- considered one or two major areas of knowledge
- thought about what everybody ought to know from these areas
- thought about how best to give this information to nonspecialists
- considered the challenges in doing this task
- looked at some good examples (from live people, from videos, from journalism, and from the arts)
- experimented with practicing and inventing our own communication tactics
- worked on preparing our own short videos
Tuesday: Climate and Atmospheric Science
Wednesday: Biology, Ecology, and Environmental Science
Thursday: Sociology, Psychology, and Ethics
Friday: Filming presentations.
1. Our first premise is that climate change is everybody's business, a
complicated series of global challenges that we'll need everybody's skills and
perspectives to deal with. So we explored this topic from a number of
different disciplinary angles: climate science, biology and ecology, sociology
and anthropology, policy, business, literature, the visual arts, ethics, and
more. For some of these aspects we took a big overview, for some we zoomed
in on a piece of the picture, and for some we just pointed to a body of knowledge
and examples of some exciting thinking.
2. Our second premise is that to deal well with this issue we all need to be
able to communicate clearly with nonspecialists. (Nonspecialists = almost
everybody = everybody except the few colleagues who do exactly the same sort of
high-level work we do.) So we explored some of the specific communication
problems that arise with climate change and experimented with some more general
strategies for clear, lively, jargon-free writing and speaking.
And 3. We watched a number of videos of specialists speaking to general
audiences, and went to work making one with a few of our fellow CMMAP
students and interns: under 10 minutes, on an important topic of the right
size, with college-level content and primer-level clarity. We shot the
video and it will be posted on the
Changing
Climates website.
Instructors
Our instructors for the course this year were John Calderazzo and SueEllen Campbell, professors of English at Colorado State University. They founded and direct Changing Climates at CSU, a multidisciplinary education and outreach initiative. In the last three years, they've organized over a hundred lectures given by speakers from eight academic colleges, more than twenty departments, and other campus, local, and regional entities. With funding from CMMAP, they are now developing a climate-change web library of short videos and other resources for college-level teachers, students, and the general public. They have presented their work at the National Science Foundation, Ecological Society of American, and the National Association of Science Writers.
For questions regarding this or next year's 2011 Graduate Colloquium, please contact
Melissa Burt, CMMAP Education and Diverty Manager, at mburt@atmos.colostate.edu.