Stand up for Science: Practical Approaches to Discussing Science that Matters

Information about Meghan Duffy

What is your name, title, and role at the University of Michigan?

My name is Meghan Duffy, and I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. As part of my job, I teach students (especially in Introductory Biology), run a research lab with 13 people where we study the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases, and work on science communication and public engagement projects. My public engagement work includes leading hands-on activities for K-12 students and developing and teaching a two week unit that will help students in the Wolverine Pathways program work with data to answer questions relevant to their daily lives.

Why are your public engagement efforts in education and/or outreach important (to you and/or to the cause you’re working to promote)?

Public engagement, especially that aimed at broadening opportunities, is important to me because I see no reason why the opportunities that are available to children growing up in privileged neighborhoods shouldn’t be available to other children, too. To paraphrase Dr. Mark Schlissel, talent is evenly distributed in the population, but opportunity is not. That is both fundamentally unfair and also means that society is missing out on the ideas and talents of people who currently do not have access to opportunities.

Meghan Duffy on Audience

Who do you interact with when working in education and/or outreach? What makes this audience different from other groups that you might interact with?

My outreach activities have primarily been aimed at K-12 students. Their age makes it so that we need to think especially carefully about how we present concepts, to make sure we are doing so in an accessible, age appropriate way. It also means that, in addition to trying to help them build knowledge and develop skills, we focus on having them develop confidence in their scientific abilities.

What suggestions do you have for making interactions with educators, learners, and/or lay-audiences as effective as possible?

One thing that is important when working with young learners is being flexible. On certain days, energy in the group might be low (or too high!), meaning that we need to change things up a bit – perhaps by skipping ahead to a more active part of the exercise. We also sometimes misjudge where the students will be in terms of their background knowledge, and then have to adjust on the fly to better scaffold the activity. As an example, this recently happened with an activity where we wanted young learners to graph their results. We realized with the first group we worked with that we had overestimated what they would already know about graphs, and so needed to modify that portion of the activity on the fly.

What is the biggest challenge you face when trying to work with educators, learners, and/or lay-audiences? What is the biggest reward?

The biggest challenge is figuring out how to adjust things when an activity seems to not be working, either because students seem bored or confused. The biggest reward is hearing them say something like “That was really cool!” or having them write a note saying that now they want to be a scientist. That sort of feedback makes it all worth it!

What are you trying to accomplish when you write to or speak with educators, learners, and/or lay-audiences?

It depends to some extent on the particular audience, but I am often interested in developing skills – for example, how to collect and work with data to answer a question they are interested in. But, with younger groups, sometimes the goal is just to get them to start to think about the really neat things that are going on in nature all around them that they might not have noticed before.

Meghan Duffy on Messaging

When you're planning to interact with educators, learners, and/or lay-audiences, how do you decide what you want to focus on?

I decide on what to focus on based on the length of the activity (is it 45 minutes or two weeks?), on the age of the students, and on based on the broader goals of the program that we’re working with.

If a scientist wanted a single idea to “stick” in the mind of a "public audience," "lay-audience," or "K-12 youth", what advice would you give them as to how best to shape/pitch that idea?

I’m still working on figuring this out! Right now, I am for repeating the idea and having them discover the idea themselves, rather than me telling them. But I know I have a lot more to learn here. I plan to read “Made to Stick” and Dan Ariely’s work to try to learn more about this.

Meghan Duffy on Narrative

Do you use stories or narratives as a tool to communicate with educators, learners, and/or lay-audiences? If so, what kinds of narratives?

Sometimes well-meaning people, when working with underrepresented groups, say they are working to give the students a voice. That’s problematic, though, since those students have always had a voice – it’s just that society tends not to listen to it. Our goal for an activity we’re developing for high school students now is to have them tell their own stories, but to help them to develop the skills they need to do so –in terms of how to refine a question so that it can be addressed critically, how to work with data to come to an evidence-based conclusion, and how to present that data in an accessible way. As part of working with them towards this, we’ll start with an accessible (hopefully interesting!) example: Is Steph Curry the greatest basketball player ever? Starting from there, we can help them see how you might refine that question so that it can be answered with data, how you would find the data and work with it, and how you would present your findings.

What kinds of documents or presentations are most effective at capturing and maintaining an educators’, learners’, and/or lay-audiences’ attention?

We usually have brief presentations, but try to mostly have the students engaged in active learning