Fostering the Art of Scientific Communication in the Center

Abstract

Our research asks how communication centers can assist advanced graduate students in the sciences to foster the art of developing scientific presentations for expert, non-expert, and generalist audiences. In a sustained collaboration supported by a national grant, the communication center at a mid-sized public comprehensive regional university in the Southeastern United States has facilitated a series of workshops for select graduate fellows in the sciences in recent years. In each of these workshops, we focus heavily on audience adaptation, thus creating a vibrant conversation between the disciplines of Communication Studies and the sciences. This research project collects data from workshops held in 2017 and 2018. Via a co-constructed narrative, we examine the notion of audience from the perspective of the research participants as well as administrators and graduate students who facilitated the workshops.