��«����Ƶ

Instructor incorporates chancellor’s Grand Challenge into writing-and-rhetoric assignment, yielding new frontiers in science communication

President John F. Kennedy famously challenged America to go to the moon and do other things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” The challenge, he said, was “one we intend to win.”

But what if we’d lost?

��«����Ƶ students pondered that and other questions this semester in Daniel Long’s writing-and-rhetoric class, which employed a “what-if” assignment to help students learn to communicate science more effectively and even artfully.

Cameron Coupe, an aerospace engineering student, responded to Long’s what-if assignment by imagining a world in which the former Soviet Union landed on the moon first, established lunar bases, thus upping the ante for the United States.

The competing lunar colonies would have launched another space race, this time to land humans on Mars, and that costly contest would have become a mutual quest marking the end of the Cold War, Coupe theorized, explicating his ideas in an elaborate mural.

This semester, Long’s what-if assignment in his “Writing on Science and Society” course (WRTG 3030) took a cue from another challenge involving space.

Last year, CU-��«����Ƶ Chancellor Philip DiStefano issued a  to students, faculty and staff.

DiStefano challenged the campus to “to create a collaborative environment among Earth and space sciences, engineering, business, law, social sciences and humanities faculty members, students and staff as well as public and private sector partners in order to explore, understand and influence how space-based innovations and technologies impact business, law and society.”

While the rest of the campus mused over that tall order, Long threw this gauntlet into his curriculum, challenging his students to employ rhetoric—visual or written—to imagine what it would be like if they’d lived in one of five periods in scientific history: pre-Galileo, pre-Enlightenment, pre-Darwin, pre-atomic bomb and post-atomic bomb.

The resulting assignments were arrayed in Norlin’s Special Collections in April. Steven R. Leigh, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, was among those who attended and left energized by what he’d seen.

Among the projects displayed was “Eadem Unice,” by integrative physiology student Kalee Morris, a painting that illustrates a revolutionary revelation of the Human Genome Project (see above). Morris paints as if she were an artist named Hannah Postecali, who strove to underscore the point that the genome of any human differs from that of any other by less than 1 percent.

The painting “Eadem Unice,” or “uniquely the same,” intends to convey that discovery visually. The artist’s statement put it this way:

“It seems human nature to want to be special, to want to be superior to others, yet the very substance we are made from is the same. This project displays this newfound truth and the hope that it can somehow instill a sense of oneness in the world.”

“The Moon Also Falls,” a painting by civil engineering student Christian Carrazo, depicts Sir Isaac Newton’s profound connection with the natural world. As Carrazo explained, Newton wondered over a simple question with a profound answer:

“If an apple falls, does the moon also fall?” Because of gravity, the answer is yes, and Carrazo’s painting of Newton staring at a giant moon punctuated the point that, as Neil deGrasse Tyson said, Newton “was connected to the universe in spooky ways.”

And integrative physiology student Sam Kendrick produced a brochure titled “What if the Renaissance Never Happened?” That project employed visual-design skills along with writing.

Long explains that earlier in the semester, his class brushed up research skills with librarians. Later, the students visited Special Collections at Norlin Library, where students can see Newton’s Principia and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in their original format.

“I call it the day of joy and wonder, because we’re looking at all these amazing documents,” Long says.

The class is about making science accessible, “so we look at all these examples from the past of how people have tried to make science accessible,” Long says.

“These are names that they’ve encountered over and over in their science classes, but they’ve never actually been able to touch the documents. And now they get to. I think it sparks their imagination.”

It’s also a good way to demonstrate how science writing has changed over the years, he says.

The idea for a what-if assignment based on one of five critical periods in scientific history congealed as Long discussed the chancellor’s Grand Challenge with Special Collections librarians. They said it was a good idea, and they offered to show his class documents from each period.

Drawing on the chancellor’s Grand Challenge, Long told his class that the what-if assignment “is meant to show you, and give you a chance to show yourselves and others, how important and far-reaching space-based research and discovery really are.”

Long gave the students choices about how to present their assignments: in writing, painting, brochures, even children’s books. Long told students he sought “a combination of creativity and intellectual verve. … What I am not looking for is a run-of-the-mill five-paragraph essay with a thesis statement crammed into an arid introduction. I know you can do the latter. It’s the former that will challenge you and interest your audience.”

Using the metric of Dean Leigh’s response—“This is great”—the mission was accomplished.

Clint Talbott is director of communications and external relations manager for the College of Arts and Sciences and editor of the .