SciOut18 Flash Talk: Allison Coffin
https://rockedu.rockefeller.edu/new_outreach/flash-talk-allison-coffin/

Morning everybody. I would say good morning but as I've said to several of you already I don't do morning in my own time zone which is the west coast. So I'll make you a deal. I will try to stay upright and awake if you do and if I start to see people falling asleep I'm going back to my chair and taking a nap until noon. 

So I'm really here wearing two hats: the first is as a faculty member at Washington State University, I'm a neuroscientist, and the second is as the president of Science Talk, which is a science communication nonprofit and at Science Talk, our goal is to bring together not just this community but the community of science communication facilitators and practitioners around the country to continue to form these communities to exchange best practices and to really grow our impact nationwide. What so just a shameless plug there that our next conference is April 4th and 5th in Portland and I have some postcards out on the back table. But today I'm here at least for this talk in primarily my role as a faculty member to talk a bit about some of the barriers to engaging in outreach and that's what Jeanne really asked me to address today. So I'll just talk about three, not saying that there are only three barriers, but in a short period of time these are the three that I want to touch on: the barrier of the lack of incentive, the lack of encouragement, and the lack of opportunity and again I probably will be raising more questions than I have answers but that seems to be a general theme for the conference; let's ask a bunch of questions and then apparently they'll put us at tables later and we're all supposed to come up with the answers to save the world. 

So let's start with a lack of incentive. I think for a lot of faculty this comes down to and I might be dating myself here the phrase the Sagan effect. Anybody heard of that? Right anybody know who Carl Sagan is or was? Right most of the group. Right so there's an urban legend that I think has some truth to it that says that Carl Sagan was not elected to the National Academies because he was a public intellectual, that his scholarship was just as good as those who were elected but he was shunned because he was seen as too much of a communicator and not as much of a serious scientist like you can't be both and I think that this permeates a lot of academic culture. Yes, that was decades ago but there's still this concern that if you're seen as too much of a public figure you must not be serious in the field or in the lab and I think this really manifests not just in that fear of ostracization by colleagues but in the lack of incentive in the formal process and for those of us that are faculty that's T&P: tenure and promotion. When we're hired in an institution, we're told there are three things that your T&P is riding on: your research, your teaching, and your service. It's a three-legged stool and we're told make it a wobbly stool. It should be research first, then teaching, and then over here a little bit of wobbly service just enough to get by so that your colleagues know who you are. Outreach is never in there. If it is it's shunted into that shorter third leg of service. I have colleagues who've been told at major research institutions "don't be too good a teacher or you won't get tenure". Right, the educators in here are appalled so is this colleague but it was the reality. Even if his scholarship was that good often it's the same with engagement. if we're going to change this and incentivize faculty who are already interested or on the fence we need to include public outreach as part of the tenure and promotion criteria. At my own institution at Washington State University, I wasn't actively prohibited or discouraged. I wasn't encouraged either. Basically I was told have good scholarship, be a good teacher, do some service work and we'll kind of ignore whatever else you want to do. At least that was my attitude. They never really told me that and I just decided to go for it and do things like found a non-profit before I was tenured and thankfully it didn't get in my way but that's not true everywhere. The culture's starting to change. So at University of Washington our in-state rival school, I saw a 22-point list of barriers to engaging in outreach and recommendations for overcoming those barriers which was really nice to see. Some of these were things like changing the indirect cost structure so that for grants that involve an outreach component they're not charged that 50% or 60% overhead that a lot of smaller foundations just won't pay. The other was to include outreach in the formal tenure and promotion criteria to make it a four legged stool and I think that's going to make a huge difference. I also think that's going to help level the playing field a little bit. If we think about the scientists that engage in outreach more broadly and looking around this room and this meeting it's primarily women and we know that the studies say that women on average tend to engage more in outreach than men and women on average are promoted at least to full professor at a lower rate than men. Are those correlated? Well correlated yes. Is there is it causitive? No idea but one could assume that it might be so by incentivizing outreach we can level that playing field and invite both women and men to the table and reward us for that. 

The second barrier is the lack of encouragement and I see this differently than incentive because the incentive is that formal structure. The encouragement is somebody saying yeah go for it and I think this is particularly important for trainees for our students and postdocs. For those that were at the story collider last night you heard Kristin talked about her experience as a graduate student engaging in outreach basically to save her soul during grad school and that's not uncommon. So often we need to get out of the lab and actually engage to rekindle our own excitement for science and to share that with others but if we're not encouraged by our PI or by our department or our institution we're less likely to do that or if we do engage we're more likely to hide it. At Science Talk we offer travel awards for trainees to attend our conference and I so often get letters that say please give me money to attend because I can't even tell my PI that I want to do this. Right so sometimes the PI doesn't have money to support that attendance in a monetary way but they could still say yeah this is a great idea let me help you find institutional funds but if the student is too afraid to go to their PI and say I'm interested in engaging in outreach and improving my communication skills. That's a huge barrier to overcome. The other thing is, as I think all of us in here know, that old model of the faculty member mentoring their trainees to be clones of ourselves is complete BS because those aren't the jobs that are available and those aren't the jobs that most of the students and postdocs want. Communication skills and engagement are key but if we're not encouraging those skills then we're not helping the next generation of scientists develop their full potential and I know that I'm preaching to the choir here already. I probably don't need to say that but I think it's important for us to think about so we can go back and talk to our institutions about why they need to support this and encourage this engagement and not just our institutions but our colleagues and especially for the faculty members and the administrators in here it's really up to us to stand up for all of our right to engage in outreach. So thinking back again dating myself that whole fight for your right to party. Right, fight for your right to engage because it's important! Right somebody else about my age exactly. 

And finally the third barrier is the lack of opportunity really the lack of connection to opportunity. There are so many great opportunities out there: science cafes and nerd nights and taste of science festivals and all kinds of things I'm not mentioning that all of you are involved in and a lot that I didn't even know about until yesterday. While yes I spend a lot of time locked in my lab I'm fairly active in the science communication outreach community and I hadn't heard of a lot of these great opportunities so what about the scientists who aren't as active but want to engage and don't know where to start? That's where we need a pipeline and as was already said in the introduction that really starts at our home institutions. We have biology programs, math programs, english programs, we have offices of student engagement and student affairs. Why is it not standard to have offices of outreach and engagement? That's again starting to change. There are programs here at Rockefeller, there are programs at Duke, there are programs at Harvard, there are programs in many places that again I apologize if I'm not mentioning yours but those are still a one-of rather than expected and I get that science engagement outreach is still new enough that everybody thinks they should create something new and shiny rather than yet another office that does the same thing as University X over here. But not every math program thinks it has to be new and shiny and different. Everybody thinks we need a solid math program, we need a solid biology program, we need an office of Student Affairs. Why not make an office of engagement and outreach just as standard? Now this also gets to a comment that was mentioned in the introduction which is funding those offices. It's much easier to fund a new, shiny this is gonna change the world initiative then yet another one of the same and I get that. I don't have the answer there other than we need to talk to our donors, we need to talk to our foundation offices, and we need the scientists who are trained to be in front of those donors saying this is why this matters and this is why you should give to this program at my institution or in my community. Because it is this important not just to have a new and different program everywhere but to have iterations of similar programs across the country. 

So I think that's really it. Well, not all of it, but as I said what I'm going to address here which is that lack of incentive, that lack of encouragement, and that lack of a pipeline to opportunity and I'll end there in that speaking specifically as a bench scientist at the end of the day we're busy. I'm in my lab and more to the point I'm in my office writing grants so that the people in my lab can actually do the work. We want to engage but we're not going to search for the opportunities as much as we're going to take advantage of the opportunities that are easier to connect to so if we can make those connections I think we're really going to encourage and foster engagement. Thanks so much! That was actually a really inspiring talk. I would love to know your perspective about new professors coming into the department versus tenured have been there 20 30 40 years and their outlook on outreach and engagement well it depends on the professor but I would say on average those that have been there 20 30 40 years don't see the point of engagement and are more likely to discourage it occasionally you find those kind of bright shining lights that have been there forever and maybe didn't do it themselves but think yes this is great we'll encourage you I think we're seeing that it's a lot more common in younger faculty that are really interested in engagement and that's where I think we need that institutional incentive for tenure and promotion like I said I did it anyway and said screw it watch this but that wasn't going to work if I was at a different institution with even higher expectations for a scholarship I'm gonna follow up on that thank you for the leading because it was exactly what I was gonna ask so people are gonna roll my eyes cuz I make this point every time I'm at a conference and yeah Jeanne will be one of them so you do this and you say there other people do this shit every faculty member be required to do this should this be mandatory No why not have you been to a scientific conference lately there are people you don't want out talking to the public so I'm gonna I'm gonna absolutely disagree with you talking with the public can mean a whole host of things talk about your Skype a sciences I'm sure you have a whole range of people who would not necessarily be great going to a 6th grade 6th grade classroom or giving a science cafe you know what you can edit a Wikipedia article that's outreach that's engaging with the public you can go there are all different formats so I strongly disagree with the notion that not everyone should be doing this and I think this gets to your point of culture change if you're saying well you don't have to do it only some of us are gonna do it the culture is never gonna change it's just going to be a select few that are always doing it but if it's mandatory if it's something that is expected of everyone no matter there's different formats that's where you're gonna get the culture change and that's a good point I think my own bias is because I also teach oral communication of science and so I think my own bias is very much thinking about outreach and engagement as face-to-face communication and oral interaction conversation and I vehemently think that not all scientists should engage in that but when you expand the definition to things like editing a Wikipedia article or something then yes actually I do agree with you you