Before discussing key methods and practices of science communicators, it is important to address two common concerns that were most prevalent in this abridged review of the literature: namely, struggles with the deficit model of communication and an emphasis on the role of risk in science communication.
The deficit model of knowledge is a cognitive banking approach to teaching that prioritizes the of filling knowledge gaps in a largely one-way flow of information (National Academy of Sciences, 2017; Reincke et al., 2020). In other words, information is the cure to ignorance (Simis et al., 2016). To provide audiences with correct scientific information is to successfully overwrite previously held incorrect scientific beliefs and consequently engender a more open mind towards science and scientific thinking. Or as Grant (2023, p. ) puts it, “It remains axiomatic in much scientific thinking and training that clearly communicated facts will lead to rational changes of behavior.” However, while many scholars discuss the flaws in such a model of science communication (Grant, 2023; National Academy of Sciences, 2017), it also continues to predominate science communication practices. This entrenchment of deficit approaches, despite its well-voiced problematics, may also reflect a paradigmatic-narrative divide – “epistemic priority for science and scientific information” (Grant, 2023, p. 5). Narrative modes, on the other hand, stand to be more resonant with audiences, but also risks embellishing information beyond the comfort of scientists and science communicators (Dahlstrom, 2021).
Ontogenetic Log
I kept it short this week. I wanted to split this section into two parts, and surprisingly, I don’t say much about the ideology of deficiency that oftentimes permeates science communication. And if I’m being honest, it deeply permeates applied linguistics research as well. It permeates the way that we write. It permeates the way that we draw implications from our research.
First: when is somebody going to stand up and argue that our linear approach to writing research findings reinforces a deficit approach in our readers? I understand that we have to follow particular conventions in order to be legible to an audience. But just as Flores and Rosa often talk about the listening subject when it comes to evaluations of English speakers’ pronunciation, we should also think carefully about the active role that a reader ought to play in the reading of our academic writing. Now, this might vary between qualitative and quantitative approaches — I acknowledge that. But whose idea was it that we need to provide such a linear unfolding of ideas that spoon-feeds our readers, leaving little tiny trails of breadcrumbs for them to get so fat and happy? Where is the role of surprise, or of suspense, or of opacity — that allows us not to lead our readers along on a leash, but to have an asynchronous dialogue between what is known and what is unknown, between the writer and the reader?
I say this mostly because I think applied linguistics has a serious bias against story and storytelling. STEM scholars seem to share the same opinion: storytelling is a perversion of truth, and to say that which is untrue is unfit for writing research. I argue that the research that we write tells a story, whether we like it or not. The question is whether or not the story is good.
Bruno Latour, in fact, talks about this ideology — what I will call storicism: the systematic bias against story, and the privileging of the concept of narrative as a more analytic textual artifact. When describing actor-network theory, Latour speaks about the feared accusation that will come down to social scientists that all they are doing is telling stories. What is interesting is that Latour seems to endorse this accusation as legitimate. He instead tries to make a counterargument about why following actants through a network — or a “work-net,” as he describes it — is in fact not storytelling, but telling the truth of the world as it arises and gets assembled in real time, including the genealogy of the actants that create social action. It is a very ethnomethodological, Garfinkelian position.
Yet, on the other hand, Latour pays a great deal of deference to fiction writers. He argues that fiction writers understand what social scientists do not: that the ideologies and social forces we often gesture toward in our critical applied linguistics articles can in fact be baked into the structure of writing itself. Fiction writers know this better than all of us. Show, don’t tell. And literary analysts still find ways to decipher the meanings of texts in a way that is dialogic and nonlinear.
I therefore view the linear form of argumentation that predominates so much applied linguistics scholarship as also silently endorsing a deficit ideology of knowledge in readers and practitioners. This becomes clear as day once we reach the conclusions of so many applied linguistics articles — particularly the critical ones — where we often see calls for more education and better training. This is almost verbatim a repetition of the deficit ideology as it is expressed in science communication: if only people had more, or higher quality, knowledge, then their behavior will change and the system will change.
I disagree. We do not need better knowledge. What we need are better stories.
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