From jargon to impact: Teaching undergraduates the art of public communication

Teaching public storytelling to students can help them communicate better in the world.

Undergraduates can learn the benefits of applying research to broader societal questions through public writing. FatCamera via Getty ImagesArticles published in The Conversation go well beyond academics writing for a general audience – they can also serve as great content for educators to use in the classroom.

Our recent article in the academic journal The Professional Geographer explores how articles from The Conversation provide opportunities for public storytelling and authentic learning in university classrooms.

As geographers and experienced writers for The Conversation – having written or co-written 26 articles since 2017 – we understand firsthand the value of disseminating these short, open-access articles that can be easily republished under the Creative Commons license.

To this point, one of the top republishers for The Conversation is Actively Learn, a McGraw Hill platform used to provide standards-aligned content for K–12 educators.

Yet we feel that The Conversation’s potential contributions to university education have not been sufficiently explored, which is unexpected given that its articles are authored by college teachers and researchers.

Why it matters

Public storytelling is increasingly important for scholars as higher education faces increased scrutiny, politicized attacks on truth-telling, pressure to show broader relevance and calls to regain trust.

In our article, we argue for integrating more public-facing science communication into educational spaces. We also introduce our use of articles from The Conversation as a classroom tool and discuss coaching students through challenges they face.

Our pedagogical work may interest university educators in other fields looking for ways to engage their classrooms in “authentic learning” – that is, learning in real-world contexts – and incorporate public storytelling into the professional preparation of their students.

Authentic learning gives students opportunities to observe how subject experts apply academic research to address social, political and environmental issues and contribute to public and policy debates and decisions beyond the classroom.

We choose to use articles from The Conversation in pedagogical exercises because we want to challenge students to confront societal issues from new perspectives. The goal is to do our part as university educators to help produce scholar-citizens ready for civic engagement.

Opportunity for a final deliverable

For example, in an end-of-semester writing assignment we have hosted, students were tasked with selecting a pressing issue in the course’s scope and writing a short article in the style of The Conversation.

Students were asked to draft a “pitch” for an article before writing it, just like prospective authors do for The Conversation. They were asked to make revisions, think through how to support their claims with evidence and adapt to the various conventions of writing for the public, similar to how it may go in working with the editorial team.

Although it is a sometimes difficult and often humbling process for the students to go through, they in real time understand the struggle of writing concisely and interestingly for a general audience.

They also produce a well-written short article that they can be proud of and potentially publish in an appropriate outlet or include in a portfolio for a potential employer.

Although The Conversation does not allow undergraduate students or community partners to go through the process of submitting a pitch and drafting an article to be published, our previous students have shown their ability to punch above their weight and produce short articles that demonstrate their applied and rigorous understanding of course concepts.

Why we write

As scholars, we like to write for The Conversation for four primary reasons:

First, we love the challenge of taking our discipline-specific academic work and translating it into jargon-free, accessible writing that anyone in our family or community could easily read.

This can be a difficult process – especially in taking complex academic concepts and breaking them down into simpler language while keeping essential rigor and nuance. The editors we work with from The Conversation are helpful in this case – even if the process is sometimes maddening along the way.

Second, we love tracking the readership of the published pieces in The Conversation’s dashboard portal. It is exciting to see a recently published article cross a threshold, such as 70,000 reads, over a period of time – something you would never experience from a traditionally published academic journal article.

These aren’t just numbers for us – it’s an indication of the potential impact of our work.

Third, we love how easy it is to share our articles via social media or via DOI links. Additionally, when other news and media outlets republish our pieces via the Creative Commons license, our work gets disseminated widely.

There is no paywall preventing access, no login or account required. Our wider communities can read the short piece by simply clicking a link that can be texted to them.

Fourth, our previous articles published in The Conversation are great sources for assigned reading in our seminar courses. They often cover content that we teach in our courses and are written in our voices. They also are short and easy to read for busy students – while laden with helpful hyperlinks to sources to explore further.

Writing for The Conversation allows us to produce accessible course content that we can use and share for years to come. From our experiences, students who read the articles have enjoyed them as much as we do, because they are quick reads and written in an interesting and accessible manner.

What is next

Further research studies could be done to quantitatively measure student learning outcomes when using articles from The Conversation.

Although our published article is helpful in providing anecdotal insights of the results we have seen from our experiences, more research would allow for further ways to measure the impact of using these articles in the classroom.

We believe The Conversation can help higher education even further by having teams or boards of educators working together to assemble college classroom e-books of articles organized around certain themes of instruction. This expansion of academic insights can help our students, who represent future civic decision-makers and public storytellers.

Regardless of future research opportunities, educators can choose to integrate articles from The Conversation into their classrooms now – whether using these articles for assigned content reading or for creative writing exercises.

We have seen firsthand the benefits of doing so, and we encourage more educators to join us. In doing so, your students can join the broader public conversation – with the power of The Conversation.

Tags: Academic Journalism, The Conversation, The Conversation Academic News