Category Archives: discussion

Storytelling and communication through environmental media: Blue Horizons films

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image credit: Alan Wolf CC-BY-NC-SA

I was pleased to have the opportunity to host Richard Hutton and LeeAnne French, the Executive and Associate Directors of the Carsey-Wolf Center and two of the minds behind the Blue Horizons film program, for a Roundtable last week. It was very fun to be able to show this year’s Blue Horizons films for the NCEAS community, and especially great to join into the conversation that we had with Richard and LeeAnne.

Richard and LeeAnne shared some great advice for those of us interested in communicating the science relevant to environmental issues, several of the things they mentioned really stuck in my mind. We discussed:

  • the importance of knowing your audience and tailoring your message for the particular audience you’re trying to reach
  • the way a nuanced presentation of a variety of cultural, societal, economic, etc. perspectives on an environmental issue can help the audience move beyond their established positions and engage more deeply with inherent complexities and competing points of view
  • the powerful and honest way people can express their thoughts and feelings about an issue when trust between interviewer and interviewee has been established
  • the importance of casting when creating environmental media
  • the value of storytelling as a communication approach

Richard also recommended a book for those interested in learning more about how to improve communication through storytelling: The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall. If any of you are planning to read it (I am) and would like to discuss afterward, please let me know and I’d be happy to join you.

Thank you, Richard and LeeAnne, for taking the time out to talk with us! We appreciate your willingness to share some practical tips we can use as we think about how to improve our communication efforts.

Collaboration and conflict management 101

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Our Dimensions of Biodiversity team held a meeting at the Lake Baikal Bolshie Koty field station this summer to discuss teamwork and conflict management. We used a lot of the materials that were shared with us by Pat Soranno and her CSI-Limnology team. So for this Roundtable discussion, I’ll tell you about the materials we used, and policy documents that we are using to manage issues around data sharing, collaboration, and co-authorship…

If you want to check out some reading materials that might be useful, shoot me an email.

Update after our discussion…

1) I agree very much with several of Stacy‘s points about the Kilman conflict instrument – a) it seems very focused on American culture, and b) the structure of and word choice in the survey tends to put positive emphasis on extroversion and quick reaction.

2) Here’s the link to the post about creating a “resentment list” during field work – good for a laugh and also for easing tensions that build in close quarters.

3) Here’s the paper that John Parker and I wrote about working group dynamics – there’s a box where we set out some of the important points about running a working group.

Steve came into my office today while I was trying to fill out my reimbursement forms from the Russian travel this summer – he looked at my desk and commented on this particular side of international collaboration! 🙂

 

Professional development at NCEAS: community interests and expertise

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The Roundtable discussion on 8/17 included a presentation of the results of a survey on professional development interests and expertise that was sent out to the NCEAS community. (Thank you to everyone who filled out the survey!) During the discussion, we spent quite a bit of time delving into ideas about presentations or discussions related to areas of professional development that elicited high interest from the survey respondents.

In the figures below, numbers of respondents who reported each level of interest and expertise are shown in the vertical, and different areas of professional development are listed from left to right. Purple segments represent level of interest, and green segments represent areas of expertise. Please let me know if you have any questions about how to interpret the figures.

Several people suggested topics for discussion in addition to the ones included in the survey:

  • dealing with sexism and other forms of discrimination in a professional setting
  • data visualization
  • how to resolve tensions between competition (me first) vs. collaboration/cooperation (us together) modes of advancing science
  • enhancing cross-disciplinary communication
  • framing research results

Some interesting readings were also mentioned during the discussion:

Please add a comment below if you’d like to suggest additional topics or readings. I hope that these survey results will be helpful for those planning to host the Roundtable in the coming months.

Just for fun, I also mapped out the survey participants based on shared interests and expertise using a self-organizing map (SOM) approach. The two images below show the results of this analysis. Colors represent cluster membership (k-means), and members of the same cluster can be expected to be more similar that members of different clusters.

See you at the next Roundtable!