In a busy life, there's those moments when you enjoy catching up with someone professionally. One such moment came when I spent some time with Eric Olson. Eric and I met as he researched who was providing improvisation-based science communication training. We found we have a common passion for building community and advancing science.
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Improvscience led the first Science Stories workshop in October, as part of the All Stars Project in New York. The goal was simple enough: get scientists and people from poor communities talking together, learning from each other, and just generally, having positive interactions together!
This goal, however simple it may seem at first glance, is actually quite difficult.
Martha McCoy, a teacher, attended CESTEMER and said of her new tools:
"A conversation with one of my grad students took on a radical transformative shift for both of us this morning. She was bogged under with her research, feeling disgruntled about everything and blaming her students for not valuing their education. I did a 'yes and' with her and guided her into a whole new reality from the perspective of her students.
Improvisation, including improvscience, has a rich history at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, better known as SC. Over the course of several years, the conference has featured improvisation in multiple ways. This trend will continue at this year's meeting in November.
Part of what was fun at CESTEMER was that we got to play, not just work! The Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research conference brought together creative people who do science and science outreach with teachers and artists.
I read Stephen Nachmanovitch's book Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art and enjoyed thinking about its relation to my experiences, work life, and play life!
Improvscience develops scientists' abilities to be creative and build with the ideas of others. However, seeing improvisation in the day to day practice of science is not yet commonplace. "Yes, And" is an improvisational principle that we can see in our scientific practice.
Creating diverse, inclusive environments is a demanding practice. It asks people to be uncomfortable as we create new and unfamiliar ways of relating and working together. Through improvscience workshops, we develop the capacity of individuals and organizations to create inclusive, flexible and collaborative ways of working that build on the differences within and across groups. These day-to-day communication skills are crucial to the process of creating inclusive environments.
Dr. Raquell Holmes and Eric Olson, a research journalist, recently spoke about science communication.