Applied InterPlay: Communicating Science Workshop at the Atlanta Science Festival

Written by Ruth Schowalter, certified InterPlay leader and MS Applied Linguistics and ESL

Have you ever thought about how you might embody the difference between weather and climate change? Do you know the difference? Well, we had tremendous fun playing around with those concepts at the InterPlay - Atlanta Science Festival 2018 workshop, “Communicating the Facts: More than a Feeling" (see the workshop description below).

Thanks to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s demonstration of “Weather versus Climate Change” on “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” (see this video), we invited pairs of people to play with this concept, with one person as climate change and the other as weather. The climate change partner was asked to choose a destination in the room and to walk to it in a fairly steady line, while the weather partner was given the task of moving (dancing?) erratically in front of or behind or around their climate change partner (Yes, we played music). Then we had the partners reverse their roles. In this way, each got to experience either the steadfastness of the climate trend, but also the variability of weather. 

The workshop participants were jubilant! Not only had the movement enlivened them and exploded the community room into happy chaos, but also something had clicked in the way each understood this hard-to-understand difference between daily weather patterns and long-term climate change. This is the “magic” of the connections made through kinesthetic activities while explored together with others.

On this March Friday evening, the doors to the Little Five Points Community Center for Arts & Community were open, allowing spring breezes to come in along with the close to 40 participants for our workshop. At the other end of the Community Center facility, the play “Freaky Friday” was playing to a sold-out audience at the Horizon Theatre. Some of theatre goers wandered down to see what we were doing. A strong sense of community was established – Science, InterPlay, and Theatre!

During our two hours together, my collaborators, two scientists, and I were overly ambitious for what we wanted to offer. Among some of the activities we InterPlayed with were the following how-to’s:

Play around with the scientific method 

Express the difference between beliefs-opinions-feelings, and facts

Release or vent frustration around communicating scientific concepts at a time when science under attack in the United States is called “fake news”

“Change” someone’s mind about his/her stance on scientific issues

“Change” someone’s stance on science? Really? How? A lot of us think that people who “don’t believe in science” are merely suffering from a “deficit of the facts.” To solve this lack of knowledge and resulting lack of concern about climate change, pollution, and endangered species – to name a few concerns – all one need do is provide a bouquet of scientific facts. Then the person we are addressing will change his/her mind. Right? Wrong! 

Facts may impact someone’s thinking in the short term (or not), but that change is not long lasting. People’s thinking is influenced by their communities (family, political groups, friends, etc.). However, there is hope for science communicators impacting the education of nonexperts.

This hope is in the form of narratives – telling stories! That is, when you tell a story from your life enfolding scientific facts, there is a greater chance of another person listening and being influenced by that story (See this article and this article as just a beginning). Knowing the powerfulness of stories in communicating science, at the conclusion of our workshop, we offered one of several InterPlay storytelling forms to our workshop participants. (I hope to explain about this in more detail in another blogpost, so stay tuned!).

Before participants left, they were asked to fill out an evaluation of our workshop, and we got high ratings of “excellent” along with some “very goods.” As our first time to offer a workshop on this topic, I know we have more to learn about playing around with communicating scientific facts. But this first effort was tremendously fun and seemingly successful!

Post "Communicating the Facts - More than a Feeling" workshop photo.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Thanks to my collaborators, Tony Martin (science author, Emory educator 

Tony Martin

Dottie Stearns

and paleontologist) and Dottie Stearns (dancer, B.S. Environmental Sciences, and a Master’s of Public Health and pre-med student), who without their knowledge and commitment to science outreach this workshop would not have been possible. Thanks also go to the organizers of the Atlanta Science Festival, Jordan Rose, Meisa Sailaita, and Kellie Vinal, who shape this event in powerful and elegant ways. And as always, thanks to Phil Porter and Cynthia Winton-Henry for co-creating InterPlay. 

Workshop Description: This 2-hour improvisational workshop is a chance for participants (teens and adults) to engage their kinesthetic imaginations and affirm just how successfully they can communicate scientific facts, while also providing the means for addressing false or misleading information. The main goal is to help participants develop proactive skills for communicating environmental science on a range of topics such as global climate change, pollution, natural resources, and extinctions.

Science is based on facts, so how can we as science advocates communicate our knowledge when others don’t “feel” the same? Participants will have fun exploring new ways to express factual science through the improvisational activities of InterPlay. Using movement, story-telling and their voices, participants will be led incrementally into enlivening and personalizing the way they speak up for science.

SOME OF THE WORLD IS REPRESENTED HERE! After our workshop, participants lingered chatting and wanting different photo opportunities with Dottie, Tony, and me. Here, in the photo above you can see how diverse our crowd was. We had people from Atlanta, Georgia, and others from Colombia, Turkey, and Iraq. In the photo below, along with an Emory University student from Tony's Science Communication class, are Chinese Scholars visiting Georgia Tech posing with me (far right).