Stony Brook's Graduate Courses in Clear, Vivid, Conversational Communication

Graduate students in the sciences at Stony Brook University are taking for-credit courses to learn to communicate more effectively about science with people outside their disciplines, including public officials, the press, students, potential funders and employers, colleagues in other fields, and the general public. Five Communicating Science courses are offered; two more will be added in January, 2012. The courses are offered by the School of Journalism and developed by the Center for Communicating Science (CCS). This interdisciplinary center was founded in 2009, with the participation of Alan Alda, the actor, writer, director and longtime advocate for science, who is a Visiting Professor at Stony Brook. At the core of the program are three 1-credit (14-hour) modules that rely on experiential learning, repeated practice and immediate, interactive feedback. In Distilling Your Message, students practice speaking clearly, vividly and conversationally about their work at different levels of complexity and formality to different audiences, using storytelling techniques where appropriate. In Writing for the Public, they extend these skills into writing. In Improvisation for Scientists, the most unconventional of the courses, students play improvisational theater games to help themselves connect more directly, personally and responsively with their audiences. In their first two semesters, the courses are expected to serve about 90 students, taking a total of about 180 credits. Most of the courses have filled quickly, mixing master's and doctoral students from more than a dozen fields, including marine and atmospheric sciences. Three to six credits of Communicating Science courses are required for students in two programs, an MA in Marine Conservation and Policy and an Advanced Certificate in Health Communications. The content and methods of the courses are based largely on lessons learned from evaluations of all-day workshops that CCS has conducted for more than 250 scientists and health professionals at Stony Brook, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and UCLA. Workshop exit surveys were strongly positive. Participants gave the most favorable ratings to the most hands-on, interactive sessions, especially Improvisation for Scientists, and expressed a preference for deeper, more sustained programs of instruction. Anecdotally, participants have said that improvisation has helped them in teaching, dissertation defense, public presentation, and talking with family members. In exit surveys from all-day workshops attended by 193 participants, 80% of respondents said they felt more or much more confident of their ability to communicate, and 90% said they felt more or much more interested in communicating with the public. As CCS looks toward scaling up its efforts, its faculty is aware of the need to fully assess course outcomes, including evaluation of participants' communication efforts by naïve and expert audiences and longitudinal follow-up of students' communication activities and career paths. Our aspiration at CCS is for Stony Brook to become the first university in the nation where every science graduate student receives some training in communicating about science to the public.