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Speak from your heart
Dr Erik Brogt
University Centre for Teaching and Learning,University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
Two questions arise when trying to communicate astronomy, or any other field for that matter, to the general public. Who is your audience, and what is the purpose of the communication? In general, your audience will consist of non-experts in astronomy. That brings us to the following considerations.
As experts in our fields we are warped by our training. Psychological and educational research has demonstrated that experts think fundamentally differently about the material than non-experts do. What may seem trivial steps to us as professional astronomers may be a giant leap to people who do not do astronomy for a living.
Consider for example the following statement:
In the HR diagram, the big, short-lived blue stars are found at the top left. Therefore, we can use main sequence fitting to determine the age of the stellar population.
For an astronomer, this is not too difficult to follow. However, when you take a look at the knowledge required to follow the logic, you'll find you need Wien's Law, the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, the mass-luminosity relation, the main sequence life time of stars as a function of mass, as well as the tacit assumptions that we are dealing with a single burst stellar population and that all the stars are equally distant from Earth, to tie all the pieces together.
It cannot be assumed that a member of the public at large will be able to follow this line of reasoning. It is only easy for us because most of us have been in the field for a while. Hence, it is necessary to take more time to spell things out clearly, with more intermediate steps shown, than you would normally do when talking about astronomy with fellow astronomers.
Acknowledging and respecting the level of astronomy expertise in a general audience should also come out in the use of language. Phrases like "a very simple equation" or "it is easy to see that" can and will alienate an audience, as it is not so simple or easy for them, as they have not spent years and years studying and working with the concepts.
The last thing to keep in mind is that experts in a field have a much easier time digesting information, because they have an existing mental structure in which to file things. Non-experts have to deal with each individual piece of information as a separate entity. So what is a small amount of information to an expert can lead to information overload in a non-expert.
If you want to get your message across, pick one or two crucial take-away points and build your presentation around that.
Ask yourself the question: How do I want my audience to be different after I have communicated with them? This ties in with the second question noted above, regarding the purpose of the communication. What do you want your audience to be able to do, to know, or to feel at the end of the communication? Do they need to know something more about astronomy, do you want them to get an appreciation of what you or your group are doing, do you want to inspire them to pursue further study, or something else? There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, but they should determine how you think about the look and feel of your communication if you want it to be successful.
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