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Episode #125: Laura Lindenfeld and Valeri Lantz-Gefroh
169 Plays7 years ago
The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, hosted in the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University, empowers scientists and health professionals to communicate complex topics in clear, vivid, and engaging ways; leading to improved understanding by the public, media,...
The post Episode #125: Laura Lindenfeld and Valeri Lantz-Gefroh appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Science Communication with Laura and Valerie
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, we're going to talk about how to help scientists better communicate their work on a topic that is near and dear to my heart.
00:00:24
Speaker
Fortunately, there's actually a group of people who are interested in helping scientists better communicate their work. So I'm very excited to have Laura Lindenfeld and Valerie Lance Gefro from the Allen Alda Center for Communicating Science on the show. Laura, Valerie, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's nice to be here. I'm very excited to have you on the show. I feel like I missed
00:00:48
Speaker
the boat a little bit because I heard Alan Alda give an interview on Hidden Brain like two weeks ago. And then he talked about the center and I'm like, how have I not heard about you guys? And so now I'm really excited because you are all working with all the scientists and helping them communicate better. So I'm really excited to hear about the work that you're doing.
Roles and Techniques at the Alda Center
00:01:10
Speaker
So to start, maybe we can have you each introduce yourselves and your roles there at the center and
00:01:15
Speaker
Talk a little bit about how the center works and how you work with scientists. Yeah, I'm Laura Linenfeld. I'm the director of the center here at Stony Brook University. It's a fantastic experience. We have trained over 12,000 scientists and medical professionals in the US and around the globe. And the center has been around since 2009. I came to it two years ago. Val has been here a bit longer than I have. I'm an old geezer here at the old center.
00:01:46
Speaker
I am the improvisation program leader here at the All the Center and I was one of the faculty members working in the theater department in 2009 when Allen had this dream to help scientists
00:01:59
Speaker
to communicate more effectively by using improvisational theater techniques. And I was recruited to come help figure that out.
Inspiration from Alan Alda
00:02:07
Speaker
And we worked together on a very limited basis in the first year. But by 2011, the idea had caught fire. And I was brought on full time at that point to help Shepard
00:02:23
Speaker
I like to say my job is to turn Alan's dream into curriculum. That's what I've been privileged to do for the last number of years.
00:02:32
Speaker
working with scientists all over the country, anywhere from graduate students all the way up to senior researchers and people who talk to Congress. So it's been a really amazing ride that was launched because of Alan's dream. Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about that dream? I'll put a link to the book and he talks of course about where it came from, but might be nice to hear from you too.
00:02:57
Speaker
Yeah, sure. He had been doing Scientific American Frontiers for 11 seasons and during that time he had interviewed hundreds of scientists. And what he found in that experience was a real wonderful level of conversation that he felt with these people. He didn't
00:03:15
Speaker
And these were not planned interviews where everybody knew what was going to happen. They set Alan on a path of being able to really get to know these people. And if he didn't understand what they were doing, he was brutally honest about that. And they found ways of being able to communicate with him based on what he says he depends on his natural ignorance, which is just because Alan is so humble. But it really is true to some degree is that
00:03:43
Speaker
He really didn't go in having pre-planned anything. He went in to try to understand from an innocent point of view.
Improv for Better Communication
00:03:52
Speaker
Out of that, he just felt like this amazing kind of conversation and vividness and expressiveness emerged from the scientists in the way that they were communicating.
00:04:04
Speaker
And he really wanted to capitalize on that and he thought, if I'm not around asking these questions, how can we help scientists to be able to do that without me, without me there pulling it out of them? And he thought back to his own life and what he realized was that the way that he knew how to do it as an actor was through improvisational theater training.
00:04:27
Speaker
And this is not the kind of improv that you would see on Saturday Night Live or whose line it is in any way. That's a very specific style of improv. The kind of improv that we use is really about connecting and listening. And it's from the foundation of Viola Spolin's work. So that's sort of loosely how this whole thing started.
00:04:49
Speaker
Can you give us a sense of some of the improv activities you do? I would guess that most people listening to the show are thinking whose line is it anyway? It's like their idea, right? But from the descriptions in the book, I get the sense as a quite different environment.
00:05:03
Speaker
It is a different environment because in much of improv now that you think about, it's about building a narrative or building to a joke. That's where you're headed with a lot of those shows.
00:05:19
Speaker
Which is you know sort of counter to the discipline of improv that's not what improv is necessarily about but that's sort of the result of a lot of improv. And what we do are exercises that help you really become in contact with with your fellow player and.
00:05:37
Speaker
That can be done with really simple things like listening exercises, exercises that deal with body language, exercises that deal with finding your own center and passion in how you speak. Improv really is only one corner of this.
00:05:54
Speaker
We have three pillars, improvisation and story and message design, and Laura is the message design side of this. We're the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of curriculum. I always claim to be the chocolate, but... I'm lying. I'm lying with the peanut butter as long as the chocolate's there. Really, what this is about, it's about how do you...
00:06:19
Speaker
genuinely bring yourself to a connection as a scientist with other human beings and share the wonder, the joy, the importance of your work in ways that really land with those audiences, that they will remember them. People come to their daily lives with experiences that shape who they are and what they know, and we operate from those positionalities. And what's so wonderful about the method that we use is it takes these improvisational
00:06:47
Speaker
theater experiences and bridges them with helping people to strategize. How do I know more about who my audience is? What they might care about? How can we even start a conversation and move something forward that's different than if I just talk about my work and the tired old way I've always talked about it and I had one scientist tell me I find myself boring myself. It's not a good
00:07:14
Speaker
No, it's really not.
Empathy and Audience Awareness in Science Communication
00:07:17
Speaker
So when you work with a group or a university, I mean, the people are coming in for a reason, but are they, do you find them to be hesitant? Do you find them to sort of be dismissive in some ways that this is not the way science has been done and that's not the way we're going to do it? Or like, do you need a big icebreaker to get them engaged?
00:07:35
Speaker
A good icebreaker always helps, but I will say that from the time we started to now, there's been a radical change in the culture and the acceptance of why we're doing this. When we first started, we had, I'm not going to say a lot of pushback, but there was significant reason for us to justify what we were doing there at the beginning of every workshop.
00:08:02
Speaker
And now we really touch on it, but we basically ask them what their challenges are. And it's pretty clear why they're there and what they feel like they need our help doing. And it's coming from them now. So that, to me, seems like a really radical change. You always have your exceptions to that, but there's a cultural shift that's happened.
00:08:26
Speaker
I think there's been a tide change. And I feel this when we've done some work internationally. And depending on where we've gone, that tide ship hasn't happened in other countries to the same degree that it has here. I feel like there's been a lot of national conversations in the US and increased attention from foundations, from National Science Foundation, other organizations.
00:08:50
Speaker
to look at communication as a critical piece of what it means to be a scientist. And also the understanding that a lot of science is done in teams across disciplines. We have to be able to work together within science to even be able to address some of the complex and challenging questions that we have to answer, not just for science, but for society.
00:09:14
Speaker
So when the folks that you're working with, when they are thinking about how to improve their communication, are they primarily thinking about
00:09:21
Speaker
their writing skills, when they present in front of a group of scientists at a seminar or conference, are they thinking about their teaching? Are they thinking about all of it? All of the above. And I think what's so fascinating to us, our model of training is very much based in the idea that an interpersonal relationship is the starting point for any kind of communication. So we train people, a lot of our exercises are done in pairs and with peer feedback.
00:09:49
Speaker
We're sitting here talking to you. I've never seen you. I'm imagining what it's like to be in your shoes and what might be helpful to your listeners as we talk with you. I'm really trying to think about what would be interesting and important for us to share that people would benefit from in a way that's probably here on this show entertaining and interesting at the same time.
00:10:11
Speaker
It's taking that ethos of who is the person or the audience you want to connect with and where are they at so that you can reach them. People come to us for all kinds of writing. They want to write better grants. They want to write better papers. They want to nail a donor gift. They're having trouble talking to their family at Thanksgiving. That's a big one. My mother says, what is it you do again?
00:10:37
Speaker
So all of the above, the concept of communication as connection, as relational, transcends any particular type of interaction.
00:10:49
Speaker
Yeah, well all that motivates his entire book and also that interview on Hidden Brain with this concept of empathy. So and that's exactly what you're talking about. So does that require when you are teaching scientists how to communicate better, how you think about how they should think of empathy in this particular context?
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah, bingo. We actually had a participant in a workshop this summer. I found this line so touching. We went around at the end. It was a two-day really intensive workshop. And I asked people, what are you going to take away from this experience? And this particular post-doc young woman said, I learned that I need to listen in order to be heard.
00:11:33
Speaker
I thought that was so powerful. What she was saying was, I have to be empathic with the people I'm trying to connect with if I want them to listen to me.
00:11:43
Speaker
I think that's the root of everything we do.
Adapting Communication Strategies for Scientists
00:11:46
Speaker
It's interesting to me because I've also heard when I teach either presentation skills or data visualization, the thing that I hear a lot is, well, do I want my work to be that different than my peers? And part of this is cultural in different science communities of I don't want to rock the boat. I don't want to be too far away from the average.
00:12:11
Speaker
I mean clearly people are coming to you with the goal of being different but how do you help them get over this? This is the way science has always been done. We write 35 page PDF papers. We give presentations with 45 bullet points on them. How's that working for you, John? Yeah, exactly.
00:12:31
Speaker
I think the most important thing to distinguish here is that every audience is different. There are places where that is a cultural imperative for your professionalism, for your respect among your peers, even your understanding from your peers. That is an appropriate way to communicate with some audiences. The problem is that that's not the appropriate way to communicate with many audiences.
00:12:59
Speaker
And trying to translate 45 bullet points to Thanksgiving dinner is probably not going to work out so well. Nor is it going to work out well in speaking to Congress or funders or school groups or fill in the blank, right? You have to look at not what you want to say, but where your audience is and how you can build on that information to make the conversation go forward.
00:13:24
Speaker
This is one of the big rules of improvisation. It's called the rule of yes and, which is yes, I'm accepting the truth of this scene. This is the offer of my scene partner and my job is to move that scene forward. So this is about saying yes to these are the people that I'm talking to. I happen to be talking to a group of people who believe X and I can't just say no to that.
00:13:50
Speaker
even if our opinions are different, I have to accept that this is the room that I'm in and figure out a strategy to still make that scene or that conversation go forward in a positive way. And sometimes that literally means leaving a conversation with mutual respect. It doesn't always mean boiling the ocean.
00:14:11
Speaker
The other part of that is probably worth mentioning here. The second major rule is make your partner look good. And that means if you're talking to somebody who doesn't see eye to eye with you on something, your job in that moment is to say yes and doesn't mean you agree with all the tenets of their belief system.
00:14:29
Speaker
But you say yes to the scene. You make it go forward and you make them feel good, which to me is the root of empathy. You make them feel validated. You don't humiliate them in their belief system or the scene is going to stop. I think a lot of the intrinsic motivation we see when we go into rooms, the first thing we do is we say, why are you here? Why does communication matter for science? Why does it matter for your work?
00:14:55
Speaker
And we hear people say, I'm really concerned about federal funding for science. I'm really concerned around how the public sees and values science. And if we continue to think of, oh, there comes some bells. Can you hear them? I'm not just chiming in. If we continue to think of, I can only write and talk about my science in the way that my peers will see it, we're not going to reach over those
00:15:20
Speaker
gaps to other people in society. I like to think of what we do as helping people become bi or multilingual. It's not about abandoning the language you use in your own work. It's about finding bridges and connections so that you can create that better flow of information and trust. I think trust is a critical part of this whole equation. When it comes to trust,
00:15:48
Speaker
From a presenter point of view, you're trying to build trust with an audience, whoever that audience may be. You're trying to build trust with your students or with your colleagues. So how do you try to get participants in the workshops to create that atmosphere of trust between whatever groups they're working with?
00:16:07
Speaker
We could give a few examples of how we will play this. A lot of it's based in really traditional improvisational theater exercises like mirroring. When you mirror someone, Val, you talk about this better than I do. Right. Yeah, John, are you familiar with the mirror exercise where the two people face each other and one person leads movement and the other person has to mirror it? Are you familiar with that?
00:16:30
Speaker
Only from alan's book but yeah right so this is just sort of a very very basic kind of an improv exercise but the idea is is that you you begin one person leads and the other follows and then you switch off who's leading and it goes back and forth a number of times until by the end of the exercise which is maybe five minutes and both participants are leading and both are following and what ends up emerging out of that is a recognition that
00:17:00
Speaker
That leadership is not a one way street leadership is as much about letting go and letting the other person take over for a little bit so you know where you are it's very very democratic in that way it's not just about me it's about us.
From Data Transfer to Relationship Building
00:17:17
Speaker
You can't plan that. That's something that happens in the moment. And so part of what we work on with improv and message design is just like an actor needs a script or some sort of a structure, at least, of how an improv is going to go before they walk out on stage, a scientist needs a strategy. They need to understand who their audience is, what their goal is, and some sort of general ideas of ways that they can make connections.
00:17:46
Speaker
They need to know and understand that before they go into any kind of a conversation that has importance behind it. But then they also need to have the flexibility and the spontaneity to be able to trust in that strategy and find out what's actually right in front of them so that they know where to adjust, where to be flexible, and where to let the other person lead for a minute so you can find out exactly where the points of intersection are.
00:18:14
Speaker
I don't know if that explains it well enough, but that's sort of an idea of it's a philosophical change more than anything that it's about us. It seems like it's back to this idea of empathy. Like you mentioned earlier, thinking about how the audience is trying to receive the information as opposed to kind of just spouting out information, hoping it's grabbed out of the ether.
00:18:36
Speaker
One of the things we asked participants, when you came into this workshop, we asked them, I used to think communication was, now I think it is. And we typically hear, I don't think there's a workshop we've done that we haven't heard this. I used to think communication was transferring information. I have like this perfect thing in my head and you're going to get it.
00:18:56
Speaker
Now, I think it's about relationships and connections and trust. It's about a world we shape together where we're never going to have that perfect transfer of information.
00:19:09
Speaker
This is hard work, right? I mean, this is not something that is done without some training and some process because we're busy people. We want to get the message out. We want everybody to think the way that we think, but that's just not the way the world works. And so it's sort of an introduction to a philosophical understanding of what communication is. And then it requires practice, practice, practice, practice, practice.
00:19:39
Speaker
That's the truth of it. For anybody out there who meditates, for me, I meditate every day because it reminds me to be present, to slow down, and listen. I recently heard this acronym. One of my colleagues posted this online.
00:19:58
Speaker
Why am I talking? Why am I talking? What is the relationship right now? Maybe I just need to stop talking and listen. And so I have to fill the space rather than really say something that contributes to a meaningful growth of information exchange and relationship building. So if you two ran the educational system of the world, let's just say it.
00:20:26
Speaker
You do, but let's just say you were, you know, Queens of from K up, you know, because you just mentioned that this requires a lot of practice and a lot of work. It's not something that we're not naturally born with necessarily, you know, it takes time. So that to me says, well, then we should be working on these skills.
00:20:47
Speaker
from younger ages. So if you were to design a curriculum starting at kindergarten all the way through, and let's just say just for scientists, let's just say, what would you add to the core curriculum as people are going through their biology classes and their chemistry and their economics? Like what would be a necessary part of that curriculum? The first thing that I would add
00:21:10
Speaker
is that people learn through experience. They don't learn because you put up a PowerPoint slide and point a little light pointer at it and go through data. That's not how we learn. We learn by experience. By the way, Alan has this wonderful, wonderful quote. I don't know who he got it from, but I'm going to attribute it to him right here.
00:21:31
Speaker
Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts, absolutely. What it means is we don't just pour information into people and it sticks.
Reconnecting Passion in Scientific Communication
00:21:39
Speaker
We're engaging whole people. We are feeling beings who also think rather than thinking beings who also feel. And I think if we approach the educational system that way, regardless of subject area, people have to experience and then acknowledge that they've experienced and that then transforms into knowledge.
00:22:00
Speaker
Science is so creative and imaginative and building curiosity I think is a thing that gets hammered out through textbook learning and I think it's
00:22:14
Speaker
really unfortunate. I've watched the path of both of my children through the educational system and really wished that this was done in a much more experiential creative way because the scientists that we work with on the graduate level and beyond are doing all of that in their day-to-day lives of finding the answers to things
00:22:38
Speaker
because of their doing it. I wish the educational system could shift in that direction because the bottom line is, regardless of what field you're going into, the thing we're all going to need going forward is creativity. We have no idea where this job market or the world is headed. Without that, we've got to build that, I think.
00:23:02
Speaker
and embrace that, embrace what's coming at you and say, oh, let's think about it this way. One of the most gratifying things for me, Val, I think I've heard you talk about this too. Certainly we hear about people, they go out, they do things they wouldn't have done before or after they do a workshop with us. One of the most gratifying things for me, and this sounds small, but I think it's actually where it's at, is we'll hear back from participants in the workshops. You helped me rediscover my passion for my work.
00:23:31
Speaker
You helped me tap back into why I did this in the first place and why I care. That's just a treasure trove. And that's really the place to speak from as a communicator, is that place of real passion and a need to get the word out about something that you actually care about.
00:23:50
Speaker
Right. What happens afterwards? So you work with the group and they go back to their day-to-day lives. It sounds like many of the people you work with are
00:24:02
Speaker
you know, transformed at their core. But do you find, do most of the people experience that transformation and continue the lessons they learned in the workshop? Or do they end up, do you see them sliding back into the old ways of not thinking about their audience? One of the reasons I really wanted to come direct this center is to bring social science research into the center that could help us understand what is changing in people, what sticks,
00:24:32
Speaker
What do we need to do better? And what kind of learning platforms and engagement opportunities do we need to help create on our own or in partnership with other organizations moving forward? So I'd love to be able to answer comprehensively what we see happening. We're working on that right now. And with 12,000 people, there's a lot of change I think that's going on there that we can't even tell you. We could share a couple of cool stories.
00:24:59
Speaker
examples where I think we've seen really powerful kinds of changes in people's confidence and their willingness to engage and do things differently than they would have before. You want to hear a few? Yeah, no, that'd be great. I'd love to.
00:25:15
Speaker
I'm thinking about a story about a scientist who deals in courtrooms, who deals with fires and testifies. This particular scientist was on her way to meet with a group of judges and lawyers. Usually in her world, she would put together a PowerPoint and she clicked through it and there would be lots of slides.
00:25:39
Speaker
Forget it. I'm not gonna do it that way and she said she sat on the train she told me this story and She just thought about what what do I really think this group is able to hear is willing to hear?
00:25:54
Speaker
And I want for them to remember, she started with what they should understand rather than what she wanted to say. She made herself a few notes and she really thought about the culture of the space she was walking into and that a PowerPoint wouldn't be appropriate. And she came in and she relied on her knowledge and experience, which is profound and deep. So it's not like she's walking in cold with no experience. She trusted herself and the interaction went beautifully.
00:26:22
Speaker
They came to her afterwards and talked about how powerful they thought the interaction was.
00:26:28
Speaker
This is really important if you think about, you know, let's take a step back from this. If she's a more trusted person in the courtroom, to lawyers, to judges, that's going to serve the interest of justice when we make decisions in courtrooms based on science. So this isn't just about some scientist somewhere in the world feeling a little bit more confident. It's about changing whole types of relationships between science and the different areas, industries, societal nexus with which we
00:26:57
Speaker
bring science to the table.
Strategizing and Authentic Communication
00:26:59
Speaker
What I also love about that story is that she relied on her expertise and her knowledge, whereas I feel like a lot of people rely on the slides and they forget that they're the expert, right? And they put up these terrible slides that really end up doing them a disservice when maybe they would just be better off having a conversation because they are the expert. Yeah. Here's a different one, slightly different one. This has to do with communities that often stand in
00:27:25
Speaker
contrast against each other and even fight and this has to do with fishing communities on on the east coast this was a workshop this is a number of years ago the all the center did this workshop i was there and there's been some pretty heated debate around the use of space is on the coast.
00:27:45
Speaker
Who gets to do what? Who gets to fish where? If you're putting in renewable energy, you know, like turbines, tidal turbines or offshore or nearshore wind energy, how's that going to affect the fishing populations? How's that going to affect how I make my livelihood depending on which group? So this can get really, really heated coastal spatial planning.
00:28:09
Speaker
And this particular group had been involved with conversations around the use of this coastal space for a while. And it hadn't moved. It was entrenched. People were fighting. And they walked out of the workshop. They came back the next day and they said, we tried it a little differently. We listened. And what we found out is even the people who are interested in the
00:28:33
Speaker
Energy, deployment, they fish. And we had something in common where we could step back from the strife and have a different kind of conversation that moved us forward. It was a beautiful yes end and make your partner look good that happened in that room. And it changed the relationship. Probably didn't solve everything, but it got them to the next step.
00:28:55
Speaker
Right? Really interesting. Let me ask one final question before we wrap up. So let's do this sort of clickbaity thing. And let me ask, what are the top three things scientists can do better when they communicate their research in any of the different mediums that they do so? We're not in the business of giving tips. No.
00:29:19
Speaker
I don't like tips. Tips is like a checklist. Like, did you make eye contact? Check. Did you speak briefly and succinctly? Check. But if your heart's not at it, forget about it. Nobody believes it. They believe real, living, breathing, honest, genuine human beings. So the big thing is connect. Connect with your audience. That's your responsibility.
00:29:42
Speaker
If you're leading with information, if you're the leader in that mirror exercise, your job is to make sure they can follow. It's so profound. So everything emanates from that. If it's about connection, then you have to know that audience. You have to understand who they are, what they care about.
00:30:01
Speaker
And not in a manipulative way, in a genuine way. So there has to be an ethos of care. This isn't about persuading people to do something that they don't want to do. It's about finding compulsive intersection where we can make the whole scenes of our lives move forward collectively and make better decisions. So it's about listening. It's about empathy, connection, knowledge about who they are.
00:30:26
Speaker
thinking about who you are and what you really care about most and maybe being able to ask yourself, why am I talking? Do I really need to get through these 15 points? Do these people really care? Or should I stop and listen?
00:30:45
Speaker
What do you think, Val? Yeah, what she said. Yeah, that was great. So I want to channel what I think are what maybe some listeners would think of when they hear that and certainly things that I've heard, which is people want a practical
00:31:02
Speaker
answer to that question. So how do they get to know their audience? Well, I'm going to let you answer it. I have my own thoughts, but they walk into a room to give their lunchtime seminar or they've been invited to such and such university to give a talk. How do they practically do that? You know, put themselves in someone else's shoes or get to know that audience so that they can do a better job of communicating. First of all, we're talking here about scientists.
00:31:27
Speaker
which means they're researchers, so you do some research. You don't just walk into a room cold. You figure out, I'm going to the Kiwanis Club.
00:31:34
Speaker
I could talk to someone who's gone to the Wallace Club and talked before and said, how was your experience? Were they all texting? Were they looking at you? Were they excited? What kinds of questions did they have? You can look at their website. If you're going on radio or television, you can figure out who's the audience who follows this show. What do they care about? So you have to do some homework. Once you're in the room, let's say you wind up in the room. So here we are in the room with you. And we've never met you before.
00:32:00
Speaker
What does the improv specialist say, Val? Ask a question and listen to the answer. I mean, it really is about letting that other person inform you. I think a lot of times we ask questions to be able to give the answers. And I think one of the profound differences about the philosophy of improv is that you're actually asking to hear. And I think that that's a very, very different phenomenon. And it's so freeing. You can find
00:32:30
Speaker
so much information in a short period of time if you actually stop yourself and listen. I worked with the university president once. This is such a great story. Who had done work in Louisiana, like in Cancer Alley, and he was supposed to go to talk to a group of stakeholders and he was all prepared, dressed in a suit, had his tie on, and he walks in the room and it's a bunch of third graders.
00:32:53
Speaker
So yeah, sometimes your audience can surprise you and you say, alright, I've just got to pivot. I just thought that was such a cute story.
00:33:04
Speaker
add. It's really this issue. I think one of the biggest things people walk away with when they do an Alda training is that they've learned how to strategize so that they know how to do some homework. We teach them that. We give them a worksheet. We make them apply it so they learn by doing because we practice what we preach. We want you to experience and anchor your knowledge
00:33:27
Speaker
Otherwise, it's just words on some page that you're not really feeling. We remember because we feel, because we've experienced. And then we put them through exercises where they get to try this out and it's safe. And they get to see how it lands and get feedback about how it does or doesn't work. And then they get to try it again.
Alda Center Programs and Resources
00:33:46
Speaker
So for people or groups or universities or organizations who are interested in training or working with you all, what's the best way for them to get in touch? The best way is through our website aldocenter.org and there's a link to workshops and then you fill out a form that would go to the workshop supervisor and then, you know, this is all very personal. It's not like a
00:34:11
Speaker
one stop shopping like click the box oh i want this thing there's a conversation that happens to really identify what the needs are of any particular organization and and be able to cater the appropriate workshop to that so it's an interaction that that would happen but the website is the first step.
00:34:29
Speaker
OK, so it's not a shopping cart of which improv activities I want to do. No. Sometimes we, depending on the situation, we can even customize. The other thing I'll say is we work across different types of institutions. We work with a lot of universities, government, nonprofits, labs, corporations. There's science happening all over the place, STEM, and really STEM more broadly, not just technology, engineering, and math.
00:34:56
Speaker
We're working on some new curricula that are going to be diffused next year sometime. We're looking at trainings to support women in the STEM workforce specifically. We're looking at how do you communicate topics like climate change to different audiences. That's a preview of a few things we're working on along with more online learning opportunities to follow up and continue to engage so you can practice what you've learned in an experiential workshop.
00:35:24
Speaker
That's great. Well, I'll put the links to everything we've talked about, including obviously the All the Center website so people can check it out. So this has been great. Laura, Valerie, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been really, really interesting.
00:35:37
Speaker
It was great to be here, John. Yeah, thank you. And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Please do check out the various links. I really enjoyed Alda's book. There's a link to that on the show and the Hidden Brain interview with him, which is kind of like the Cliff's Notes version of the book. I'll also put a link to that. And of course to the Alda Center, should you have questions. So thanks again for tuning in. Until next time, this has been the Policy Vis podcast. Thanks so much for listening.