American Scientist

My first consciously conducted science experiment was to gauge my parents' reaction to my playing in the mud. They sighed and brushed me off when I played in the dirt but encouraged me with toys and special clothing to play in the water, so I wondered 'How will they react when I combine dirt and water and play in that?'

That kind of self-directed learning is encouraged by certain educational institutions. But whether encouraged by formal schooling, we all start out—in some sense—as self-directed learners. Many of us get muddy in the process. That commonality of childhood experience can limit us as adults, though, by making it too easy to think of educating ourselves at more challenging subjects—such as science communication—as beyond the scope of self-education. Instead, as we grow up, we are increasingly prompted by many social systems to rely on formal experts. In some cases, that's useful because adult mistakes can be far more costly than muddy clothes.

So when a group of self-directed graduate students invited me to serve as an expert reviewer at ComSciCon-Triangle 2019, a workshop about communicating science for graduate students put on by graduate students, I went with the enthusiasm of a muddy imp who had just learned how to make his parents scream.

Although "science communication" is one of those catch-all terms that applies to press releases, journalism, blogging, and even Tweeting, the kind of science communication of particular interest to these students was in talking about their own research. Their program began with learning and practicing techniques from improvisational comedy ("improv"), with each student learning that at some point during the 2-day conference they too would be standing before everyone else to give a one-minute summary of what they did. Behind the student, a projected stopwatch counted down the seconds. In front of them, other students waved either green signs that said "clear" or orange signs that said "jargon" as visual feedback.

First organized at Harvard in 2013, ComSciCon has been both repeated annually and franchised elsewhere, such as to Research Triangle Park, where I attended earlier this spring. The overall goal of the conference is "to empower future leaders in technical communication to share the results from research in their field to broad and diverse audiences, not just practitioners in their fields," which fit in quite nicely with the improv work. In reviewing with students their science writing, I thought it was smart that they had to pre-select the publication they might be writing for: some chose general press outlets, others chose outlets with interdisciplinary science audiences such as American Scientist, and we've published an article or two that began as student writing at ComSciCon.

Given my love (and encouragement) of self-directed learning, in attending I also wanted to understand the motivations of the student organizers, and so brought along my smartphone to do some unobtrusive and spur-of-the-moment (improv?) interviews with those organizers I could manage to find between sessions. Those motivations varied much more than I expected, and delightfully so. Thanks to all the organizers for the invitation, but especially thanks to Laura Mudge, Erin Viere, and Ben Zeldes for talking with me on camera with little more than a moment's notice and with very little idea about what questions I would be asking.

This year's flagship ComSciCon is to be held for the first time in San Diego (July 11-13) instead of its usual venue of Boston, where it began. Perhaps those green signs that students will wave as positive feedback will say "Awesome"—not just because the word is a Californianism—but because that's how students at the first ComSciCon lauded their peers. Indeed, clear, non-jargon-y speech about science is awesome.