Team:DeNovocastrians/Education
Science isn’t just people wearing white coats in research labs. Science is also a reflection on what people want, and more importantly, need. We believe that the best research should be valued by all people.
Studies have found that scientists have the respect of the public, however they have trouble gaining their trust (Fiske and Dupree, 2014). This is where effective science communication becomes essential. We realised that the relevance and success our project has in the real world relies heavily on the level of support it receives from the wider community.
Companies and individuals are much more likely to support your research if you can communicate its worth. Therefore, we directed a lot of our focus towards explaining the importance of the work we are doing through community outreach.
Many articles have shown that when people are able to build trust in the process early, the final outcome is more likely to be accepted by the public (R. Grant, 2016).
Due to the current pandemic, we believed it was best practice to use digital based outreach platforms.
In the initial stages of our project, we created a team Medium page to collate our progress in a single place. This platform was relatively simple to use and allowed for the combination of video, text and images to create a multifaceted representation of our work. Since its launch in early September, our medium page has reached over 1000 people, with an average of 43 views per post.
We also made use of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to connect people to our Medium page, update the public on our progress, inform them of the benefits associated with GMO's and reach a larger audience. Additionally our project aims to show a fun and social environment, by showing images such as celebrations selfies when sending sequencing, and fun witty jokes mixed in with team descriptions such as “Science is a fickle lover; you can spend months on a project and go absolutely nowhere and sometimes it works perfectly.” — Darcy Kilvert. We hope we can appeal to younger generations coming through, so that more kids will pursue a career in STEM. Collectively, these platforms have reached over 2000 people, with an average of 190 views per post in the last two months.
Using Twitter we were able to conduct poll-based surveys to obtain data of the public's general perceptions. Poll questions included “If you had $100, would you donate the money to cancer research or environmental pollution management?”, 71% of people indicated they would prefer their $100 to go to environmental pollution management. This would indicate a strong care for environmental management. Another question was “Do you believe that the industrial sector should help fund research to clean up industrial pollution?”, 100% said voted they should. We additionally questioned “Do you think your country is doing enough to protect the environment?” and 100% said no. From this data it can be extrapolated that the wider community believes not enough environmental considerations and responsibility are being taken.
We also met with businesses and local government (Lake Macquarie council), to seek financial support and expand our network for future endeavors. By doing this we were able to promote our research, as well as gain feedback on community views and ideas regarding the implementation of our work in a real-world setting. Some industries we have been in contact with were Traditional Aussie Gardens and Australian Ecoflora.
References
Fiske, S.T., and C. Dupree. (2014) Gaining trust as well as respect in communicating to motivated audiences about science topics .
Grant, R. (2016). Why scientists are losing the fight to communicate science to the public. The Guardian