ASC volunteers represent a wide variety of science communication paths: editing Wikipedia, responding to foodborne illness complaints, designing museum exhibits, and more. Today we’re featuring someone who has trained hundreds of scientists to communicate about their science with broad audiences. Scott Hershberger (ASC’s newsletter editor) spoke with Tamara Poles, ASC’s accessibility director, about her full-time consulting business, how she became a scicomm trainer, and how she’s working to make the science communication community more inclusive.
Scott Hershberger: What do you do in your job?
Tamara Poles: I am founder and CEO of SciCom Consulting. I train scientists how to communicate to the public, and then I create opportunities for them to practice and hone their skills in science communication. I do workshops, I do trainings, I do keynote addresses and things like that.
In the world of science communication as it is right now, we are still, unfortunately, struggling to be seen as a field. A lot of times you have these PIs that are like, “Oh yeah, I have this researcher that also can talk to you,” but they don’t recognize that that’s something valuable that should be monetized, recognized, and perfected. So that’s where I come in.
I have a big vision for SciCom Consulting. I want to give science communicators a platform to be able to safely do their work under an umbrella. Right now, we’re all doing this stuff in silos, and it’s not efficient. I’m building out a list of consultants now. I already have several people that have expressed interest, and soon they’ll start rolling out on the website. They’re going to have profiles, and it’s like, “Hey, you want to learn about science writing? Here is a career science writer that has won awards for writing. You can talk to them for an hour.” Or “Hey, guess what? She’s doing a workshop this week. You can register here.” Then they get their compensation and their recognition. Nobody’s trying to get rich off of this, but I want to make sure my scientists are feeling recognized and seen, and that they get compensated fairly for this extra work that they’re doing—and that the scientists that need these resources can easily access them to become better science communicators.
But on any given day, I have lots of meetings, lots of workshops, lots of fun. I absolutely love it. I should have done this a long time ago, but everything happens in its own timeline. I’m so glad I made this jump.
Tamara Poles with her workshop participants at the Science For All Summit in February 2024. The workshop topic was “The Importance of Authenticity in Science Communication.”
SH: What is your approach to running trainings and workshops?
TP: I facilitate a learning environment that’s a safe space for everybody to learn and contribute. I set the stage about a concept, and then participants get to say how that impacts them individually. So immediately they’re connecting my content with what they do for a living or what they’ve seen in grad school, and then we work off of that for the rest of the workshop. In a two-hour workshop, I might be talking a maximum of 30 minutes, but it’s not consecutive. It is them doing something, and then us engaging and problem-solving together, and then them getting their hands dirty again and actually creating something.
Tamara was invited to be the keynote speaker at Durham Public Schools’ SciSummit in April 2024. Here she takes time from her keynote address to conduct a meaningful activity with scientists and educators.
SH: Being a scicomm trainer is a bit of a different skillset from being a science communicator. How did you learn how to be a science communication trainer?
TP: After undergrad, I was supposed to go and get my PhD in evolutionary biology, but I took a year off, and I fell into museums and science centers. There I learned how to do public engagement, because they throw you in and you have to figure it out. You’re teaching people from K to gray all day, and you have to talk in a way that both ends of the spectrum will understand and be entertained as well as take away something.
While doing that, I also started working with scientists to share with them what I’d learned. That grew into me working at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, where I was the coordinator of distance education before people started using Zoom. I provided a museum experience for people that were unable to attend the museum, like pediatric hospitals and schools that weren’t in the area. In that role, I thought it would be important to train scientists in their labs how to communicate their research with my digital media equipment. We would work on a program together in order for students to meet real scientists and learn about current research taking place at the museum.
The most popular program was belly button armpit biodiversity, where I would send out swab kits to teachers, and teachers had to swab their belly button, their principal’s belly button, and their PE teacher’s belly button. Then I would culture it and grow these plates to be nice and fuzzy by the time we connected with the students. While the researcher talked about their research on microbiomes, they would talk about how there’s good and bad bacteria that live on us all the time. And then the researcher would show the plates to the students, and the students got to make their own hypotheses about whose plate was whose and why. I was behind the scenes the whole time, and I was there at all their sessions to make sure it went smoothly.
Then I went to grad school for education. I already knew what worked and what didn’t through trial and error, and then when I got my master’s in education, I was like, “Oh, then this is why it works.” What I did for my master’s was create a science communication curriculum, and then I got back out there. I used parts of that curriculum when I worked at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center to create the IMPACTS program. When I look back, everything I did was actually a straight line to being a scicomm trainer and science communicator.
Tamara Poles with three of her former students from the IMPACTS program, an intensive scicomm training program that she developed at the University of North Carolina’s Morehead Planetarium and Science Center. These students’ encouragement in April 2023 gave the final push that inspired her to start her own scicomm training company.
SH: What do you do as ASC Accessibility Director?
TP: I try to connect and recruit more folks to ASC that provide diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility resources and workshops, from partnering with and recruiting more members from HBCUs to searching for programmers to provide accessibility workshops for scicommers. Coming up, I will hopefully be bringing in professionals to do more workshops. The first one will be on how evaluation can benefit what we do as science communicators. If we have somebody evaluating our products, then we can see what audiences are there, and what audiences aren’t there and why.
My whole goal is to figure out who’s at the table already, and why aren’t others at the table, and what can I do to make my table bigger and make it more accessible for you to get there? And since we have a conference next year in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I live 15 minutes away, I’m trying to pool my network with ASC’s network so we can have a cool and accessible conference here.
SH: Are there any specific accessibility challenges that you have noticed within the science communication community?
TP: I think the biggest obstacle is making sure the more traditional sciences see science communication as a reputable field and a skillset that you have to grow and foster and practice just like their field.
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