Recovery from Being Such a Serious Scientist

Igniting Your Research Communication Style Through Improvisational Forms

written by Ruth Schowalter, Certified InterPlay Leader

"I'm a recovering serious person!"

When I offer the above statement to a room full of scientists and their college students at the beginning of a workshop, they don't know how to react. Is that a good or a bad thing? Maybe they are much too serious to know how to respond.

The goal of my workshop is to offer these scientists recovery from being too serious. But why would researchers want to "recover" from the high seriousness that has served them so well in their investigations and the establishment of their careers as academics? 

Let's take a moment to affirm that we want our scientists to conduct their research and interpret their results with the utmost concentration using all of their acquired knowledge and experience. Scientists must be objective when they are at work. They must be "serious" with a capital "S."

However, when it is time to communicate their research results to colleagues, students, and the general public, I suggest that they will be more effective if they shift the direction of their "emotional" compass. Why not navigate from the boundaries of the objective realm of collective science, I suggest, to inhabiting the subjective realm of individual self?

Connecting with listeners - whether it be an audience of one, five, thirty, or hundreds - requires a different tool kit than the "doing" of science. One strategy academics can use to develop audience rapport is to allow their personalities to emerge in their discussions, lectures, and presentations. Such unleashing can be fun and rewarding as researchers leave the objectivity of their intellectual investigations and step into a more dynamic and "less serious" way of being. 

It was with this goal in mind that I offered the micro-workshop (yikes - only 20 minutes!), "Recovery from Being Such a Serious Scientist: Igniting Your Research Communication Style Through Improvisational Forms," at the 2018 Southeastern Evolutionary Perspectives Society conference. Set in Savannah, Georgia at the Coastal Georgia Center, we had participants from as far as New York and Louisiana, but with most coming from Alabama and Georgia.

Along with my paleontologist husband, Tony Martin, who is my collaborator for these kinds of science-communication workshops, I engaged a seminar room full of professors and their students into "shaking" their bodies awake after a morning full of talks. Asking them to breathe in with a focused breath and breathe out with an articulated sigh (3x's), I gently led them into accessing their physicality. Next, I offered them an incremental step away from "high seriousness." 

WARMING UP THE AUDIENCE. Ruth Schowalter and Tony Martin begin their improvisational workshop by engaging the audience in a few exercises. (photo by John S. Mead)

I offered them the InterPlay tool of "easy focus," which combines a physical action with a different way of thinking. Participants are asked to grab the spot (the "focuser") between their eyebrows and to take that focuser by flinging it away while vocalizing a "wheee..." with the gesture. By enacting easy focus, everyone has given themselves permission to soften their intellectual gaze and judgment in order to relax, then see what might happen.

Yes! Not everyone in the room wants to leave their way of being a serious person. That is fine. But for those who have engaged in the "wheee of easy focus," they have opened themselves for some fun, for stepping into the unknown, and for self-discovery about themselves and the way they communicate.

Now, for the full disclosure. Two days before offering this 20-minute micro-workshop, Tony and I spent more than an hour with some volunteer administrators, researchers, educators and college students engaging them in three InterPlay performance forms: The Side-by-Side Story; Walk Stop Run with a Three-Sentence Story; and the Rotating Gesture Choir. Then these "volunteers  who had "experienced" the forms joined the novice volunteers on the day of the micro-performance. The photos below show the Thursday "playing" with the forms.

LEARNING THE FORMS INCREMENTALLY. On Thursday, two days before the improvisational workshop,  volunteers were acquainted with the form, "Side-by-Side Story, " incremental step by incremental step. (photos by Ruth Schowalter)

WALK STOP RUN WITH A THREE-SENTENCE STORY. Tony demonstrates how participants take the "spotlight" during Walk Stop Run to tell their three-sentence story on a topic given by the audience. (photos by Ruth Schowalter)

ROTATING GESTURE CHOIR. One participant, a University of Alabama college student, speaks on the topic of "mutation" while the people behind her mirror her gestures. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

DISCOVERING THEY COULD BREAK THE RULES. Energy levels rose among the participants when one speaker took the risk of leaving the stage and leading their followers into the audience space. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

Tony and I achieved our workshop goal! We succeeded in sparking the scientists' creativity in the act of expressing ideas. The volunteer performers moved in an enthusiastic and embodied way through two of the three improvisational forms ( Walk Stop Run and Side-by-Side Story). Time limitations, however, prevented us from performing the Rotating Gesture Choir.

Yet during our workshop, I noticed keen interest in the audience. Researchers who instruct college students were taking notes. Afterwards, two professors informed me they were going to try one or more of these InterPlay forms in their classrooms immediately in the upcoming week.

TAKING THE SPOTLIGHT TO SPEAK ON THE TOPIC OF "PLASTICITY." (photo by Tony Martin)

TELLING A SIDE-BY-SIDE STORY ON THE TOPIC OF "FITNESS." (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

On another front, one undergraduate college student - who had participated in the "training" of the InterPlay forms the day before and then performed in the micro-workshop - expressed surprise and wonder at the way she had stretched her abilities to express herself from the start (on Thursday) to the finish (Saturday). Her positive experience does not surprise me.

I know that participants during a longer experimental, kinesthetic, nonjudgmental workshop like this will experience an expanded sense of themselves because they are given the opportunity to flex their creative muscles and to play. 

Perhaps, the recovery process has begun for some of these serious scientists when it comes to communicating their science. Who knows? I've been invited back for the 2019 SEEPS conference. So stay tuned!

Some of the key concepts in my instructional methodology which I use to guide my workshops grounded in InterPlay include the following:

EXPERIENTIAL--Participants learn from doing.
KINESTHETIC--Movement engages participants in experiencing a fuller sense of self.
NONJUDGMENTAL--Risk-taking and making mistakes are encouraged to lead to discovery.
REFLECTIVE--When participants notice what they are feeling and thinking, it assists them in the integration of new knowledge. 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Thanks to my amazing collaborator, Tony Martin, who is one of the least serious science communicators I know! He is effective, and his audiences have fun learning what he has to offer. I appreciate the enthusiastic participation of the highly credentialed John S. Mead, an amazing middle school educator from Texas, who was new to InterPlay but took to it like a fish to water. Many thanks to Christopher Dana Lynn, who is such a joyful creative professor and understands the value of creativity and movement in the classroom. His participation and that of his students made the Thursday educators' workshop a success. I also want to give a shout out to Amanda Glaze, who "trained" on Thursday to perform all three InterPlay forms and succeeded in flexing her creative muscles. Finally, thanks to Phil Porter and Cynthia Winton-Henry for InterPlay and having the vision to see how it can be applied to education.