Science communication: a practical guide

Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Broadway Publishers, 2011. ISBN: 9781400052172.

Other required readings (and required audio, video and exhibition materials) are listed separately on the readings page.

The course will comprise two 90-minute seminars per week, at 11:30am – 1:00pm on Mondays and Wednesdays throughout the fall semester. The Monday seminars are devoted mainly to seminar discussion of key topics, and the Wednesday seminars are devoted mainly to work (individually, and in groups) on practical communication projects.

Students are required to attend and participate actively in the seminars. Students who are unable to attend a seminar for medical or other reasons should inform the professor in advance. Unexplained poor attendance and failure to participate actively in seminars will affect the overall grade on the course.

Assignments (which may involve reading, listening to or viewing relevant sources before class, written composition, or exhibition-related work) will be set on a weekly basis. It is essential that students should complete pre-class assignments, as this will be essential to effective participation in the relevant seminar discussions.

This is a communications intensive (CI-HW) class. CI-HW subjects are a subset of CI-H subjects concentrating more particularly on the writing process. Given how important revision is to composition, many assignments will be revised. The emphasis in all the CI-HW sections is on writing: the writing process, from pre-writing through drafting, revising, and editing; and the rhetorical dimensions of writing: the audience for whom one is writing, and the purpose for which one is writing—to argue, inform, persuade, explain, convince, and so on.

Grades on the course will be based on the following marking scheme:

Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers in the Greater Himalaya

Guest speaker: David Breashears, director of Glacierworks

Seeing is Believing: Visualizing Science for Communication

Guest Speaker: Jonathan Corum, science graphics editor at the New York Times

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