A bit over a month ago, “framing” was the hot argument in these parts (see here, here, and here, and links therein), with zillions of comments about how difficult it was to understand what Mooney and Nisbet were advocating. Today, Matt Nisbet appears to endorse a suggestion made in a letter to Science, namely that graduate schools should offer formal instruction in science communication. Somewhat weirdly, this hasn’t generated any comments at all.
Their suggestions are pretty clear and concrete:
From this experience, we strongly encourage other graduate programs to implement science communication training. We have three key pieces of advice based on our effort that we hope will help others in their course development:
First, involve people from multiple fields across your college or university. In particular, we highly recommend involving staff from the press relations office. […]
Second, visit a news room (radio, print, or television) and talk to reporters–not just science reporters, but reporters in all fields. Ask to sit in on a meeting where reporters and editors pitch stories to each other. […]
Third, get hands-on experience communicating science as part of the class. Do not just set up a series of lectures and field trips: write press releases, write articles, conduct interviews, get interviewed, create a Web page, and set up a science blog. […]
(I’ve edited out most of the explanations– go to Matt’s site or the Science, and read the whole thing.)
In principle, this is all excellent advice. If the goal is to learn how to communicate science, the best way to do it is to talk to the people who actually do that sort of thing, which means university press offices and science journalists. And, really, the very best way to learn to communicate with the public is to talk to people who aren’t scientists themselves– one of the most important steps in the writing of the grants I’ve had funded was having Kate read the proposal over. Not just because she caught all my many grammar and spelling errors, but because she provided a very useful perspective as someone who wasn’t already intimately familiar with all the jargon of my field.
At the same time, though, those first two suggestions make me a little nervous. The tiny bit I know about the world of journalism makes me think that a lot of scientists are really much happier not knowing how news gets made…