The Teachers who Mentor the Scientists--Talking with Advisors in the Notation in Science Communication

This spring, fourteen undergraduate scientists in PWR’s Notation in Science Communication (NSC) will be recognized by friends, faculty, and fellow scientists for doing work that puts them in a select class of researchers. Students who complete the NSC have spent countless hours polishing a portfolio of their accomplishments in communicating research to a diverse range of audiences, from non-experts to specialists in their fields. Each student curates a portfolio of their articles, podcasts, field studies, websites — a full sweep of projects built to engage audiences in the wonders of science. Throughout their time in the NSC, a passionate group of Stanford teachers has been with them in their process. Each NSC participant works with two teachers as advisors, one from PWR and one from their discipline. Their advisors, in partnership with the NSC Coordinator Dr. Emily Polk, guide and review an archive not only to help them show their best work, but to show fellow scientists — and themselves— what they learned along the way. 

Dr. Shay Brawn (PWR),  who has worked with NSC students since 2015, notes how these portfolios represent a significant shift in a student’s understanding of their own accomplishments. The challenge of selecting from a number of projects and writing about how they represent a learning process results in something of an inflection point in the ways they think about their own education. Dr. Sarah Pittock (also PWR), who has taught in NSC since 2016, describes the excitement of seeing a student's development across many drafts, from a tentative, early brainstorm for one of her PWR electives to all that appears in the polished final portfolio.

As writing teachers and scholars of rhetoric, Brawn and Pittock mentor students in stepping back to look at their portfolios from the standpoint of an outsider. Students must put themselves in the position of someone reading the portfolio, asking questions an employer or potential colleague might ask:  What am I learning about you by seeing your work? How do you reflect on your work?

Dr. Jennifer Stonaker was founding Coordinator of the NSC along with Russ Carpenter in 2013. Stonaker explains the evolution of the rubric used to assess the portfolios like this: “Initially we developed a holistic rubric that defined the main NSC ePortfolio features. We used this rubric successfully for three years, but as the NSC program grew, the student ePortfolios grew as well. The NSC students were so creative — they really challenged our conceptions of what the ePortfolio could look like — and a change in the tool we used to build the ePortfolio gave students even more design options. So, [PWR lecturer] Cassie Wright and I developed a more detailed analytic rubric that better reflected the work current students were doing in their ePortfolios. This rubric has received a few additional tweaks over the years, but it is still the basic rubric that we’re using today."

Dr. Katherine Preston, Associate Director of Human Biology, has worked as a disciplinary NSC advisor since 2014. She has found, “One of things that I love about the portfolios is their multidimensional character where the viewer's understanding of the set of work is enriched by the design, which works both explicitly and subconsciously on the viewer.”

In addition to mentoring students in developing their portfolios, PWR and disciplinary advisors work together as part of NSC portfolio evaluation teams to review portfolios of each graduating cohort. Reviewers use a set of objectives along with a rubric to determine if students have completed the requirement and to recognize exemplary portfolios. In some cases, disciplinary advisors might highlight specialized knowledge of the science and methodology, while PWR instructors will note how a portfolio tells a certain story of the student’s choices as a scholar and as a public scientist contributing to the community’s understanding of critical issues.  

Dr. Megan Formato, NSC Coordinator from 2018 to 2021, comments, “The NSC’s criteria are linked to the learning objectives in the NSC, so we want reviewers to read for evidence of that learning. What growth and learning do they see across the portfolio? How does the student reflect on their own learning? Without criteria and guidance folks tend to take the portfolios in as more of a ‘showcase portfolio’ focusing on how good or polished the artifacts are rather than a ‘learning portfolio’ that is assessed by showing evidence of learning and reflections on that.” For an in depth perspective on the NSC’s ePortfolios and the system that hosts them, check out Stonaker and Formato’s summer 2021 article in The AAEEBL ePortfolio Review, which they co-wrote with former PWR colleague Dr. Jenae Cohn.

In working together to assess portfolios, PWR teachers and teachers in the disciplines learn about ways to innovate their pedagogy. Preston of HumBio calls attention to that cross-pollination process: “I have been lucky to learn from Shay Brawn about the role of reflection in writing pedagogy, and I have seen how students can grow as writers and thinkers when they are given space to reflect on their own work.”

In a more recent  2023 article “Science Communication across Disciplines: Reflecting on STEM Identity Building through Notation in Science Communication ePortfolios” (Across the Disciplines) three teachers central to shaping Stanford’s NSC situate the required portofolio within the long-running scholarly conversation around portfolios in education design. Dr. Christine Alfano, Associate Director of PWR, Dr. Emily Polk, current Coordinator of the NSC, as well as founding Coordinator Stonaker, summarize the main components:

"We explicitly ask students to pair curation and reflection [...]  For each artifact, we first ask students to introduce the artifact to their audience of classmates and instructors. (Why did you create this artifact? What is the genre and/or mode? Who was the intended audience?) Then we ask them to reflect on the rhetorical choices they made in this artifact. (How effectively does the artifact meet the genre standard? How well did you adapt to your intended audience? What other rhetorical choices did you make?) We remind them that they do not have to cover every choice that they made but they should be specific. Finally, we ask them to reflect on their growth and the application of what they learned. (If you could redo the artifact, what would they do differently?)  [...]These scripted reflective moves help students learn to layer metacognitive processes into the practice of portfolio-building." (140)  

Developing this practice of reflection is a major learning objective for the portfolio. "Students tell me over and over again how much they value having the time to reflect on all of that they have done during their careers at Stanford," says Polk. "I don't think many of them have the intentional space to reflect on how their experiences have cultivated their expertise as science communicators or how that expertise will inform their lives outside of Stanford. They are really grateful for that time." This process is designed to reveal to them their strengths, as well as areas they need to add new efforts. In addition to pursuing recognition for their scientific achievements, students practice the art of learning how to learn, a valuable skill set that prepares them to adapt to rapidly shifting technologies and new applications of science.

Preston has seen how cultivating in HumBio students a meta-awareness of their practice gives them a sense of confidence and breadth. She has noticed a change in her teaching, which has brought rhetorical reasoning to students beyond NSC participants. She notes, “When students have the opportunity to communicate complex ideas to general audiences, they develop a better understanding of the norms that govern speaking and writing for specialist audiences.” As a result, “When students study the contrasts between these modes of communication, they observe the purposes of each, which can help them understand why certain norms exist in the first place.“ 

In some cases, advisors develop the unique perspective of getting to know NSC participants over the two or three years that most are in the program. This relationship helps advisors learn about what motivates individual students, and some expression of this motivation can help a portfolio take shape. Pittock uses the example of the student who sees herself as a researcher who does ocean science. The student might reveal to Pittock that she has “been into oceans from the time I was 12 years old.” That arc of interest could be significant to the reader of the portfolio. It answers that silent question readers are often asking: Who is this person behind these words, and what’s important to them? What’s more, Pittock adds, “They might have photographs from way back that show a keen observer at work.” Those old photographs may become part of the portfolio and help tell the story of how that person developed into a scientist.

Another layer of experience unique to NSC advisors forms around the discussions of portfolios with teachers across the disciplines. At the heart of PWR’s NSC program is an exploration of rhetoric and the beauty of the language choices we make. Working with portfolios cultivates a review process that leads to consensus, and teachers get to hear from and be heard by educators in other disciplines. To let Brawn have the final word, “It’s about the value of communication, about understanding what it means to be able to be a flexible writer who can write to different audiences. That conversation happens because the NSC is convening participants from across the university. That conversation in these spaces is one that I think is real growth for all of us who get to be involved.”