Guest blog post from postdoc Sonya Hanson.
Earlier this month, I went to Science Communication Boot Camp. It was at the 'Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science' at Stony Brook University. We did not get to meet Alan Alda. That was disappointing. But everything else was really, super awesome. We played a lot of improv games, we did a lot of woodshedding explaining our own science, we learned about how to make stories, we learned about metaphors, and at the end we taped three-minute mock media interviews and talks to try and implement what we had learned throughout the week. It was exhausting, it was embarrassing, it was hard, but it was a blast.
Baseball
I first realized we were someplace special when we started talking about baseball. Now, I am not a baseball person, but that's okay: I know enough. But in the beginning of the first day, they asked us to explain the following to someone who knew nothing about baseball:
'In the bottom of the ninth, Jeter worked a one-out walk and stole second. But the Red Sox's ace reliever got Ellsbury and Teixeira to strike out swinging to end the game.'
And it was super hard. We started explaining baseball: there are three bases, there are these things called outs, you get a point by... That just wasn't working. And then... they put up this explanation:
'The game was almost over, and the home team was losing to its most hated rival. The beloved captain of the home team, playing in his last season, made a last-ditch effort to win. He took a big risk, and it looked like it might pay off. But when his teammates tried to help him score, a key player on the other team shut them down. The game ended, and the home team went down to bitter defeat.'
Suddenly you understand the stakes. Suddenly you understand why someone might care about baseball.
Yes, and...
Don't worry, the rest of the camp was not about baseball. Time-wise, the plurality of the boot camp was spent doing improv games. Why, you may ask? What do science and improv have in common? Why would you do improv, where the whole point is that you're just making stuff up, to become a better scientist, where the whole point is precisely that you do not just make stuff up? Because improv is about connecting. Improv is about 'Yes, and..'
Not 'No, but...', not 'Yes, but...', but 'Yes, and...'. Agree and add something. Find how to connect to someone and then add to that. At the beginning the improv games were not science related. Zip-zap-zop, the mirror game, the ball game, the positive side of ranting, etc. My hypothesis is that they're to get us talking. To get us comfortable with talking about anything, anything at all. To find our own rhythm, and try to connect that rhythm to whoever you're communicating with. In one of the most powerful games, we were told to take a blank piece of paper and describe a picture. It was intense. Almost everyone talked about something deeply personal. A picture of an important family space or pet that got you through hard times. There were no instructions to 'do your best to make everyone cry', but somehow that's what happened. And this was all without any preparation. Somehow, we already had these stories inside of us, but how could we use them *dun dun dun* FOR SCIENCE?