Tonight I watched a Lilly Conference online session from this past May entitled: “Who needs writing?”: Engaging STEM Majors in Public Science Writing” by Jennifer Osterhage and Katherine Rogers-Carpenter from the University of Kentucky. They described the writing course they developed and the biology program at the University of Kentucky, reaching 1,400 people. Their “Writing Public Science“; course has the goals of focusing on diverse audiences, recognize the different public audiences scientists and science writers target, and practice using different writing modes and visuals. Students begin with an academic research proposal for a topic they will develop throughout the semester. They then analyze the rhetorical moves used in a main-stream article. They write an op-ed and construct visual arguments. The final project is a mini article and publication analysis: they decide on a venue and analyze it, identify the target audience and circulation, format… and look at how to submit a manuscript to this publication. Students can select topics that they are interested in learning more about. To help participants, the course has built-in scaffolding and synthesis assignments. Interestingly, the presenters compared these assignments to a traditional lab report and how these assignments are designed to think about publishing and audience. Professional writers are invited to visit the course. In order to integrate this course into the biology curriculum, they decided to have the course count as an upper level biology elective and for it to fulfill a writing requirement. The course was then approved by the curriculum committee at their institution. Student perceptions of the course mentioned ability to pick the topic and having the opportunity to think about ideas that are of interest to them. Nevertheless, the presenters explained that there are still some challenges to convincing more students to take this course. To address some of these barriers and challenges, the instructors emphasize the importance of science communication at the beginning of the course, discuss visualizing data, practice rewriting student texts for different audiences, and allow rewrites. Students now have the opportunity to try different approaches and refine with the support of instructor and peer feedback. The presenters highlighting the goal of creating a writing environment that is safe and fosters improvement. A modification the instructors presented was to edit the course structure to allow participants to complete the publication submission process to, for example, undergraduate journals. This presentation brought up several benefits and approaches for engaging students in writing that I will consider for the BIT 295 public science writing project.
