PEWS - Stofer Hecht - Scientist Outcomes as Measures of Successful Public Engagement

Hi, I’m Dr. Katie Stofer, and, along with my student, Kirsten Hecht, we’re pleased to present our work looking at scientist outcomes as a potential measure of successful public engagement. We’re from the University of Florida I’m going to be your narrator today, and Kirsten will be available to answer questions at the q a on September 11th so We know that scientists are becoming more involved in engagement and seeing it as increasingly important particularly in some disciplines such as herpetology and herpetology is a very conservation- focused discipline and we think of engagement as a way to take people from - this gentleman who’s scared of the, I think it’s a lizard on his shoulder - to the young person on the right who’s interacting and really up close and personal with a turtle um so one of our studies involves looking at interviews and surveys with herpetologists as to the extent and type of work that they are doing in engagement. But we also wanted to think about what are they doing to be aware of their success? Are they evaluating their work? Are they evaluating themselves? What exactly are they doing beyond just participating? So we found they definitely are participating you know, particularly our respondents were those who were doing a high amount of engagement and Kirsten can tell you as someone embedded in the discipline that that it is pretty widespread within the discipline um with some notable exceptions about people who are particularly resistant to doing any public engagement um but we see the three most common activities that herpetologists in our study reported uh but they’re definitely for the most part not evaluating either their audience or themselves. You know as this one quote says they’re not thinking about what success looks like they’re pretty much thinking that success is like oh i just you know go out there and do something and that’s successful. But on the other hand we can look at a case study of a program that is designed to be truly public engagement and show that scientists can actually see you know ways to improve their own work and be more successful at some of their engagement goals so in this program called “talk science with me” that I facilitate, pairs of scientists go to local venues such as bars, restaurants, coffee houses, even libraries and laundromats and they’re talking basically in small groups with patrons as they walk by very informally off the cuff you know whatever people want to talk about.

This one scientist who returns regularly to 02:54 - the bar that is in his rural community about 20 minutes away a 20-minute drive from our university campus uh said that you know he would never have thought of taking his microscope and live nematodes that you see him presenting in this photo of the event uh he wouldn’t have thought about that without you know working through this program several times and talking to the people that he was you know interacting with from the community through the program. So combined with some of our other results from Kirsten’s work noting that herpetologists in particular aren’t having formal engagement training yet they think they have sufficient training, we actually see a lot of room for improvement that we think looking at the scientists’ work themselves could help the scientists do better work so for example with the herpetologists helping them think about - are they truly doing engagement? Their number one activity, public lectures, is that really what we think of as engagement scholars as something that really is a multi-dimensional or multi-directional conversation? And even social media, the second one. so thinking more in the future about - are those truly what we mean by engagement. And then this example of our scientist who had to go several times to the same activity to really understand like oh i could do more by bringing props, can we help maybe people reflect on other’s practice and eliminate some of that time needed for trial and error. So i’m looking forward a lot to speaking with you all about the work that we’ve done and the possibilities. Thank you. .