Meeting Abstract
The Community Writing Center (CWC) is an outreach program of Salt Lake Community College that helps the public in any writing that they are working on, regardless of educational background. Our motto is “Everyone Can Write.” This comes from our philosophy that education and writing is a conversation between all parties involved; that the traditional deficiency model of education where the ‘learned’ is a gatekeeper that bestows facts upon the ‘learner’ fails in a number of ways. This is especially problematic when it comes to science communication. So we shifted the approach by extending our motto to “Everyone Can Think Critically.” From that standpoint we then built two popular workshop series to facilitate conversations and dialogue around scientific literacy. The goals are to increase scientific and statistical literacy in the public while also increasing the ability for scientists to effectively communicate. The first is our Science Communication workshop series where local journalists, academics, and researchers collaborate on how best to present their work in an accurate and accessible way. The second is our Writing for Change workshop series for the general public where we work on various issues including how to write about and critically analyze statistics and factual claims they encounter in news and social media. The outcome has been hundreds of people collaborating on how to better understand and write on science and statistics- from people experiencing homelessness to retirees to high school students to Ph.Ds- and everyone in between. This presentation will be of benefit to researchers, educators, and science communicators. The presentation will include further discussion of our philosophy, the goals and content of our workshops, and how you might adapt this model to fit within your communities.
