193 F21 Ofili

Week One Sept 8

Communication/Introduction

In the first week of classes, we will discuss the idea of genre in rhetorical studies. Students will be introduced to this concept through a series of examples of genres in science communication.

Write a short bio introducing yourself (that includes a picture or some memes) or a 5-minute video to be posted on the discussion board.

Read:  Aristotle’s “Rhetoric.” Available at www.jstor 

Sept 13

Due: Your Short Introduction – Post on the discussion board.

Putting the idea of genre into practice, we will have students look at their own introduction as an example of a genre, and then explore how genres actually function together (e.g., how does the introduction help us to know you as an individual? Also, what narrative technique did you employ to make it captivating?)

Homework: What is Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, and how do they operate in science communication through various mediums of communication like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other mediums of communication in the era of Covid-19?

What can people glimpse about you from your introduction.

Your peers will evaluate how creative and compelling your introduction is.

Week 2: Sept 16

Due - Post your analysis of Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby’s “COVID-19 Current Controversies.” And show how Ethos, Pathos, and Logos function in the article on the Discussion board - Discuss by posting a comment on three posts.

Argumentation–Getting your evidence in order. Arrangement is one of the core concepts in rhetoric, and this idea builds on our discussion of genre.

Homework: Read:  KJELDSEN, E, JENS. “What the Metaphor Could Not Tell Us About the Prime Minister’s Bicycle Helmet Rhetorical Criticism of Visual Political Rhetoric.”  Available at  https://www.academia.edu/2429331/What_the_Metaphor_Could_Not_Tell_Us_About_the_Prime_Minister_s_Bicycle_Helmet_Rhetor

Discuss how Blumenthal-Barby deployed ethos, pathos, and logos to discuss the pandemic.

Sept 20

Library Workshop – This workshop is recommended for everyone, and it will help you learn more about how to do productive research that is absolutely necessary for your entire academic pursuit.

Post your ideas about Visual Rhetoric in KJELDSEN, E, JENS’s article on the discussion board. Comment on three post of your peers on the discussion board.

What is Visual Rhetoric?

Investigate the effectiveness of Visual rhetoric.

Visuals and visualization are different modes of communication that are crucial to scientific research. We will explore the different ways that visuals can operate across genres of science communication. As well, we will explore issues of data visualization and ``anticipate questions of ethical concerns in addition to readability and clarity.

For your Report, find an article from Nelson-McDermott, Catherine, Laura Buzzard, and Don LePan. Science and Society: An Anthology for Readers and Writers. Broadview, 2014. 

 and breakdown the steps used to make the arguments in that article.

With the conceptual frameworks established to understand there are different kinds of writing in the sciences (i.e., genres), particular strategies to make an effective and logical argument (i.e. arrangement), and particular forms of evidence expected to support a situated argument (i.e., evidence), we

will now focus on putting these ideas together in a particular genre of science communication: the research report. To do this, we will explore linguist John Swales’ work on the Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion (IMRaD) model, and his Create a Research Space (CARS) model. These two models give us a way to map the typical form of a research

report or a research article in the sciences, and it applies to both physical and life sciences. IMRaD describes the form of an overall report or article, and CARS is a set of moves found in introductory sections.

Homework: Read Jeanne Fahnestock’. “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts.” Available at http://wcx.sagepub.com/content/3/3/275

Week 3 – Sept 24

Due:  Post your analysis of Jeanne Fahnestock on the discussion board.

Homework: Read –

Fred Pearce. “Battle over Climate Data Turned into War between Scientists and Sceptics” pp 83 -90 (From -  Nelson-McDermott, Catherine, Laura Buzzard, and Don LePan. Science and Society: An Anthology for Readers and Writers).

Do a blogpost about the implication of Pearce’s arguments and post it on the discussion board on Learn. Each person should comment on at least 3 blogposts. Choose posts that do not already have comments to comment on. This blogpost counts towards 5% of your grade.

Sept 27

Post your blogpost based on your ideas on the debate revolving around climate change on the discussion board (use visual rhetoric to make your ideas more persuasive) - Discuss the blog post by posting comments on three posts of your peers.

This post is 5% of your final grade.

Homework: Read -

Stanley Milgram. “Issues in the Study of Obedience: A Reply to Baumrind” pp 139 – 149 in Science & Society. (From -  Nelson-McDermott, Catherine, Laura Buzzard, and Don LePan. Science and Society: An Anthology for Readers and Writers).

What do you think of Stanley Milgram’s experiment in a scientific world?

What makes a good blogpost?

How do Scientific Visuals and Visualization enhance persuasion.

Week 4: Sept 29

Post your analysis of Milgram’s article on the Discussion Board.

Choose an article from - Nelson-McDermott, Catherine, Laura Buzzard, and Don LePan. Science and Society: An Anthology for Readers and Writers- to do a report on.

As you draft your report, think about what counts as evidence in different fields of science?

Draft your article report to be posted on the discussion board for peer review.

What counts as evidence?

Week 5: Oct 4

Post the draft of your report on the discussion board for peer review- give a review of three of your peers’ essays. Your peer review counts towards participation grade.

Use the feedback you received to revise your essay.

 Review your colleague’s report, build on the previous week’s discussion of arrangement and argument, and we will further explore how to situate an argument in a particular genre.

Specifically, we will investigate how to 1) situate one’s argument in a current research conversation, and 2) how to frame evidence, such as data.

Next assignment: Grant Proposal- Identify a problem or Pick an idea (by identifying a gap you want to fill) from the article chosen for your report.

Arrangement of an argument helps students understand how to stage their ideas. Arrange the arguments in the article of your choice. Think about how to anticipate the information your audience will need, what information they will already have, and how you can build the arguments you need to make with respect to your anticipated audience.

   Week6:  Oct 8

Submit your report as word attachment into the drop box.

Start your next major assignment: Grant Proposal.

Homework: Read-

Brian Deer: “How the Case against the MMR Vaccine Was Fixed”. pp 201 – 217 in Science and Society. (From - Nelson-McDermott, Catherine, Laura Buzzard, and Don LePan. Science and Society: An Anthology for Readers and Writers).

Week 7: Oct 11

Reading Week

Reading Week

Week 8 – Oct 18

Post your analysis of Deer on the discussion board.

Using -Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion (IMRaD) model and Create a Research Space (CARS) models, establish a territory for your research, a gap in the research, and then explain how you’re going to fill the gap.

Homework:

Prepare your grant proposal

Increasingly, research doesn’t happen without securing external funds. This week explores the complex task of writing a grant application. Introducing the concept of a grant, how different kinds

of grants function in the Canadian academy, and what grants students can actually apply for (e.g., NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Awards), this week is a crash course in grant writing. Crowdfunding proposals will serve as an exciting and accessible example. Experiment.com is a rich resource for students to find examples tailored to science, and all the basic elements one might find in a traditional proposal are included in crowdfunding proposals, such as budgets, biographies, and, of course, the proposal itself. Using crowdfunding also allows, and demands, we talk about the kind of audience one might have for a proposal (it is an academic multidisciplinary panel, as in traditional grants, or a complex ground of academic and publics giving us their own money, as in crowdfunding.

Do we have to write differently for those audiences (spoiler: yes, we do)?

What’s the hook for the

research topic you’ve

chosen? How could you

accommodate that to a

broader audience to persuade

the Reading Week m to fund your

research? Think of creative ways through which you can get funding for your brainchild.

Identify a gap in your article or any other research area you are interested in and conduct the research for your grant proposal.

Week 9: Oct 20

 Post your Grant Proposal draft on the discussion board for peer review.  Give peer reviews of three of your peers’ essay. Your peer review counts towards participation grade.

Use the feedback to revise your essay.

How do your findings fill the gap you have identified?

Week 10 – Oct 25

Submit your grant proposal as word attachment into the drop box.

Watch on YouTube: Sharing science through story: Fergus McAuliffe at TEDxDublin

Read:  Michael D. Jones1 & Deserai Anderson Crow,

“How can we use the ‘science of stories’ to produce persuasive scientific stories?”

Oct 27

Post your ideas of how science is changing on the discussion board by discussing Fergus McAuliffe’s Ted Talk and Michael D. Jones1 & Deserai Anderson Crow, “How can we use the ‘science of stories’ to produce persuasive scientific stories?” How do creative literature like poems, novels, drama impact the audience differently from scientific articles?

While there are a lot of opinions on how we communicate science to publics, we’re going to throw a lot of them out. What we’re throwing out are models of science communication that rely on the so-called deficit model. As you might guess, this model assumes a deficit of knowledge on behalf of your audience (the public). If you could just fill them up with the correct knowledge—presto! —they think right, just like you. No longer do anti-vaccine proponents debate you, no longer is there a push to “teach the controversy,” and who would even dream of suggesting the Earth is flat? The problem with the deficit model of science communication, particularly in controversial cases such as I’ve outlined, is that the point of contention isn’t agreed upon. Throwing data at the controversy just won’t work. What will? It depends, and we’ll talk about tools to help you better engage in communication of both controversial and non-controversial science with broad publics. And, if you’re wondering just what the heck "publics" means, this is lesson #1: you have a lot of different public groups with different views, needs, etc., so understanding their complexity lets you understand your actual audience. We’ll take up Jeanne Fahnestock’s important work on “accommodating” science for different publics, and look at some other strategies for thinking about science in public discourse and debate.

Draft your conference paper to be submitted to the discussion board.

Week 11 – Nov 1

Post your conference paper draft on the discussion board for peer review.  Give reviews of three of your peers’ essays. Your peer review counts towards participation grade.

Use the feedback to revise your essay.

Group Project:

Science communication is changing, and these changes have generated enormous critical discussion around the ethics of science communication. Often, we talk about how to communicate research ethically and seriously engage broader publics in science. An increasingly popular way to do this is through citizen science. Unlike traditional consultation models (town halls, public forums, etc.; see, for examples, India’s Bt brinjal debate or British Columbia’s Site C controversy), citizen science brings every-day people into science not only to advance research, but to ensure research aids in civic discussion. This is a highly important turn and scientists in every discipline, from ecology to physics, are leading the charge with projects such as Galaxy Zoo to the protein-folding game Foldit to the, remarkably longitudinal (over 100 years!), Christmas Bird Count.

Public Communication

of sciences and its impact on public policies.

Week 12: Nov 5

Submit your conference paper as word attachment into the drop box.

Start Your Group Project

For the group assignment, you can consult with each other and come up with a topic that you all agree on. Afterward, the topic should be broken down into parts, and each person should be assigned one part that should be researched. After the research, the group should put the ideas together in a cohesive manner. The group will have to put together a PowerPoint that will be posted on the discussion board for everyone to see. The topic should be controversial and of importance to society in contemporary times.

Brainstorm and identify a really controversial topic that is currently a problem the society is dealing with and to which you need to find a solution (Avoid topics with religious undertones).

I have created group forums on Learn Discussion board for the group project.

You can use this platform to discuss your group project, brainstorm, arrive at an idea/topic, decide how you will break the topic down into different aspects, share the different aspects of the topic among yourselves, and feed off each other's ideas.

After you have all arrived at a topic, the topic should be broken down into parts, and each person should be assigned one part that they should conduct a research on. After the research, the group should put the ideas together in a cohesive manner.

You are required to produce a PowerPoint based on each person's aspect of the topic. The PowerPoint will be assessed based on the use of visual rhetoric, originality, and logical content for each individual presentation, while the group will be assessed on how cohesively all the different PowerPoints tie into the major topic you have all worked on. The topic has to be contemporary, which means it must address current problems that have not already been over-flogged. The topic and how it is approached should aim to influence public policies and make recommendations that will bring about a change in the society.    

Please get engaged with each other and come up with brilliant ideas. I am mainly looking for creativity, logic, and deployment of visual rhetoric.

Nov 8

EDGE workshop – this workshop is mandatory because it was incorporated into this course to enable you translate your skills into your resumes, interviews, and the workplace.

Discuss your experience on the discussion board.

Continue your group work.

How we communicate to participants in research, how we communicate research findings, and how we choose (or choose not to) involve ourselves as experts in public debate all involve ethical decisions. Researchers at every level take most seriously the way we inform participants about their involvement in our work: we often talk about informed consent—the obvious communication challenge here being certain we are, indeed, informing our participants accurately. How we communicate research findings is also an ethical matter in that we must do so accurately, transparently, and within the norms of our discipline. WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, And Democratic) in human-focused sciences, replication problems across disciplines, and the rise of registered reports (a kind of proposal you write for a research journal before you have even run your study, let alone wrote the article) are all marks of ongoing ethical engagements by scientists at the level of our research design and, importantly for your communication practices, reporting. And, perhaps most obviously, when do scientists weigh in and on what topics? Senior scientists often taken on civic debate; e.g., Carl Sagan to Neil deGrasse Tyson to our own Chris Hadfield and Governor General, Her

Excellency the Right Honourable—and, don’t forget, astronaut, engineer, and scientific communicator who has made numerous radio spots—Julie Payette. And, let’s not forget, sometimes the engagement is about a specific science-based civic matter, such as the Flint Water crisis where Virginia Tech’s Professor Marc Edwards, an expert in water supply safety and “whistleblowers” (how’s that title for starting an ethical debate?), stepped in to aid citizens in their battle for clean water.

Week 13: Nov 15

Work on your group assignment.

Intercultural communications and cross-cultural communications are important considerations in an increasingly globalized world of science. Since 1990, research articles with collaborators from more than one county have doubled, according to a report presented by Caroline Wagner at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in 2017. Although it is often said English is the language of science, just what we call English, and what counts as “good” English isn’t so simple. Also, issues such as regionalisms can create barriers to understanding. Beyond the written word, how we interact with each other everyday shapes how we are able to understand and collaborator with one another.

Discuss among yourselves on how you plan to put your group write-up and PowerPoint together.

The group will have to put together a PowerPoint that will be posted on the discussion board for everyone to see. The topic should be controversial and of importance to society in contemporary times.  

Finalize your group write-up and PowerPoint presentations among yourselves.

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Nov 22

Post Your Write-up and PowerPoint onto the Final Project Forum on Learn discussion board.

Nov 29

Prepare your Final Reflection.

Dec 6

Submit your “Final Reflection” of all the feedback you received as well as the impact of the course to be submitted to dropbox.

End of Term