2020 Hubbard Brook Cooperators Meeting
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This document summarizes the work of understanding public engagement culture at Hubbard Brook and Harvard Forest over 2.5 years. Interviews and surveys of scientists were conducted in 2017, 2019, and will continue in 2020+ to track changes in engagement culture and its impacts over the long term. The path to better science communication involves ensuring organizational support for scientists and collaboration. As long-term research institutions embedded in communities, Hubbard Brook and Harvard Forest have an opportunity to enhance their impacts through building a culture that seriously supports public engagement.
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2020 Hubbard Brook Cooperators Meeting
- 1. The Culture of Public Engagement at Hubbard Brook and Harvard Forest: Year 2.5 This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF, Grants AISL 1421214-1421723, and 1713197. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
- 2. Who am I?
- 3. Task: Understand public engagement culture at both Hubbard Brook and Harvard Forest Method: Three rounds of interviews and surveys Fall 2017 Survey (70% response rate) Winter 2019 Survey (53% rate) (Look up my slideshare.net site) Fall 2017 semi-structured interviews (n = 17) Fall 2019 semi-structured interviews (n = 24)
- 4. Where I started … The path to better science communication is scientist training and ensuring communication opportunities
- 5. Where I am now … The path to better science communication is ensuring scientists have the organizational support they need and the training to use that support in collaboration with colleagues
- 6. Organizations associated with LTERs are … • Big enough to support an engagement team • Small enough for shared goals and strategy • Big enough to have an impact • Small enough to build substantive organizational relationships with stakeholders Also … • Embedded in communities • Focused on (some) issues people care about
- 7. But the big thing is that they are in it for … … the long-term • Building a research culture that takes public engagement seriously likely takes time … • Having an impact through public engagement likely takes time … • Being impacted by public engagement likely takes time …
- 8. The opportunity … … Can we track this process? … And use it to enhance LTER impact? • Long-term indicators of public engagement culture? • Long-term indicators of public engagement stakeholder impact? • Long-term indicators of public engagement science impact?
- 9. Fall 2020+ Activities • Scientist Survey … expanding out to full LTER • Scientists Interviews … reflection on experience with engagement activities in recent years
Editor's Notes
- My goal today is to give a brief update on the research component of the project Sarah just told you about but I’ll mainly focus on one big insight that’s shaping the path forward.
- As quick background, I’m a science communication researcher at Michigan State. I study public opinion about science as well as scientists’ opinions about communicating with the public.
- For me, this project includes a series of three surveys and qualitative interviews with researchers at both Hubbard Brook and Harvard Forest. We’ve collected data on your willingness to take part in communication activities as well as your specific attitudes about doing so, your perceptions of what your colleagues think, and your sense of your own skills. We’ve also asked about your overall goals for communication as well as the specific, short-term objectives you think scientists should have when taking part in specific activities. You can find these results by looking at my We’ve done two rounds of each and have one more round later this year that I’ll discuss on my final slide.
- I’ve talked about that data in previous years so what I want to highlight today is one big picture insight that participating in this project has provided me. I came into the project with the idea that I could help understand and improve the quality of science communication at places like Hubbard Brook by focusing on individual scientists’ before and after they received training and opportunities to communicate. This is consistent with the broader approach to communication training that we see across the country where there’s an emphasis on individual science communication training for scientists. The most prominent is probably what’s provided by the Alan Alda Center for Science Communication at Stony Brook.
- Participation in this project has caused me to argue that science communication researchers need to rethink how we approach supporting science communicators. What I have heard and seen from you is that scientists are eager to communicate but they want to share the responsibility for communication with professional communicators and their colleagues. In other words, the project has increasingly led me to think about the role that organizational support and leadership plays in allowing for more effective communication and caused me to put less emphasis on the value of stand-alone training.
- The other thing I’ve come to understand is that places like Hubbard Brook may be model organizations around which to build research on the value of providing organizational support to science communicators. Many academics have communication people at their university or in their college but my sense is that these people are often focused on advancing a broad range of university goals and not goals related to scientists’ research. In contrast, organizations like those associated with LTERs are big enough to have public engagement teams but still small enough and focused enough to come up with shared goals and build out strategies to achieve those goals. Similarly, they’re big enough to have targeted impacts but still small enough that it makes sense to talk about identifying and building long-term relationships with goal-relevant stakeholders.
- And what’s especially cool about LTERs when we start thinking about organizations is that communication success is that the types of communication effects that scientists seem to care about take time and achieving them takes a long-term commitment. It takes a long-term commitment to building a research culture that supports engagement efforts It takes time to have an impact on others. And, ideally, we would expect that researchers might hear and learn things during their communication activities that changes how they think and behave. And that takes time.
- On the research side, one thing I’m excited about is the idea of finding ways to track this process over time. This would include trying to find longer-term indicators that allow test whether organizations that build cultures that value public engagement have more impact on stakeholders and on their own activity.
- The place where we need your help is for you to continue to work with your public engagement team while also responding to our survey requests and interview requests. One fun thing is that we’re hoping to expand out a version of our survey to the full LTER network. We know that different sites have different approaches to public engagement and that we might see some additional variation in researchers’ communication experiences and opinions.