Teaching sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Tune in: Why does scientific communication matter?

25 minutes

Find out: What does effective communication look like?

15 minutes

Take action: Design your own science communication

5 minutes

Reflection

Tune in: Why does scientific communication matter? (10 minutes)

Step 1.

Listen to the Making of a Hoodie Sea the Weed podcast from 31:34 - 33:15 mins. The transcript for this section can be found on the student worksheet.

Step 2.

Invite students to spend a few minutes exploring the following web pages from AIME and Operation Crayweed that have information about the Sea Weed Hoodie campaign.

Sea the Weed - Aime Mentoring
Operation Crayweed - Restoring Sydney’s Underwater Forests
- Note: This website has multiple references to seaweed sex to talk about the growth of crayweed. Please browse the website prior to teaching this lesson to see if it is suitable to use with your class. This down-to-earth, informal, amusing language is one example of effective communication to a wider audience.

Step 3.

Ask students:

What methods have AIME and Operation Crayweed used in order to try and get the word out about the importance of reforesting the Sydney coastline?
- Possible responses: images, videos, music videos, podcast episodes, creating a hoodie, graphics, Shareholder of the Ocean campaign, artwork, inspiring language, informal language, humour.
What does normal scientific communication look like?
- Possible responses: scientific reports, graphs, tables, videos, textbooks
Is the way AIME and Operation Crayweed have communicated their messages effective? Why?

Find out: What does effective communication look like? (25 minutes)

Step 1.

Ask students to think about how they have seen science communicated to them either at school or in their personal lives. What were the messages that stuck out to them most? Encourage students to share their responses and discuss them with the class.

Possible responses:
- Frozen Planet - David Attenborough documentary or any other documentary that shows the effects of climate change
- War on Waste documentary showing the effects of landfill and waste
- Informative social media posts and videos
- TV shows, movies, school projects, museum and gallery visits, awareness campaigns, and advertising

Step 2.

Discuss with students what was effective about these forms of communication. Capture some of the students' observations on the board.

Step 3.

Explain to students that when scientists conduct research, the initial communication of that research needs to take the form of a scientific report or a peer-reviewed journal article that is included in science journals.

You might like to show students the following article: Towards Restoration of Missing Underwater Forests - Plos One. This is a standard science report which explains the science behind Operation Crayweed.

Discuss with students what they notice about the article. Below are some prompts to help guide the discussion.

Would they read it?
Do they understand the results and what it is trying to say?
Who is the audience for this report?
Does this report or research bring about any lasting social change?
Why is a report like this necessary?

Explain to students that journal articles are important because it shows that the knowledge gained by the scientists is backed by evidence. However, a big part of communicating scientific findings is to make those findings accessible and engaging to the wider public so that society can actually use the knowledge contained in the research to make a lasting change.

Step 4.

Spend some time exploring effective science communication with your class. You might like to look a little more deeply into some of the suggestions students made in Step 1.

Below are a few examples to look at with your students. Divide the students into groups and assign each group a specific communication that they can then discuss with the class.

Online articles: 12 examples of stunning science communication
Documentaries: Adorable Seal Pup Starts to Explore | Frozen Planet
TV shows: War on Waste - Plate Waste
Museums and Activities: Scienceworks
Social Media: The impact of climate change on freshwater fish
Podcasts: The future of everything

Ask each group to share with the class the aspects of this type of communication that make it engaging and informative. How do they lead to social change?

Take action: Design your own science communication (15 minutes)

Depending on how you are using this lesson, this section could take multiple forms.

If you are using this lesson for students to follow the process of designing an experiment to ignite change, each Take Action at the end of the lesson will correspond to forming a different section of their overall experiment. This first Take Action will focus on students designing their own science communication.

You could choose for students to develop their own experiments, or you could conduct one experiment as a class, and each student could write their own report.

This is an alternative approach for teaching the scientific method that could result in some social change within your class or school community. Consider spending some time thinking about ways your class could create change within your community and encourage students to think creatively about how they could make a positive impact and measure it. If you want to focus on the scientific method more, we would suggest focusing on a class or year-level change through one experiment.

Some possible examples could be:

Does raising awareness about recycling within Year 8 increase the rate at which students use the correct bins?

Does an awareness campaign about fast fashion influence the clothing choices of Year 8 students?

Step 1.

Divide students back into their groups from the last lesson or allocate them to groups of 3-4.

Using the information you have covered about effective science communication, ask each group to plan a way of communicating their findings with their school audience in an engaging and informative way.

This could be through a social media post, a mini-documentary music video, podcast etc. You can choose to give students the amount of time appropriate for your school and setting. The students could just plan what they would do at the end of this lesson, or if you have the time and resources, students could follow through with creating their communication method over the next few lessons.

Support students to plan out their approach.

What are the main messages they are trying to get out?
Who is their audience?
What do they want to achieve?
How can they make their message engaging, clear and concise?

You could use the sample results in the teacher content information for the question, “Does raising awareness about recycling within Year 9 increase the rate at which students use the correct bins?”, to discuss possible ways of communicating results.

This sample data is for a social change experiment conducted within a Year 8 cohort. The students could aim to communicate this data to the whole school or even the local community, with the aim to create social change in the recycling space on a broader level by engaging their audience.

Reflection (5 mins)

The overall goal of AIME’s Making of a Hoodie podcast is the following.

Ask students:

How does AIMES ‘Sea the Weed’ Making of a Hoodie podcast, and their other podcast episodes that we have mentioned throughout this unit, help to create long-term systematic change?
How does something as simple as the scientific method enable us to make a long-term systematic change?

Communicating Findings

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Summary

Learning intentions:

Students will...

Success criteria:

Students can...

Lesson guides and printables

Lesson Details

Curriculum Mapping

Resources Required

UN Sustainable Development Goals

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