate site for a Professional Writing minor in Science Communication because of its strong profile in STEM among both faculty and students. For example, in 1970, UCSB undergraduates were leaders in the founding of Earth Day after an oil spill along the local coast, and students remain active today through a popular Environmental Studies program. To address different STEM foci, multiple but disconnected science communication-focused classes and workshops were scattered throughout the university, spanning departments from Communication to Chemistry, but as of 2015, no concentrated SciComm program existed for undergraduates. As Jonathan Buehl and William Fitzgerald note in their useful overview of the multiplicity of science writing permutations and programs, “successful pedagogical interventions in science and writing look beyond a single course to issues of sustainability in the face of growing demand and the need to think vertically in a developmental arc from science novice to science professional” (2018, p. 171). We decided to create a more coherent SciComm initiative.

The scaffolding for this new SciComm initiative was already in place within UCSB’s independent Writing Program (WP). The WP offers courses[2] that meet two General Education (GE) writing requirements, one lower- and one upper-division, plus a minor in Professional Writing. The upper-division courses offer over 40 options that represent a broad spectrum of writing in the disciplines, the professions, and transdisciplinary practices. Students are free to select any upper-division course that fits their schedules and interests; they are not required by specific majors. Most of these courses have been created by fulltime NTT faculty members (Lecturers). STEM-oriented courses include Writing for the Health Professions, Writing for the Environmental Professions, Writing About Sustainability, Writing with Code, Technical Writing, and Writing for Accounting. Particularly appropriate stepping stones to a SciComm minor were Writing for Science and Technology, often focused on writing academic research grant proposals, and “Science Writing for the Public,” a relatively new course that paved the way in our curricular development for the new minor. Overall, the WP encourages pedagogical innovation and experimentation, and individual instructors exercise considerable autonomy in designing and teaching courses.

Until the SciComm minor was offered, students interested in intensive STEM writing took one of four other Professional Writing minor emphases or “tracks”: professional editing, business communication, multimedia communication, and civic engagement. (A new journalism track was also launched in 2020.) Due to budgeting issues, spaces within the minor tracks are limited to 25 students per track. As a result, unusually for the campus, the minor includes a competitive application process. Students interested in any of the minor tracks must first complete three upper-division Writing courses. Any of the upper-division courses may be used to fulfill this requirement, although we suggest course recommendations for specific tracks. For example, the “Science Writing for the Public” course is highlighted as appropriate for students interested in the SciComm track. However, because students may take any combination of the three prerequisite courses, they enter the minor tracks with different histories of preparation. To be admitted officially to a minor track, students apply to the Professional Writing minor in the fall of their senior year by submitting a substantive portfolio in which they explain how their preferred track relates to their enclosed writing samples and to their professional goals. If admitted, students then take two senior capstone courses with the 24 other students in their track. They also complete an internship at a local company or agency, as well as a course that provides support for the internship. Since UCSB is on the quarter system, each course lasts 10 weeks plus a finals week, and the senior capstone courses and the internships occur during the winter and spring quarters of the academic year.

Because the Professional Writing minor was already established, creating the new SciComm track involved surveying students to gauge interest (with IRB permission) and writing a proposal to the WP’s curriculum committee to explain how the SciComm track would diverge from existing tracks and from other courses on campus. Nationally, although we find a wide range of science writing courses, many are focused on STEM students (Buehl & FitzGerald, Gigante). We considered a similar focus, but ultimately decided to design the minor for students in all majors. Our initial IRB-approved surveys of upper-division students enrolled in Writing Program classes indicated that interest in a future Science Communication minor was high (approximately 50% of 288 respondents) and spanned the disciplines: 58% of interested students were STEM majors, 34% were Social Science majors, and 8% were Humanities majors, including several Art majors. Communication majors have generally been the most represented non-STEM major in the last seven years of our Science Communication minor track.

The new minor track also required the creation of two new capstone courses: Scientific Literacy and Science Communication for the Public. The first capstone, Scientific Literacy, encourages students to delve deeply into a scientific topic of their choice, developing their abilities to interpret, analyze, and critique scientific genres (including visual genres) intended for specialists. They also compose their own texts addressing a range of audiences, both academic and non-academic. In the next course, Science Communication for the Public, students draw upon the scientific knowledge and expertise they have gained in the first course to continue to compose genres, including web-based genres, for nonspecialists. To unify the two courses and to create a place to showcase their work (including, with permission, internship work), students build an electronic portfolio. Although parameters are set for the capstone courses, individual instructors shape the syllabus to reflect the different types of expertise they bring to the courses, and they determine all grades for the coursework, including the final portfolio. Altogether, then, UCSB’s SciComm minor comprises three upper-division writing courses; an application portfolio; two capstone courses; an internship; and a final electronic portfolio.[3]

II. Integrating Theory and Curricula

Just as classes and workshops related to SciComm tend to be dispersed across the university, current approaches to SciComm scholarship draw from a variety of academic fields, including but not limited to rhetoric of science, medical humanities, discourse analysis, museum studies, journalism, education, media studies, and communication. We started designing the SciComm minor before the most recent emphasis on converting STEM to STEAM or STREAM[4] (by re-integrating Art and Reading/wRiting into STEM) gained traction in Writing Studies (see, for example, the collection edited by Vivian Kao and Julia E. Kiernan, 2022); we will return to this point in the conclusion. Instead, we had other sources of motivation and inspiration that remain significant for SciComm. First, as mentioned, we began to re-envision our upper-division SciComm and capstone courses by adapting specific aspects from technical communication and WAC/WID pedagogies, including civic engagement, multimedia, visual rhetoric, and genre studies. We especially began to distinguish our SciComm courses from technical communication through the choice of topics and by highlighting techniques from the rhetoric of science. Second, because we had already been involved with workshops for graduate students and beyond, we sought out scholarship from researchers interested in the Public Understanding of Science. Third, to better inform our approaches to defining SciComm audiences, we also sought out the related scholarship in Public Engagement with Science, particularly work that emphasizes the potential and challenges of digital SciComm venues and platforms. Fourth, because UCSB is a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), with approximately 45% of the graduating class designated as first-generation students, we have built the curriculum around student-developed and community-facing projects. Our goal, ultimately, is to build a vertical curriculum in SciComm from the level of undergraduates through faculty—a curriculum that reinforces earlier lessons through later courses, workshops, and extracurricular opportunities, and a curriculum that is more inclusive.

1. The Rhetoric of Science

The Rhetoric of Science scholarship was one of our early touchstones for curriculum design, as it clearly connects SciComm and Writing Studies. As Randy Allen Harris has argued in his introductions to two Landmark Essays collections, Rhetoric of Science has informed approaches to SciComm for decades and will continue to do so. Jeanne Fahnestock, a founding member of the field, has described Rhetoric of Science as interpretive, multidisciplinary scholarship that addresses a wide and expanding range of issues regarding scientific argumentation/persuasion, genres, knowledge-making practices, visual representation of data, and stylistics. Of stylistics, Fahnestock adds, perhaps the most persistent research topic has focused on the use of metaphor within scientific discourse (282-283). Her claim has been borne out by recent scholarship on metaphors, including but not limited to, studies by Leah Ceccarelli; Sarah Perrault and Meaghan O’Keefe; and Kathryn Yankura Swacha.

For our purposes, the Rhetoric of Science tradition exemplifies how to read academic, professional, and popular STEM documents with an eye towards critical scientific literacy. Researchers analyze, for example, how biased cultural assumptions become entrenched and seemingly validated through the construction of “objective” scientific discourse, through such techniques as the clever use of hedging, the IMRAD article format, and statistics. Likewise, researchers note how scientific discourse is both adopted and transformed through news and social media, and, in turn, how such popular media affect scientific argumentation (for example, see the discussions by Deborah Orpin and by Jeffrey Brainard). Our upper-division courses and capstone courses in the SciComm minor repeatedly address these issues through exercises requiring students to analyze documents closely. For example, several instructors in the program ask students to give presentations on news reports regarding current STEM topics. The class discussions explore how news accounts of STEM activities may skew representations of scientific methods, particularly the use of statistics. Class activities like these are supported by readings such as Naomi Oreskes’s Why Trust Science? and Jutta Schickore’s About Method: Experimenters, Snake Venom, and the History of Writing Scientifically. Through assignments and classroom experiences, we want students to see that science is a “social discourse: created and used by people in dynamic and unstable contexts, for varying and ever-changing reasons” (Yu and Northcut 12).

In addition to analyzing documents, students create them, both individually and in collaborative teams, and they practice with genres, styles, and techniques. For just one example, the minor echoes SciComm scholarship in highlighting the study of metaphors in STEM discourse. Our courses and assigned projects reiterate the importance of understanding how metaphors work and how to deploy them effectively across different contexts. Students in the environmental sciences, for instance, might consider the implications of metaphors such as a “food chain” versus a “food web,” whereas those in the medical fields might analyze the history of “food pyramids.” This consideration also extends to visual metaphors. In the SciComm capstone courses, students are especially encouraged to consider situations when metaphors fail to accurately convey significant STEM information. For example, one instructor created an activity in which SciComm minor students consider the benefits and pitfalls of comparing electrical phenomena to water (as in “flow” or “currents”). These activities ask students to consider the different audiences who might read, view, and interpret metaphors, and how the students’ texts may need to change to accommodate different constituencies’ varied knowledge of both the item used as a metaphor and the STEM concept. Throughout the program, such activities are supported with academic readings, as well as with popular sources like Reddit’s Explain Like I’m Five, and Wired Magazine’s 5 Levels video series.

The Rhetoric of Science scholarship is the bedrock for our SciComm minor. Focusing on textual issues, whether alphanumerical or visual, gives students from all majors an equal footing for thinking about SciComm. Focusing on the uptake of metaphors, genres, and other techniques by different constituencies encourages students to consider the social dimensions of scientific discourse. Most important, by encouraging students to take a critical approach towards scientific literacy, the program also prepares them to be flexible as new STEM information and cultural exigencies arise.

2. Public Understanding of Science

Our next theoretical strand, the Public Understanding of Science, emerged from our previous work with STEM graduate students and faculty across the university. Public Understanding of Science research (with its evocative acronym, PUS) developed from an international movement[5] intent on improving science education as well as on protecting governmental funding for the STEM disciplines. The scholarship discusses how scientists can best communicate their research activities and findings to the public. PUS scholarship is directly relevant to the most developed area of SciComm instructional programming: workshops targeted at advanced professionals, such as those offered by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science.[6] Programs such as these seek not only to enable scientists to communicate effectively with their peers and with nonspecialists, but also to enable journalists, policymakers, educators, museum administrators, and other professionals to understand and communicate scientific information accurately to their constituencies.

As important as such programs are for advanced professionals, the workshop model has been widely criticized, including by PUS researchers, for a potential flaw in its fundamental assumptions, namely, the adoption of a “deficit model” of science education. The deficit model, as Sarah Palmer and Renato Schibeci have explained, assumes that SciComm exists primarily to correct insufficient knowledge among audience members, and it implies “a flow of knowledge exchange from scientists to ‘the public,’ broadly understood” (513). The emphasis on workshop curricula suggests that the communication problem can be addressed straightforwardly: If only STEM specialists were to apply appropriate communication techniques, the public would be properly informed by scientific expertise, and relevant stakeholders would resolve issues. This assumption that experts must transmit their specialized research to broader stakeholders is further amplified by funding agencies that require “outreach” components in their grants. Certainly, conveying scientific information (especially new STEM information) accurately to nonspecialists is one aspect of SciComm, but considering SciComm as a one-way street from respected experts to ignorant novices is misleading and, in some cases, dangerous.

Notably, in our experience, students who take our courses often begin with this flawed assumption that SciComm is a one-way interaction in which STEM experts must “translate” or, more graphically, “dumb down” their expertise for the ignorant masses. That expectation seems inherent in our broader culture, even across disciplines. Students who are STEM majors fret that changing their vocabulary undermines their own claims to expertise, whereas students who are non-STEM majors worry that they have insufficient insider knowledge to write about “difficult” topics. To address these assumptions, our SciComm instructors include readings, activities, and assignments throughout the curriculum to explore the meaning of expertise.

For example, to challenge the problem of framing SciComm as a simple expert/novice divide, Karen[7] received a small instructional development grant to create a pedagogical exercise based on a real incident involving SciComm issues. In 2009, an earthquake registering 5.8 on the Richter scale struck the L’Aquila region in Italy, killing over 300 people. Six scientists were accused and convicted of negligence because, prosecutors maintained, they had failed to provide adequate warning and, moreover, had appeared to reassure residents about their safety. The six scientists maintained that they could not be held responsible for failing to predict an earthquake, as precise earthquake prediction is not yet possible. In the pedagogical exercise based on this event, teams of students participate in a simulated debate over the L’Aquila court cases, with each team representing a different stakeholder. They read the compiled court documents, letters from scientific organizations, news reports, and STEM articles regarding the 2009 earthquake. Although the teams include students who specialize in earthquake science, the variety of materials allows students with different backgrounds to find entry points into the information. Nearly all students appear to be interested in the topic, most being from earthquake-prone regions themselves. Typically, the team representing the six scientists and their supporting scientific organizations quickly finds itself outnumbered. For undergraduates, this exercise drives home how the cultural capital associated with scientific expertise can be tenuous and evolving. It also asks students to think about the different forms of expertise the stakeholders bring to the table, from the lived historical experience of the L’Aquila residents to the judges’ knowledge of the liability of public statements to the international geologists’ complicated interpretations of the seismographic evidence.

More broadly, our experiences with teaching both post-collegiate workshops and college activities such as the L’Aquila scenario have caused us to consider carefully how expertise can be developed and positioned at all levels, from freshmen to faculty. As Brianne Suldovsky and others[8] have argued, the deficit model of STEM education is both widespread and surprisingly persistent. To counter the deficit model, we argue that a focus on more nuanced ways of thinking about SciComm must occur sooner in our students’ professional lives, and, as we will discuss further in the next section, across more majors. As we have developed curricula focused on undergraduates, we have come to realize that many prerequisite STEM courses are designed to weed out students deemed unprepared for further STEM education, thus reinforcing the view that those who do not pass through are deficient, and those who do pass are superior. As Ebony Omontola McGee highlights, “STEM is also known to have a survival of the fittest culture that deemphasizes both structural racism and students’ raced and gendered identities, thus implying that students’ success is due solely to individual ‘intelligence’ (M. J. Williams et al., 2019).” This practice likewise reinforces the view that undergraduates are novices whom STEM experts must inform alongside all other public constituencies. Yet, these practices mark an attenuated way of viewing the life experiences and knowledges that all students may bring to STEM and to SciComm. In moving away from a worldview that privileges post-collegiate SciComm workshops to correct STEM education deficits after the fact, and by establishing a robust SciComm minor, we are beginning to define a more extended, more welcoming, vertical curriculum for SciComm.

3. Public Engagement with Science

UCSB students’ enthusiasm for activism dovetails with the final area of research, Public Engagement with Science (PES). PES reconsiders the expert-to-public one-way communication trajectory and instead imagines audience members who not only wish to learn about a topic, but who also may find themselves emotionally involved and motivated to action. As mentioned, UCSB students contributed to the founding of Earth Day after a coastal oil spill, and this activist tradition continues in students’ participation in local chapters of Engineers without Borders, which sponsors visits to areas in need to set up equipment to provide clean water, and Hermanas Unidas, which helps Latinx/Chicanx students succeed in university life. Our students’ commitment to activism is clear in this example from the home page of a writing minor’s eportfolio, “I am passionate about science outreach, equity, and diversity, which is why I'm enrolled in the Professional Writing Minor (in science communication) at UCSB.”

A PES-aligned curriculum assumes dialogic and equitable interactions among people; new media support this aspect. Blogs and social media, for example, provide important affordances for dialogue: “traditional distinctions between experts and nonexperts have shifted, and the routine trajectory of science communication has been disrupted and reshaped to allow for more immediate and direct interaction between scientists and lay communities” (Bray 155). Our SciComm minor curriculum substantially addresses this shift toward new media. SciComm track Writing Minors can select among multiple upper-division courses with significant new media components, such as Writing for Multimedia and Writing Web Content. For the final projects in the second capstone course (the writing minors’ final course), students create work in a variety of genres such as videos, podcasts, websites, e-newsletters, and social media campaigns.

New media assignments are likewise featured in Amanda’s design for the upper-division course, Science Writing for the Public. These assignments include short discourse analyses of misinformation circulation on Twitter and a major assignment for which students create and publish a STEM blog on an area within the student’s expertise.[9] To succeed in the blog assignment, the audience must be narrowly defined in terms of age, education, values, and level of interest in the topic. To help students understand how to target audiences, class members read sources like Beyond Politics, an article from the New England Journal of Medicine about public health strategies to reach vaccine hesitant individuals by connecting to their values and identities. By asking students to consider audiences carefully, the assignment reinforces a central goal of our larger SciComm curriculum to foster a dynamic notion of what counts as “public.” As Stilgoe et al. argue in Why Should We Promote Public Engagement with Science, “it is now time to re-open our ideas about publics and science. Publics, [Jasonoff] states, ‘are not all alike but are guided by culturally conditioned civic epistemologies.’ We should think of The Public less as a pre-existing entity and more as a space within which publics selectively form around technoscientific objects and matters of concern. It is these issue-oriented publics, Jasanoff contends, who enter the political arena to participate in constructing scientific and technological futures” (p. 8).

The resulting projects very explicitly demonstrate the students’ optimistic enthusiasm for creating a dialogic and activist science communication. Some blogs are a “call to action,” such as one that urges readers to join local endangered animal species advocacy groups. Some students directly seek interaction. For example, in a blog on her experience diving and identifying West Coast mollusks, a student encourages readers to share their own findings through a form on the site. Spring 2020 topics had a new sense of urgency, with many students choosing to write on the pandemic (e.g., “The math behind epidemic prediction”). The About pages rarely mention the course or the assignment; instead, they emphasize the students’ desire for interactive communication.

In this assignment, as well as across our science communication curriculum, we encourage students to write to audiences that are meaningful to them. For example, nearly a third of the students in the minor each year are Latinx, and we have noticed that they tend to prioritize SciComm projects that focus on their families and communities. Sanchéz, Nicholson, and Hebbard have called attention to this familialism by creating a familioso pedagogy that posits “a multicultural space which encourages students to simultaneously cross over the borders of their home environment into the mainstream academic spaces and vice versa” (p. 111). Similarly, in their blog assignments, students frequently build connections between campus and community. For example, some students write to an audience based on their younger siblings, imagining how they might encourage an early interest in STEM content. Students also elect to target audiences who speak languages other than or in addition to English. As Ben Young Landis et al. point out, students have expertise in these specific cultural contexts. Acknowledging this expertise, instructors offer guidance on document design and scientific content, while encouraging students to use their cultural knowledge to target their intended audiences effectively. Public health pamphlets, for example, are often bilingual or written solely in the targeted language and according to a localized culture. Students have produced pamphlets on health topics of specific concern (such as an elevated risk for diabetes) for Latinx peers living in the nearby campus housing; as healthcare providers volunteering for Street Medicine, which serves clients without permanent housing; and as members of health clinics providing services to different areas in Los Angeles. Our student-centered and community-facing program dovetails with students’ own enthusiasm and activism.

III. Capstone Courses, Internships, and Alumni

As noted, the minor comprises three upper-division writing courses, an application portfolio, two capstone courses, an internship, and a final electronic portfolio. During the two capstone courses and the internship, taken winter and spring of senior year, students focus on one STEM topic. In the spring course, they design a final project in which they research and practice creating work in two genres and with two target audiences. Driven entirely by students’ varied interests, career goals, and strengths, these projects demonstrate the range and depth of their personal investment in science communication.

Rhetoric of Science analysis forms the basis of project designs. Students consider, for example, how the affordances of particular genres might be especially suited to particular audiences. One student wrote about psychedelics as mental health treatments, dividing the project into a website for patients and a newsletter for physicians.

Self-designed projects encourage students to explore multiple facets of their own expertise, which interestingly, they may not be fully aware of. Rather than follow the model of Public Understanding of Science, students reconfigure the role of expertise, expanding and shaping how “outreach” works in their context. They often speak to a younger version of themselves, for example. One student wrote a Slack e-newsletter on invertebrates targeted at high school students. She wanted to encourage interest in an area frequently bypassed by students who easily develop interests in “charismatic” species. In her newsletter, she writes in an aggressively casual style, using slang and memes to target a Gen-Z audience steeped in a similar style from social media. The final capstone class also emphasizes research into the science of science communication. For this purpose, we read Craig Cormick’s digestible summary of current research in the field. Students then do additional research in science communication to help them situate their capstone projects. For example, instrumental to the e-newsletter topic design was an article the student found that demonstrated the invisibility of invertebrates in social media spaces.

Many students’ projects align with the activism of Public Engagement with Science. One project revised and expanded an existing website from a UCSB student organization, MAPAS, which strives to support “outdoor recreation opportunities for historically underrepresented communities.”[10] This student’s eportfolio highlights her view of science communication as necessary to achieve her social justice goals: “I am an environmental scientist and science communicator [emphasis original] interested in the ways human-nature relationships influence our present and future world, particularly at the nexus of public health and environmental justice.” Another final project was an e-newsletter, The Anthropozine, which addresses multiple social and cultural intersections with botany, such as ethnobotany. One article is entitled, “Western medicine is finally acknowledging what other cultures knew all along.”

Students draw together strands developed in the three upper-division courses taken prior to the capstone. For example, students may have created a podcast in 105SW, Science Writing for the Public. In the first capstone course, Scientific Literacy, they might practice interviewing research scientists. In the second capstone course, Science Communication for the Public, they could expand these assignments and proficiencies into a podcast series with an accompanying website. One pre-med student, for instance, worked on a group project podcast episode on nutrition in 105SW, which she then developed from a straightforward interview to a much more complex engagement with the issues, positioning herself as a critical guide to the literature through multiple interviews with physicians and patients.

We have been fascinated by the range of interests and expertise that our students have brought to the minor. Recently, interest in art has been popular as students explore forms such as zines, comics, and games. One student, for example, wrote an illustrated sci-fi guide to botany and another used a graphic novel style to communicate her interviews with local sustainable farmers. We see trends and waves depending on what else is happening on campus and in the broader culture.

IV. Challenges and New Directions

To run a SciComm program is to be nimble. We have learned that science communicators and their preparatory programs do not exist in a vacuum. Generally speaking, a SciComm program must respond to continual shifts in participants and personnel; the development of new STEM emphases, findings, and concepts; and the emergence of new platforms for and careers in communication. Locally, a SciComm program should be attuned to the STEM-related participants and activities on a campus, whether they are sponsored by STEM departments, or Education, or Museum Studies, or the Library, or student/activist groups, or any of a number of possibilities. Such activities wax and wane as funding priorities change. SciComm scholarship is likewise evolving and flexible, responding to shifts in cultural and academic exigencies, and drawing upon multiple disciplines to do so. As we have reflected on the seven years of the program, we have realized that our greatest challenges involve finding ways to foresee and accommodate change.

a) Shifts in participants and personnel

Even though the Professional Writing minor tracks are popular among the students who take them, one challenge has been to recruit students into the minor in the first place. Although we work closely with student advisors to promote the minor, the lack of a major means that the Writing Program is sometimes overlooked as a degree-awarding option. Other avenues for circulating information about our tracks have included word of mouth, promotional visits to lower-division writing courses, and recruitment at campus events. These avenues were largely cut off during the COVID pandemic. Significantly, undergraduates do not know what SciComm is, and our best recruitment tool has been casual conversations between students and faculty. Most students first learn about the SciComm track by taking one of the several STEM-oriented writing courses we offer. Unfortunately, students often take the upper-division writing courses as seniors, when it is too late to join the minor. We plan to carry out a more formal assessment of why this is happening, but we speculate that courses are so impacted that students are not able to register for their chosen writing courses until senior year. Further, it is possible that low self-efficacy about writing ability may lead students to postpone their writing requirement. We hope that the current return to campus will allow us to again converse more easily with students, especially to inform non-STEM majors about the opportunity. Moreover, to increase the visibility of the Professional Writing minor as a whole, the leaders of the six tracks have designed a new online application process to streamline the entrance into the minor. To increase the visibility of the SciComm minor track itself, we are also working towards a website, perhaps a publication, that showcases SciComm projects from the freshman level through faculty.

As we make adjustments, we are increasing our efforts to recruit even more first-generation and under-represented minority (URM) students to the Professional Writing minor. As Ed Yong, Ebony Omontola McGee, and many others have argued, sociocultural realities such as the pandemic have called attention to disparities in how STEM information reaches different constituencies in the U.S. At the same time, we have witnessed the power of social media to make Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in STEM and in SciComm more visible, as in the rise of more diverse citizen science projects. Both these disparities and these successes need to inform a SciComm program. Historically, minority populations have been under-represented within the STEM disciplines at UCSB, and that under-representation also carries over to the SciComm minor. In addition to contacting student societies (such as Hermanas Unidas) involved in increasing URM representation in the STEM majors, we are recruiting among non-STEM majors. We argue that more URM students need to become not just consumers of SciComm, but producers, to better articulate the diverse viewpoints and contributions that different constituencies bring to the table. We have found that, for many of our first-generation college students, SciComm allows them to share their university experiences with their families and communities, and our students are especially interested in using SciComm to encourage their younger siblings and cousins to develop interests in both STEM and communication. In other words, just as the STEM disciplines aim to establish pipelines of interested students, writing programs need to extend those pipelines into SciComm. Moreover, the experiences of URM participants with SciComm deserve more study within the many academic disciplines that create this field. As we have written this program profile, we have taken to heart Kendall Leon and Aydé Enríquez-Loya’s argument that more research is needed to study the experiences of Latinx and BIPOC students within the specific locales that shape SciComm programs. We plan to do so.

In addition to responding to demographic shifts in our student population, the Writing Program is responding to shifts in faculty participation and development. As established instructors have retired, junior faculty interested in SciComm have joined the program. One challenge common for new teachers—i.e., instilling students’ confidence in a faculty member’s expertise-is occasionally exacerbated in the STEM-oriented writing courses. We have observed students asking how someone without a STEM degree is qualified to teach about STEM topics, and, given the historical racial and gender disparities in STEM, students are even more likely to question faculty members who do not fit preconceived notions of scientific expertise. Our faculty learn several strategies not only to respond to such challenges, but to forestall them. First, we have all developed lesson plans to call attention to bias within traditional STEM approaches. Second, we share lessons built on the Rhetoric of Science, lessons that emphasize faculty members’ expertise in analyzing, producing, and teaching genres that are new to students, including research proposals, scientific literature reviews, curriculum materials, and longform news articles. In other words, we emphasize expertise in Writing Studies as a discipline.

The third strategy is institutional and should be planned for by anyone starting a new SciComm degree: the WP rewards faculty members who pursue professional development. Faculty members in the SciComm minor do not usually have STEM degrees (although some do), but they do cultivate STEM-oriented interests that shape their approaches to SciComm. Karen was hired with experience in using cultural-historical activity theory to study how scientists write digitized articles (see Remediating Science), but more generally, she has training in the biological sciences, astronomy, and the history/philosophy of science. The WP has allowed her time to develop further interests in museum studies, as well as experience with evaluating research grant proposals from across the campus. Amanda similarly has experience with multiple STEM-oriented writing projects. During graduate school, she directed the Technology in the Humanities Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led WAC initiatives, and specialized in STEM writing tutoring at the UW Madison Writing Center. More recently, she has worked with the Art of Science initiative and edited academic STEM articles. Other faculty members have expertise in computer coding, mechanical engineering, and writing for STEM businesses. Importantly, faculty seek out opportunities, sometimes with the support of small grants from the WP, to continue to develop their STEM experiences. In the past year, for instance, one faculty member has begun to volunteer for the Santa Barbara Wildlife Network (a rescue operation for injured wildlife) and for the Snowy Plover Docent program on a campus-run nature reserve (to protect the coastal nesting sites of this endangered bird). Because a case can be made that such community outreach is directly relevant to teaching science writing courses, these professional development experiences are taken into account during personnel reviews. Also taken into account during personnel reviews are faculty-led initiatives; for example, WP faculty in SciComm meet biweekly to read and discuss relevant SciComm literature.

Over the past seven years, then, we have learned that SciComm programs require thoughtful investment into the students and faculty who participate in them.

b) Shifts in STEM knowledge, majors, and initiatives

Recently, we were asked to advise another university program about how to initiate a new SciComm curriculum. As we have been grappling with this evolving field, we have not found a single, generalizable curriculum. Rather, more practically, we suggested that a local SciComm program should consider the STEM interests and initiatives located on their campus. What majors are offered, and what career pathways do students from the campus follow? These departments and initiatives are natural allies for a new SciComm program.

That said, we have also found that, as a campus defines new areas of STEM, the SciComm program must likewise plan for the future. Like many campuses, for example, ours has been developing Big Data projects and a new Data Science major that will attract students from multiple departments. Fortunately, we had faculty members able to develop a new “Writing for Code” course as an option for the upper-division requirement. We are perhaps most challenged by developing more programming for the M in STEM communication—math communication for the public. Our campus does not have a business school, and so the Math major skews toward the theoretical. Our response has been to emphasize the history of and practical applications of math, but we are not yet satisfied with that curriculum.

These shifts have led to a set of internal research questions: 1) What are the impacts of offering very specialized, upper-division writing courses in parallel with the specialized majors offered by the campus? How many different types of specialized courses are needed? How do they interact with the writing-intensive courses that departments offer for their own majors? 2) Which configurations of upper-division writing courses do students take as they enter the Professional Writing minor, and what difference do these different configurations make? The answers to these questions will affect not only the content of the curriculum, but also the financial and personnel resources we have to dedicate to the SciComm program.

c) Shifts in SciComm platforms and careers

When we first began designing SciComm courses (before we even considered a SciComm minor), academics and journalists were voicing concerns that traditional print newspapers were waning and were being replaced by digital replicas. Significantly, the Science news sections were among the first to be eliminated, and SciComm as a career was seen to be in decline. Yet the need for SciComm persists. In some cases, our former writing minors have blended old and new media. For example, one graduate was hired as a data journalist at a major newspaper a few months after graduation. Other science communicators have shifted their work to blogs, podcasts, Twitter, websites, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other social media. A 2019 graduate recently left her full-time position in biotech to become a free-lance science communicator, specializing in video content. She has over 170K followers on Tik Tok as @sciencebyashley.

We have been watching students navigate evolving information landscapes as they have created new types of SciComm positions on behalf of institutions and companies, such as the students who became social media managers for hospitals communicating with senior citizens. Indeed, we have begun to think about research studies to document what students are creating from this program, what jobs they define for themselves, and what they see as options for their futures. In addition, The Wayfinding Project, in which Karen and co-PIs from UC-Davis and UC-Irvine are asking alumni about their writing practices and knowledge in the 3-10 years after graduation, is learning more about these new career pathways (for more information, see the project website at https://thewayfindingproject.com/). Through this research, we hope to better position our program and to continue thinking about how we can better foster future communicators.

d) Shifts in SciComm research and initiatives

The last ten years have seen an uptick in SciComm research per se (witness several recent edited collections), as well as the further development of parallel subfields. For example, as Elizabeth L. Angeli and Richard Johnson-Sheehan argue in their introduction to a special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly, the field of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine has begun to develop an identity separate from the Medical Humanities—an area that itself has been evolving into the Health Humanities. The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) journal was first established in 2018, winning the “Best New Journal” award by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2020. Scholarly divisions such as these—as they separate research into technical communication, health humanities, and rhetoric of health and medicine-create new areas of intersection for Science Communication. As we have developed the SciComm track in the minor, we have started to track these scholarly divisions, especially as other areas on our campus have started their own initiatives. For instance, Karen participates in RHM meetings at conferences such as the CCCC.

Similarly, as we developed the minor track, a movement in K-12 education to expand the STEM curriculum to include the humanities (namely, Art and Reading/wRiting) began to influence college and post-collegiate education. We should note that our SciComm courses first arose from the Writing Program’s investment in an even older WAC/WID program, as some WP faculty members coordinated with faculty in other departments to create collaborative and linked courses with different configurations. In other words, in our program’s history, we have not argued to re-insert the humanities into STEM, but we have been allied with STEM departments and initiatives for some time. As we explore STEAM and STREAM now, we are still coordinating with our STEM and Education colleagues, as in Amanda’s work with the Art of Science competition. One direction we are considering is to coordinate more with the Art Department, as we have had several students who have wanted the option to pursue scientific illustration in their careers.

Overall, we agree with Ed Yong’s sentiment, as he reflected on his selections for the 2021 edition of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology:

Science is so much more than a library of publications, or the opinions of doctorate-holders and professors. Science writing should be equally expansive. Earlier, I asked: What even counts as science writing? Now, here’s my reply: We shouldn’t be able to answer that question. A woman’s account of her own illness. A cultural history of a color. An investigation into sunken toxic barrels. A portrait of a town with a rocket company for a neighbor. To me, these pieces show that science is intricately woven into the fabric of our lives—so intricately that science writing should be difficult to categorize. [emphasis in original; 24]

SciComm Programs should embrace that difficulty, as it leads to ever more creativity.

V. Conclusion

As we write this conclusion, we find ourselves in a Writing Program re-imagining itself after three years of remote pedagogy in response to COVID-19. Lately, both news venues and social media have been flooded with stories about how young people have responded to the health crisis, often to criticize their indulgence in parties and their failures to meet previous pedagogical standards. Almost never do these stories acknowledge young people’s work during the pandemic as essential clinical assistants, research technicians, EMTs, public health volunteers, big data analysts, software programmers, marketing campaign managers, documentarians, and memoir writers. The COVID-19 crisis made visible what happens when a country’s public discourse is divided into discrete silos of information, a discourse filled with accusations of fake news and alternative facts, and with what Patricia Roberts-Miller has described as in-groups and out-groups. Social media, through echo chambers, amplify an analogous problem that academics have recognized on campuses: the separation of knowledge into distinct departments and disciplines and pockets of expertise that have little conversation with one another. As the evolving field currently stands, SciComm offers an intervention into this dynamic because it is committed to dismantling this destructive silo-ing of knowledge. We are still studying our program to better articulate a full vertical curriculum from freshmen to faculty, but we do know that such programs must be wary of the tendency for deficit models of pedagogy to return. Rather, by recruiting younger professionals, drawing on more disciplines, inviting in more majors, and offering opportunities for students to practice, our minor program extends the intervention and promise of Science Communication.

Notes

1. https://art-csep.cnsi.ucsb.edu/. (Return to text.)

2. Descriptions of lower-division (numbered 1-50) and upper-division (numbered 100-199) courses can be found here: https://writing.ucsb.edu/academics/undergrad/courses In addition, the curriculum guidelines for most courses can be found here: https://writing.ucsb.edu/resources/faculty/curriculum. (Return to text.)

3. For a site with sample electronic portfolios, see https://www.ucsbscicomm.org/. Student and alumni work is shared with permission. (Return to text.)

4. The R in STREAM has also been used to signify Robotics, Reflective learning, and other permutations. (Return to text.)

5. See the PCST Network (Public Communication of Science and Technology Network) and its accompanying listserv at https://www.pcst.network/. The international character of PUS is reflected by the wide variety of disciplinary homes for its researchers, although many are located in Communication Studies. (Return to text.)

6. For example, Todd Newman’s Theory and Best Practices in Science Communication Training (2020), presents research on the “science of science communication” that focuses almost entirely on post-undergraduate training. Similarly, a book intended to shift the field to public engagement, John C. Besley and Anthony Dudo’s Strategic Science Communication: A Guide to Setting the Right Objectives for More Effective Public Engagement, still is addressed to post-collegiate “colleagues in the scientific community who want to take an evidence-based, long-term approach to communication” (1). Both might be adapted for advanced undergraduates, but students are not their primary audiences. (Return to text.)

7. With thanks to Instructional Development, UCSB, for the grant. This lesson plan was inspired by Dorothy Winsor’s analyses of the communication problems in the 1986 Challenger disaster, in which engineers and project managers miscommunicated about the dangers of below-temperature O-rings in the space shuttle’s valves, leading to a fatal explosion. (Return to text.)

8. The expert-to-public one-way communication trajectory, termed “the deficit model,” is critiqued for being “overly simplistic (Hansen et al., 2003; Sturgis and Allum, 2004), largely ineffective (Holland et al., 2007; Nisbet and Mooney, 2007), and unfairly characterizing those opposed to scientific endeavors as necessarily deficient or ignorant (Priest, 2001)” (Suldovsky 415). In a 2014 special issue on Public Engagement, the editor of the journal Public Understanding of Science highlights this shift: “one could say that the field has moved from research into public understanding to research into public engagement” (Bauer 3). (Return to text.)

9. For more on science blogs, see Riesch, Hauke, and Jonathan Mendel. Science Blogging: Networks, Boundaries and Limitations. Science as Culture, vol. 23, no. 1, 2014, pp. 51-72. (Return to text.)

10. https://mapasucsb.wixsite.com/hello. (Return to text.)

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