Theory and Best Practices in Science Communication
Book Review by Mike S. Schäfer
The book covers a wide range of relevant topics and contains several excellent contributions which map evidence about key aspects of science communication training and/or link them to training practices. However, few chapters are both grounded in research and provide a strong link to practical science communication training.
As the range of science communication formats and activities increases, training courses for science communication have been established in many countries, aiming to motivate scientists to engage with the broader public, and to improve their ways of doing so.
A number of “how-to” books on science communication training have emerged. But while some of them are based on science communication research and aim to provide evidence-based advice for communication of and engagement with science — like the Communicating Science Effectively report of the National Academies of the Sciences in the US or the recently published The Science of Communicating Science, reviewed in this journal — others are mostly based on anecdotal evidence.
Todd P. Newman’s edited volume starts with a laudable aim to “bring together some of the leading researchers and practitioners from around the world in the field of science communication training” and to ask them to “provide a broad overview of current trends in science communication training, including best practices and areas in need of future research”.
Part 1
Part 1 focuses on The Scientist as a Strategic Communicator and the question whether training efforts support this role. Nichole Bennett, Anthony Dudo, Shupei Yuan, and John Besley provide a concise yet comprehensive overview of scholarly research on how, which and why scientists engage with the public. They show that “[d]emographic factors seem less important” to explain this engagement than attitudes towards engagement or perceived social norms. They also demonstrate that in contrast to this diverse engagement, science communication trainings in the US mostly emphasise communication geared towards knowledge transfer and legacy media.
Declan Fahy argues that important lessons for science communication can be learned from “the field of science studies, specifically the work of sociologists of science Harry Collins and Robert Evans” and translates these lessons into five “insights for [science] communication training”. Fred Balvert focuses on an under-researched yet highly relevant science-society nexus: public-private partnerships as seen at EU-level, in Brazil and the Netherlands, and he sketches four models for the practical embedding of science communication in such partnerships.
Emily Howell and Dominique Brossard, “based on a growing body of science communication research in social media settings”, give an extensive overview of the role of online media in science communication and those of their characteristics which further or hinder science communication: “platform and search engine algorithms; technologically and socially created filter bubbles and social fragmentation; user make-up and level of openness/publicness of platform content; social and informational context cues … and platform layout and design”.
Part 2
Part 2 on Science Communication Training Design and Assessment opens with Toss Gascoigne and Jenni Metcalfe, with experience of 1,700 workshops held in various countries, laying out the aims, format and programme of their workshops, their organisation and evaluation, as well as the facets that worked well and those that did not. Tzipora Rakedzon describes her experiences with courses on science writing for graduate students and scientists.
Louise Kuchel uses scholarship of science education to question terminological and conceptual distinctions that are sometimes muddled in the research and practice of science communication — like the difference between “education” and “training” (p. 106f.) or the different factors that influence learning like motivation, practice, feedback, reflection and “fun and play”. Yael Barel-Ben David and Ayelet Baram-Tsabari focus on the evaluation of science communication training, also delineating related concepts such as “evaluation” vs “research” and laying out different basic concepts of evaluation and available method(olog)ical tools like self-reports, surveys, interviews.
Part 3
The concluding Part 3 considers Future Directions for Science Communication Training, with Brenda MacArthur, Nicole Leavey and Amanda Ng drawing parallels between training in the health communication and science communication fields. They argue for more audience-centric approaches, moving, e.g., from blaming the audience’s alleged shortcomings in seemingly unsuccessful science communication towards “accepting the burden of proof” on the side of science.
Brooke Smith uses the Washington Metro as a metaphor for developing science communication training: For example, she uses Metro lines as an analogy for different communicative pathways available to scientists, Metro engineering as an analogy for research on effective training, and the Metro Transit Authority as an analogy for a potential central coordination for science communication training.
Newman hopes that the volume will “serve as a resource for science communication trainers” and “contribute to the continued growth of communication training as a sub-discipline within the ‘science of science communication’”. In some ways, the book is likely to contribute to these aims: it covers a wide range of relevant topics and incorporates expertise from various disciplines in doing so. It contains several excellent contributions which map evidence about key aspects of science communication training and/or link them to training practices.
However, few chapters are both grounded in research and provide a strong link to practical science communication training, and several contributions, while covering interesting aspects, remain short and somewhat generic. A stronger editorial line, aiming for a more comprehensive mapping of the field combined with a clearer chapter structure, would have benefited the volume. It is not clear why some aspects of science communication training are included and others are missing — like research on the normative and ethical foundations of such training. Potentially interesting and helpful links between the chapters remain unexplored. It would have been interesting, for example, to discuss the normative starting points of the advice given by Fahy, Rakedzov and others in light of the overview provided by Bennett et al. Although the book incorporates experts from different continents, it still centres strongly on the US and/or Anglophone countries and where it does not (as in the chapters on Public-Private Partnerships or science communication training workshops around the world) remains surprisingly general. A more substantial introduction and/or conclusion could have remedied some of these shortcomings, given the volume more depth and helped it to achieve its aims more fully.
Mike S. Schäfer is Professor of Science Communication at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. He is co-editor, with Birte Fähnrich, of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Communication Management on “Communicating Science in Organizational Contexts“ and, with several others, of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Climate Change Communication (2018).
