Storytelling is in our nature, humans have always used stories to educate and entertain.\u00a0 The ancient Greek constellations are more than mere curiosities, they are patterns in the sky relating to well-told stories: if you know the story, you can more easily remember the patterns in the stars, and can navigate home when you get lost at sea.\u00a0 Every culture has its own sky stories, made from the same stars in the one sky we all share, and they are endlessly fascinating.<\/p>\n
Science has two sides to it: the doing<\/em><\/strong> part where you come up with a hypothesis and then test it, and the communicating<\/em><\/strong> part where you tell the world what you found.\u00a0 There’s no point doing the first, if we don’t also do the second.\u00a0 In academia, this second part is all about writing research papers for journals and giving high-level lectures and seminars.\u00a0 But there is a public side to this too, after all the public ultimate pay for a lot of it.\u00a0 Over the last ten years I’ve spent a lot of time doing both: in my day job I’m paid to DO<\/strong> science, and in my spare time I enjoy TALKING<\/strong> about science.\u00a0 This has lead me to the point where I almost get more requests to do public talks, festivals, school visits and public workshops than I can reasonably handle.\u00a0 But I can’t help it!\u00a0 When I started out, any kind of public speaking scared the hell out of me, but I’ve become so used to it that people don’t believe me when I tell them that I used to suffer from severe stage fright.\u00a0 It’s doing the public outreach that has helped me reach that point, and that has helped my professional communication as well.<\/p>\n Along the way I have created a number of talks and workshops, and I’ve developed my own style.\u00a0 What I always try to do with my public talks is to tell a story that runs through the entire presentation, and it seems to work quite well.\u00a0 What I have come to realise is that the art of storytelling is a very<\/em> powerful tool, and I think that scientists should make better use of it.\u00a0 I now sit in professional seminars and conferences, listening to very clever people talking about their exciting science results in such a boring way, wondering why we don’t give our students proper training in communication.\u00a0 This would help them when they leave and try to persuade someone to give them a job, and it would help the public impression of science if our graduates are not just clever, but articulate and confident too.<\/p>\n For me, this moved to a new level when I met, by chance, Sita Brand from Settle Stories<\/a>, and Conway Mothobi, schools outreach manager at Manchester Metropolitan University<\/a>.\u00a0 The three of us masterminded the first Settle Star Party<\/a>, which ran in October 2015 and was a great success<\/a>.\u00a0 At that event, I worked together with Sita Brand<\/a>, Emily Hennessey<\/a>, and Cassandra Wye<\/a>, and learned a lot about the art of storytelling from these three amazing people.\u00a0 Over the course of the star party I ran the Star Lab, working with the storytellers in the inflatable planetarium, running family-friendly shows that were a flowing mix of story and science.\u00a0 It was a brilliant experience, and really opened up the world of storytelling for me.\u00a0 Now I’m very excited to be working again with Cassandra Wye, developing family-friendly workshops where we will interweave storytelling and astronomy to make something both entertaining and educational.\u00a0 Whatever we come up with, it’s guaranteed to be a lot of fun!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Storytelling is in our nature, humans have always used stories to educate and entertain.\u00a0 The ancient Greek constellations are more than mere curiosities, they are patterns in the sky relating to well-told stories: if you know the story, you can more easily remember the patterns in the stars, and can navigate home when you get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-outreach","tag-storytelling","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7Ni4X-1i","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drmeganargo.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drmeganargo.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drmeganargo.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drmeganargo.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drmeganargo.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/drmeganargo.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81,"href":"https:\/\/drmeganargo.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions\/81"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drmeganargo.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drmeganargo.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drmeganargo.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}