Abstract:

In order to take full advantage of science and technology, they must be accessible to as many people as possible and their message must be easily understood. In fact, the Covid pandemic highlighted the importance of simple and effective science communication. However, researchers are only trained for the creation of knowledge and in no instance are they trained for the communication and dissemination of science to a general public. That is why we designed an experiment that intended to introduce graduate and undergraduate students to multimodal ways to communicate science.

That is why we designed an experiment that intended to introduce graduate and undergraduate students to multimodal ways to communicate science. Science communication requires imagination and creativity, thus we believe that active learning methodologies based on the Flipped Classroom pedagogical model were the best option to conducted a pilot experiment was carried out, which included students from the School of Science (ECUM) and the School of Arts and Humanities (ELACH) of the University of Minho. The ECUM students were finishing their degrees in Applied Biology (LBA) and Biology Geology (LBG) and were taking the optional course Biology of Freshwater Pollution (bPad); the ELACH students were in the first year of the Master in Translation and Multilingual Communication and were taking the Corpus Linguistics (LC) course.

Since water is a cross-cutting theme, the bPAD syllabus was shared on virtual murals in both course units. For each of the seven proposed themes, BPAD and LC students (divided into teams of 3 or 4 elements) prepared mind maps on paper or digital media, based on a scientific article from which they could (and should) collect more information appropriate to the contents of their course. After the creation of mind maps, students proceeded to two types of science communication:
i) conversion of the mind maps into collaboratively elaborated texts;
ii) adaptation of these collaborative texts into digital narratives, through the prior creation of a storyboard.

At the end of the course, the students from ECUM and ELACH jointly presented their digital narratives. The teams from both courses showed considerable creativity in the narratives presented in 3 minutes.

This paper will present the methodology used, the content produced and the results of the questionnaire submitted to students to assess the impact of this collaborative and interdisciplinary methodology.

The aim of this methodology is that students interact with the subject matters of the course units all the while learning how to communicate science through a multimodal approach.

Keywords:

Science communication, Collaborative Learning, Multimodality, Flipped Classroom, Interdisciplinarity.