Date
25 May 2020
—
25 Jun 2020
Location
Online
Target Group
Students of all levels
Host
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany & Université Paris-Saclay, France
About the Course
Writing Global Health is a virtual workshop series that aims to narrate, communicate and disseminate global health science and research on a global scale. We build this scale with our workshop participants through both a sensitization towards multiple modes and media and a critical assessment of what works, when, and where. Drawing on research and scientific exchanges within the EUGLOH project, we ground this workshop in the core literary traditions of storytelling and creative writing, extending these ideas into the realm of scientific popularization. We welcome projects of all sizes and ambitions as we explore possibilities of communicating your work within EUGLOH (and your individual research on global health) to a broader public.
Objectives
The goal is to enable students to create informative material in various forms and for different media, give them the skills to assess the potential of this material, and to disseminate information about a project in different forms on appropriate channels.
-
Programme
Phase 1: Preparatory Phase: Check-in-Session: login, explore the platforms [Zoom and Moodle]
Phase 2: Kick-off Meeting: online plenary session followed by breakout sessions in smaller groups
- Online collaborative space
- Who am I as a scientific writer? (input + 1-minute individual writing task)
- Who is my audience? (word cloud + discussion/input)
- What is scientific storytelling? (input)
- The role of style in writing, from ‘word dropping’ to making meaning (input)
Phase 3: Popularization exercise: Explain your current research (or if you do not have any project: explain some content of a lecture/course you took) to a six-year-old in max. two minutes (audio/video recording) + compare your explanation individually with your writing/your course material.
Phase 4: Choose one individual and one group format (individual online work, peer feedback (from your fellow students and our tutors), refine your work, hand it in and get overall feedback on it)
4.1 (individual) Press Release / Social Media
4.2 (in small groups) Flyer
4.3 (in small groups) Podcast / Interview
4.4 (individual) Creative text (Haiku, Joke, Poem, Short story, Song)Phase 5: Online vernissage of each one’s favorite creative work generated in Phase 4 on Zoom (5 minutes per person or group)
Phase 6: Develop a dissemination strategy and put your videos, podcasts, flyers, press releases, social media posts online (with a schedule)
Phase 7: Test-drive these skills in your real lives: pitch your next (fictive or real) research question to each other in pairs! Discuss in the forum (with the help of a tutor) how these exercises benefited your academic and non-academic writing and presentation skills!
Phase 8: Evaluate the course and feedback. [Evaluation via an online questionnaire].
Date Phase May 25 1: Preparatory Phase (online, group) May 28 2: Kick-off Meeting (online video conference, small groups) June 4 3: Popularization exercise (audio/video) 4: Individual online work plus handing in and feedback on it
(Students choose one individual and one group format)June 8 - June 11 4.1 (individual) Press Release / Social Media June 8 - June 11 4.2 (individual) Creative text June 15 - June 18 4.3 (in small groups) Flyer June 15 - June 18 4.4 (in small groups) Podcast / Interview June 22 5: Online presentation of favorite element From June 25 6: Dissemination: go online June 25 7: Application of new skills Around July 14 8: Evaluation We've planned asynchronous and synchronous elements. The times (CET) and dates of our live meetings are the following:
- May 25: 14-15h
- May 28: 14-18h
- June 4: 14-15h
- June 8: 14-15h
- June 15: 14-15h
- June 22: tbd (individual presentations)
- June 25: 14-16h
-
Registration
Please follow the application procedure given on this website.
10 Participants from each EUGLOH partner university can take part.
The registration deadline is 18 May 2020.
For questions, please reach out to schreibzentrum@lrz.uni-muenchen.de.
-
Report
Workshop facilitators and structure: The virtual workshop series “Writing Global Health” was designed by Dr. Daniel Graziadei (Munich) and Divya Madhavan Brochier (Paris). The first edition of this workshop took place between May 25 and June 25, 2020, with the help of two Canadian tutors from LMU Munich. The workshop series aimed to train undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students to narrate, communicate, and disseminate global health science and research to a broader public. The workshop was structured in 8 phases, all of which were fully completed. Out of 52 initial candidates, 29 participants completed the course successfully (LMU 13 out of 14; Centrale Supélec Paris 1 out of 1; University of Porto 11 out of 27; Szeged University 2 out of 6; Lund University 2 out of 4).
Live sessions: Participants joined our synchronous sessions on Mondays and Thursdays and learned about different types of scientific writing, scientific and popular audiences, scientific storytelling, and style in writing. All participants received checklists and strategical input in order to further their potential to correct their writing.
Assignments and feedback: All participants had to hand in and work on the feedback they received on their asynchronous assignments. All participants had to complete a first popularisation task to explain their current research to a six-year-old in two minutes. In the next phase (phase 4.1-4.2), the participants had to choose between two popularisation tasks: writing either an original text or a press release. The text should mirror either their research or content from their studies. For our group assignment (phase 4.3-4.4), six groups were formed. In the course of this assignment, three flyers (on lessons learned from earlier pandemics, on infection control, on sustainability in the laboratory) and three podcasts (on digital health, on COVID 19, on sharks) were produced. In the following (phase 5-6), we had a live vernissage of their favorite productions and discussed potential forms of dissemination. In order to make the most of their new competencies, all participants had to think of the further application of the newly acquired popularisation skills. The direct feedback and the online evaluation confirmed that the workshop was highly useful for most of the group, which became already visible in the increasing quality of the assignments.
Further editions: Given the successful launch of Writing Global Health, we hope to run a second edition in the autumn of 2020.