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

Information about Molly Kozminsky

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

Molly Kozminsky, PhD Candidate, graduate student researcher in the department of Chemical Engineering (within the College of Engineering)

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 is important because of the value of getting people involved. When reaching out to students still in middle school or high school, I want everyone to be excited about engineering, to understand how it might diverge from their expectations, and to be aware of how many options they have. When communicating with lay audiences at RELATE events or through the MiSciWriters blog, it’s important that the audience learn about the world around them (both what we know and what we’re trying to understand) and see themselves in the context of research.

Molly Kozminsky 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?

Who: I’ve been invited to speak with groups of high schoolers about Michigan Engineering. I also have participated in several FEMMES capstone events (elementary and middle school girls). I participated in a Science by the Pint event at ABC (through RELATE) and have written several blog posts on the MiSciWriters blog.

Differences from other groups: since the members of the audience tend to have diverse knowledge bases, you need to make sure that you’re sufficiently compelling across a wide spectrum of education backgrounds. You also need to convince the audience that they want to listen to what you are saying (in contrast with most situations in academia where people have come to listen to you with a specific purpose, i.e. collaborations, learning about a technique, etc.)

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

Gauge your audience’s level of knowledge on your topic. If they’re missing the basics, you can lose them from the get-go. Working to fill in the gaps builds a strong foundation for the rest of your interaction.

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

Challenge: Figuring out how to best target your message and to justify why the audience should be interested

Reward: Generally, I’ve found lay audiences to be the most enthusiastic about what I do (as opposed to interacting with people in the field, who are often trying to pick you apart)

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

I am generally trying to generate excitement about science, but I like to do so through the specific examples of what I do in my research. In that case, I would like the audience to understand that challenges I face in my research and the tools we have to address those challenges.

Molly Kozminsky 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?

If a scientist wanted a single idea to “stick” in the mind of a policymaker/legislator, what advice would you give them as to how best to shape/pitch that idea? (e.g., Does it need to be personally related to them or someone they know? Does it need to reference/build on specific kinds of knowledge? etc.)?

I’ve found that to make ideas stick, I have the best luck when I’m able to build it onto the scaffold of the learner’s prior knowledge. Once you identify what the learner knows, you can create a path from there. It’s helpful to have a destination in mind, though (i.e. the idea you want to stick). This is more something I’ve noticed from day-to-day than specifically in the context of lay audience communication, but the more you can make something about the person, the more likely the person is to latch on to it in some way.

Molly Kozminsky 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? 

Yes! Broadly speaking, establish the problem to motivate you work, then talk about the journey to solving the obstacles you encounter 

What kinds of documents or presentations are most effective at capturing and maintaining a educators’, learners’, and/or lay-audiences’ attention? Would you mind providing a few examples (both “good” and “bad”) of the same kind of document or presentation?

Keep it simple. Keep it uncluttered. You have the ability to control what your audience looks at during a presentation but minimizing/eliminating anything (and I mean anything) extraneous and using simple animations to guide the eye and progress the story. People have different philosophies about presentations, but I believe that the presenter and what the presenter is saying should be such an integral part of the presentation that the only thing that the slides should show are things that benefit from a visual (ex. a diagram, a picture of a technology, a flow chart where arrows connect ideas). This is almost never true of a block of text.