Getting to the Heart of Science Communication by Faith Kearns

Author:Faith Kearns [Kearns, Faith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI003000 Science / Applied Sciences
Publisher: Island Press

Listening Responsibly

I was in the water for quite a while, and by the time they started pulling me back, I was waist deep in the water that had already started coming into the car.

—Cheryl Mickelson, Gays Mills

Driftless Writing Center, 2019

Stories from the Flood: A Reflection of Resilience is a small booklet filled with gut-punch quotes.14 Throughout its pages, residents of Kickapoo and Coon Creek watersheds in southwestern Wisconsin share their feelings about the now persistent flooding they are facing with a blend of awe, fear, sadness, and resolve. It’s an area used to several big floods a century, but nothing like that of the past fifteen years.

“The Kickapoo River and Coon Creek watersheds are beautiful. They’re filled with steep hills, bluffs, and flowing rivers. Flooding is a somewhat common occurrence, but it’s been exacerbated by climate change,” says Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, an associate professor in the English department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Druschke, recently returned to the Midwest, had been spending time developing relationships in the area and taught a community-based learning class with the Kickapoo Valley Reserve. “Because of that, I was contacted by the Driftless Writing Center, somewhat out of the blue. They had an idea for an ambitious project to collect stories about catastrophic flooding in the area. They were applying for a grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council and needed me to serve as a ‘humanities expert.’ I wouldn’t call myself that, but I’m committed to using my university power to help where I can, so I told them to put my name down,” Druschke says.

“This was a listening project. Their idea was to give people a chance to tell their stories to an engaged listener—somebody who would cry with storytellers, laugh with them, and bear witness to what they went through. This is a huge ask in a community where people are pragmatic and generally suck it up. Upper midwestern farmers are like ‘I’m fine. I lost my house and my barn and fifty cows and a tractor. But you should talk to my neighbor who suffered.’”

Druschke is particularly equipped to work in this kind of community setting. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa in social work and a doctoral degree in rhetoric at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She says both fields, though seeming very different, focused on interpersonal relationships and dialogue, as well as radical critique of inequitable structures, albeit from different angles.

She is also sensitive to the many complexities of community-engaged work.

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