One of the great benefits of studying science writing at FHL is the way stakes are reinforced by the location itself. On several sunny days, I took my students out to a platform near the water, and what I liked about this platform—and indeed about sundry seats on the rocky points of the campus shoreline—was the visibility of the town across the harbor. Especially as the course shifted its attention to writing about science for non-experts, this relationship between the foreground and background of the FHL setting made posing such questions clear rather than abstract. We had discussions on the platform about how different writers including Elizabeth Kolbert, Alanna Mitchell, and Callum Roberts each made choices to convey the same information about ocean acidification differently. For students who take a science-writing class at this field station, it is visually apparent that how we write matters for how we reach across the UW property line.
This finally contributes to a way of seeing science itself differently. There are different circulating versions of the truism that science isn’t finished until it’s published, and as a result of taking “Science Writing for Diverse Audiences,” students are further pushed to ask, “published to or for whom?” At FHL and throughout the variety of classes they take there, students are surrounded by (are themselves!) researchers—people engaged in asking salient questions and who use intriguing tools to explore those questions. Some of our earliest conversations in the course were about how sharing inquiry is baked into the very idea of science. What are measurements, after all, but a way for two people to agree on descriptions of what they measure? Acquisition of knowledge is part of science, but it’s not the only part.
Naturalist and inventor—but also writer and filmmaker—Jacques Cousteau knew this. When I got the sense that most of the students were unfamiliar with this popularizer of ocean sciences, I brought in profiles written about him as the entry point into one of their last assignments, where they were tasked with writing profiles of researchers from around FHL. Writing these profiles had students take on the task of communicating complex work to non-experts blended with a sense of the people doing the science. Figures like Cousteau, and also Rachel Carson, infused science with their charisma in ways that offered audiences a share in the subject matter. In having the chance to practice doing similar work on-site where so much exciting marine science is taking place, FHL students prepare themselves to advance a history of doing needed communicative work.