An Introvert Does Outreach by Don Orth

I was honored and proud to receive the Excellence in Public Outreach Award from the American Fisheries Society last week. It raised many questions in my mind and the minds of others.  These questions form the basis for this post.  Why do I do public outreach?  I am an introvert. One in three people you know are introverts (Cain 2013).  Introverts love quiet places and working solo and loathe noisy crowds and self-promotion. Introverts don’t seem naturally adapted for outreach activities.  But it doesn't have to be an excuse for not engaging with the public. 

“Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. 

Make your life worth living.” Albert Einstein

 

AFS Executive Director, Doug Austen, congratulates me on Excellence in Public Outreach Award.  Photo by Valerie Orth.

Introverts can engage in public outreach. My first priority is research, which requires building a team of collaborators and connecting with other researchers to share ideas and conduct research.  But writing requires time alone.  And public outreach requires writing long before engagement begins.  Let me answer some questions:

How do you see science communication fitting into the future of fisheries education?

Public engagement is the connection between science education, communication, and policy. Increasingly scientists are expected to engage with the public at multiple levels. On Twitter, the hashtag #scicomm denotes engaging the general public in the world of science.  We need to engage with the public in science in ways that may influence policy. The decline in news reporters and newspapers has influenced how people obtain science information.   Google and Facebook have replaced the newspapers and TV news, for better or worse.  Today, most people depend on online sources for science news (Su et al. 2015) and some argued that the scientific article is obsolete (Somers 2018).  

Newspaper and Google revenues over time.  Source.

The problem as I see it is that we learn very little about public outreach in college.  Outreach and public speaking are not natural skills, especially for introverts. There are many communication skills, beyond public speaking, that are needed by today’s fisheries scientists.  Add these to the growing list of skills a scientist needs to master.  It’s not enough to tell students “Go read this Science Communication book by Bowater and Yeoman (2012).” Scientists and managers in agencies are often stymied in attempts to do public engagement.  Who should do it?  How should we do it? Too often we assume it is someone else’s job to do.  People are often knowledgeable but don’t act in ways that show that knowledge.  The communication of science began with the deficit model in which scientists try to fill gaps in the knowledge of the public.  Modern #scicomm encourages two-way dialogue between experts and non-experts.  

Was there a single, memorable public outreach event that galvanized views and methods, or was development more gradual?

I’ll never forget my first visit to speak at an elementary school. I brought a bullhead in a small aquarium and talked about senses of fish.  Wow!  I was blown away by kids filled with curiosity and questions.  My Department required that all students translate a thesis or dissertation into form readable by the general public. Consequently, I’ve always worked with students to create a popular article related to their thesis question (e.g., Leonard and Orth 1985; Graham and Orth 1986; Austen and Orth 1988).  However, my interests in public outreach built gradually over time from occasional popular articles or talks to local angler or Kiwanis clubs to more focused activities. 

What have you learned along the way?

There are many benefits to public engagement. We all want to change the world and we want people to take action based on evidence.  It is not enough to educate the public and expect them to act based on the knowledge.  Even regulations and laws do not always result in compliance with desired actions.  I wish to learn more about human behavior.  The idea of the nudge, or positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions, can influence behavior and decision making (Thaler and Sunstein 2009). A fascinating example of this is about bathroom urinals in the Amsterdam airport.  Men have terrible aim, which leads to unpleasant effects in busy airport bathrooms.  A nudge would be to include a realistic image of a fly in the urinal based on the belief that if you give a man a target, he cannot help but aim at it.   We need to learn much more about how to connect and influence various publics.   Market researchers and Cambridge Analytica have proven it possible even with dastardly consequences (Wylie 2019).  

Urinals with a fly.  by WissensDürster CC-By 3.0 Source

Another major benefit to public engagement is to stay informed on emerging trends.  Twitter is a great platform to learn and contribute to ongoing discussions.  Here are a few hashtags that are relevant: #GRExit, #gradstudents, #MeTooSTEM, and #SciComm. Twitter lists are curated groups of Twitter accounts.  You can either create your own lists or subscribe to lists created by others.   Join a twitter group that fits your interests, such as Virginia Tech Things, #TeamGar, or AFS Member Tweeps.   Or create your own.

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How do you make content accessible to diverse audiences?   

This is a challenge and my advice is fourfold: (1) Start small; (2) Find your voice; (3) Identify an audience; and (4) Go beyond publication in scientific journals.  Several authors (See here and here) have described how they write a blogpost from a journal article.  Reaching diverse audiences will take time but you must first develop your authentic voice. So you can become a “Nerd of Trust”  and see that some people do value your knowledge (McClain 2017).

 

Writing scientific publications is not enough.  We need to realize how science affects society and how society may affect and determine the direction of science.  In the world of fisheries, we are learning to adapt to climate change.  Fishing fleets must adapt or move to follow fish.   GMO fish is an emerging issue (Pickrell 2006). Many in the scientific community have claimed to have reached a consensus that there is no well-documented threat to human health from consumption of genetically modified food. However, opponents including the Union of Concerned Scientists remain concerned that long-term effects of consuming bioengineered foods have not been tested thoroughly, and that it is irresponsible to release them into the environment before we have better data on their consequences.  Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing food sectors and the issue of consuming farm-raised or wild-caught fish is on people’s minds and should influence the direction of future science. Society also demands that we address questions long ignored or thought unimportant, such as fish pain and welfare of wild-caught and farmed fish.

What blog posts are most read? My most-viewed blog posts were:

•             Mythology of the Baby Doll Head
•             Pike Killifish: A Small, Specialized Ambush Piscivore  
•             Clupeids From Freshwaters of Virginia
•             Damned If You Do: Adopting Social Media in Teaching  

What advice do you have for the beginner?

First decide how much time you are willing to devote to public outreach.  Time is the number one barrier to participating in outreach (Weaver 2005).  Illingworth (2017) provides advice to the novice science communicator.   He advises that one examine these questions before jumping into science communication.  What and why are you trying to communicate? Who are you communicating to? What type of activity are you using? Is there a chance for two-way dialogue? Are you re-inventing the wheel?

There are additional questions to consider, but the field of science communication needs more evaluation of results and training for the would-be science communicator (Illingworth and Roop 2015).  Each public outreach activity represents another skill to master. One-time activities provide little chance to improve.  One must tradeoff public outreach with other job-related duties.   If you are struggling to find the time for doing science, you should consider partnering with others in the unremitting dialogue that is needed (Prokup 2017). 

References

Austen, D. J., and D. J. Orth.  1988.  Sampling of waters with electricity.  Virginia Wildlife 49(April):24-27.

Bowater, L., and K. Yeoman. 2012. Science Communication: A Practical Guide for Scientists. John Wiley & Sons. 384 pp.

Cain. S. 2013. Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking.  Broadway Books.  368 pp.  

Graham, R. J., and D. J. Orth.  1986.  Living in the danger zone.  How do smallmouth bass survive?  Virginia Wildlife 47(April):22-25.

Illingworth, S. 2017. Delivering effective science communication: advice from a professional science communicator. Seminars in Cell and Developmental Biology 70:10-16 

Illingworth, S.M., and K.A. Roop. 2015. Developing key skills as a science communicator: Case studiesof two scientist-led outreach programmes. Geosciences 5(1):2-14 

Leonard, P. M., and D. J. Orth.  1985.  Are your streams healthy?  Ask the fish!  Virginia Wildlife 46(April):14-17. 

McClain, C. R. 2017.  Practices and promises of Facebook for science outreach: Becoming a “Nerd of Trust.”  PLoS Biology 15(6): e2002020. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2002020

Pickrell, J. 2006.  Introduction: GM organisms.  New Scientist. 4 September 2006.  https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9921-introduction-gm-organisms/

Prokup, A. 2017.  Communicating basic science: what goes wrong, why we must do it, and how we can do it better?  SciComm PLOS Blog https://blogs.plos.org/scicomm/2017/11/20/communicating-basic-science-what-goes-wrong-why-we-must-do-it-and-how-we-can-do-it-better/

Puckett, E.E. 2013. Outreach for introverts, WildlifeSNPits website. Available at https://wildlifesnpits.wordpress.com/2013/12/19/outreach-for-introverts/ accessed October 8, 2019.

Somers, J. 2018. The scientific paper is obsolete. Here’s what’s next.  The Atlantic. April 5, 2018.   

Su, L.Y.-F., H. Akin, D. Brossard, D. A. Scheufele, and M.A. Xenos. 2015. Journal of Mass Communication Quarterly 92:597-616.

Thaler, R. and C. Sunstein. 2009. Nudge. Penguin Books. 312 pp.

Weaver, A. E. 2005.  Scientists and public outreach: Participation, motivations, and impediments.  Journal of Geoscience Education 2005:1-22.

Wylie, C. 2019.  Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the plot to break America.  Random House. 270 pp.