You should try this, said the WhatsApp message from my wife. Attached was a poster on a Science Communication workshop. At first, I wondered if I should attend. It was a weekend and I wasn’t sure if it would be interesting. Finally I bowed to pressure at home and, at the end of two days, was thankful that I did so.
Organised by Zoo Outreach Organisation (ZOO) at Saravanampatti and conducted by Devayani Khare, it was an exhilarating experience. Khare engaged with all the participants and helped us share our thoughts and ideas on science communication. We were a diverse group, ranging from PhD scholars, and school teachers to science enthusiasts. We spoke about how science news is portrayed in the media, both print and television, and how the need to sensationalise spreads misinformation and causes panic and fear. One of the participants brought up Trump’s tweet about the US needing a bit of “good ol’ global warming” to deal with the cold weather! This lead to another discussion on how simplifying scientific communications can lead to better understanding.
Day one included role play for which we used ZOO’s publications like Journal of Threatened Taxa . From teachers explaining concepts in schools/colleges to reading news as an anchor on television, we looked at how we could make science interesting and fun. We were also asked to create our own superheroes with different capabilities. My superwoman had springs under her feet and wings on her shoulder to defy gravity. My colleague Sarabamit’s superhero was the Gene, a bacterial DNA that disassociated itself from the bacteria and got embedded in a plant cell to help it grow without pesticides. As a teacher of Physics, it helped me understand and addresses the issues I grapple with on a daily basis. There were moments of serious discussions on the four critical elements of science communication: facts, emotion, values and story.
Day two was an eye-opener too. It had never occurred to me that the world of science could have fake news. Khare took us through the ways in which teachers, educators and scholars could recognise fake news and help others do the same. Dr Sanjay Molur, director ZOO, spoke about plagiarism of scientific papers and the ways in which to differentiate between genuine research and false or copied work. He stressed the need for proper review of papers and suggested that we visit www.predatoryjournals.com to check the veracity of any paper that we were reading.
Post-lunch came Taboo, a game in which we were given a science-related term and allied words. We were asked to explain the term without using the given words. My term was ‘allergy’ and I was not allowed to use ‘cold, ‘cough’, throat,’ etc. When I stated that my term was a condition that has no long-term cure, my colleagues came up with words like ‘cancer’, ‘fever,’ etc. It took a while for someone to come up with allergy. This helped me realise how fixated we are on certain words and how lost we are when we cannot use them.
I had always had the image of a scientist as a loner, who is either blowing things up or creating weird concoctions in a test tube. Over the two days, I realised that scientists and researchers can no longer confine themselves to a laboratory. The onus of making science easy to understand and promote scientific thought lies in their hands. This workshop taught me that science communication needs to be less about jargon and rhetoric and more about putting forth facts in simple language. Something that I will try to put into practice in my own classes henceforth.
TM Srikanth is the Academic Coordinator at Vidya Vanam School, Anaikatti
More about ZOO
Over the past three decades, ZOO has been gathering scientific data, doing risk assessments of species, conducting capacity-building programmes for biologists, conservationists and working with schools, colleges and anyone with an interest in the field
ZOO publishes the Journal of Threatened Taxa, earlier called Zoos’ Print Journal. The Zoos’ Print Magazine contains articles about what’s happening in the world of zoos, wildlife and conservation. Both are available for free on http://zooreach.org
