InterPlay with Ruth Schowalter

Have you ever thought about how you might embody the difference between weather and climate change? Do you know the difference? Well, we had tremendous fun playing around with those concepts at the InterPlay - Atlanta Science Festival 2018 workshop, “Communicating the Facts: More than a Feeling"  ( see the workshop description below ). Thanks to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s demonstration of “Weather versus Climate Change” on “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” (see this  video ), we invited pairs of people to play with this concept, with one person as climate change and the other as weather. The climate change partner was asked to choose a destination in the room and to walk to it in a fairly steady line, while the weather partner was given the task of moving (dancing?) erratically in front of or behind or around their climate change partner ( Yes, we played music ). Then we had the partners reverse their roles. In this way, each got to experience either the steadfastness of the cli...

InterPlay is an active, creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body Exploring Evolutionary Concepts in Community at the Atlanta Science Festival TRILOBITES GONE MAD!  Improvising trilobites in an InterPlay "Walk Stop Run," participants make eye contact before going into a "lean" or making contact with another trilobite. This photo was taken at the end of the activity after participants had been invited to create a "Trilobite Party." (photo by Ruth Schowalter) Written by Ruth Schowalter, certified InterPlay leader and educator   (Reposted from InterPlay Atlanta, March 2016) “Trilobite Eyes” was a comment one participant left on Facebook beneath the group photo of the  InterPlay   workshop my scientist husband and I facilitated on Sunday, March 20 for the  2016 Atlanta Science Festival . After all, we had done the activity, “Walk Stop Run,” adding “the lean” using “Trilobite Eyes,” to ask another person’s permission through eye co...

written by Ruth Schowalter, certified InterPlay leader     (reposted from InterPlay Atlanta, March 2016) “Everyone spread out and find a space in the room. Now, find another space in the room that you want to travel to. Put one foot in front of the other and take your time getting to that spot. Once you arrive at your destination, you may decide to go to somewhere else in the room.” I delivered these seemingly mysterious directions to a group of university students and professors who attended the collaborative workshop that my scientist husband, Tony Martin , and I gave at the  1st annual Southeastern Evolutionary Perspectives Society   (SEEPS) meeting, which was held at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, during Valentine’s weekend 2016. Titled “Improv-ing Your Teaching and Learning of Evolution,” we teased together evolutionary concepts with improvisational forms from  InterPlay so that scientists and scientists-in-training might experien...

InterPlay is an active, creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body.  SCIENTIFIC FACTS ARE REAL. Do you need support responding to "opinions" about scientific facts like climate change, pollution, and endangered species? Science is more than a feeling! Let's play around with making effective and respectful replies! InterPlay joins the Atlanta Science Festival on March 23, 2018. Ruth Schowalter, certified InterPlay leader, is offering a unique and fun way to communicate scientific facts in collaboration with two Atlanta scientists. "Communicating the Facts--More than a Feeling is 2-hour improvisational workshop, which gives participants (teens and adults) a chance to engage their kinesthetic imaginations and affirm just how successfully they can communicate scientific facts, while also providing the means for addressing false or misleading information. The main goal is to help participants develop proactive skills for communicating environme ntal scie...