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PS 109 Journalists and Teachers as Knowledge Brokers: The Use of Journalistic Texts in Classrooms
A. Ginosar1, T. Tal2
1 The Academic College of Yezreel Valley, Communication, Emek Yezreel, Israel
2 Technion, Education in Technology and Science, Haifa, Israel
Science education and science communication are two distinct research disciplines with different research traditions. Yet, both address the developing
of the public science literacy and decision-making competencies which are needed for civic involvement in democratic societies (Hodson, 2013; Lewen‑
stein, 2015). Both fields share common goals: to educate, entertain, and engage the public with and about science (Baram-Tsabari & Osborne, 2015), and
address “knowledge brokers”(Meyer, 2010). In science education, the brokers are school teachers, while in science communication the brokers are science
journalists. In this research we attempt to expose the interface between these two groups of knowledge brokers. More specifically, this research aims at
exposing and understanding the ways science teachers use journalistic texts dealing with environmental topics and determining the impact of such usage
on students' learning and tendency to engage in issues of science and society. The mixed-method study consists of: content analysis of online journalistic
texts on environmental topics published on seven top-rated news websites, during a three-month period; two teacher questionnaires: the first investigates
how teachers use journalistic texts in their classes; the second aims at learning about the teachers’journalism literacy. Out of the texts we identified, infor‑
mative texts made 90%, 10% were opinion articles, and commentary items made less than 1%. The writers were: professional journalists (87%), opinion
writers (6%), experts (5%) and stakeholders (3%). The two leading environmental topics were: ecosystems, biodiversity and conservation (27.6%), and
landscape, open space and urban environment (26 .1%). Forty middle school science teachers responded to Questionnaire 1.Their majority (87%) indicated
they use journalistic text in their teaching. Most of them (74%) use them few times a year, and 15% use such texts about once a month. The most common
topics of articles used by teachers are air and water pollution and biodiversity. The preferred type of journalistic item is an informative text, and teachers
prefer text written by experts rather than by professional journalists. In the conference, we will report on the results of questionnaire 2 as well. We hope
that the findings of this research will contribute to the dynamic field of science communication by demonstrating how teachers can use journalistic texts
in their teaching and how enhancing teachers’media literacy can contribute to the informed use of such texts in the classroom. Reference Baram-Tsabari,
A., & Osborne, J. (2015). Editorial: Bridging Science Education and Science, Communication Research, 52(2), 135–144.
Hodson, D. (2013). Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared. Be prepared. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education,
13(4), 313–331. Lewenstein, B. V. (2015). Identifying what matters : Science education, science communication, and democracy. Journal of Research in
Science Teaching, 52(2), 253–262. Meyer, M. (2010). The Rise of the Knowledge Broke. Science Communication, 32(1), 118–127.
PS 110 Online Engagement and the Communicative Construction of Climate Change on Twitter
M. Taddicken1, L. Wolff1, N. Wicke1, A. Reif 1
1 Technische Universität Braunschweig, Institute of Social Sciences, Braunschweig, Germany
The Internet has changed the modalities and forms of individual, social and political communication as only few technological innovations did before.
Currently, this development is mainly influenced by social media like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. These are also increasingly significant in the field
of science communication. They expand possibilities to participate in public discourses on socially relevant issues (O'Neill & Boykoff, 2011). However, less
is known about who takes part in online discourses as well as how this kind of engagement is performed (Brossard 2013; author1a). The communication
culture of short messages in new media environments challenges the handling with complex scientific issues such as climate change. This becomes partic‑
ularly obvious facing Twitter’s technical limitation of 140 characters. To investigate how users construct climate change (author1b) under these conditions,
both content and technological functions of the microblogging service were researched.This study is based on 1605 tweets with the hashtag“klimawandel”
(German for Climate Change) which were collected during the 19th Climate Change Conference in Warsaw. Based on a systematic random sampling, 159
tweets were investigated in detail by a mixed methods content analysis. In order to identify the interplay of textual, technical and actional aspects on
Twitter (Thimm et al., 2014), especially qualitative aspects of the specific operators usage (#, @, RT, http://) were analyzed. The exploratory design extends
so far predominantly quantitative Twitter studies (e.g. Pearce et al., 2014). Results show that among identified authors the majority were citizens (57.3%)
and civil society actors (23.4%). However, political (5.6%), economic (3.2%) and scientific (1.6%) authors take part in the Twitter discourse on climate
change remarkably rare. The way of communication about #klimawandel is characterised by a thematic and informative style. Embedding the term in
the fields of politics (26.6%), science (22.8%), nature (18.4%), environmental disasters (11.9%) as well as economy (6.9%) displays the users’ reflection
of the multidimensionality of climate change.The use of the operator # further underlines these findings concerning communicative construction processes:
#klimawandel is often set into different meaningful contexts across other hashtags (395 times), for instance consisting of terms related to environment and
nature (20.2%) and political parties (11%). Users also expand the communication to areas outside Twitter’s spheres via hyperlinks (86.8%) to share mass
media content (60.4 %) and content produced by experts (33.7%). The communication can be described as fact-orientated, unemotional and mainly based
on media coverage. Furthermore, the low use of the operators RT (29.6%) and @ (17.3%) shows that in the context of climate change almost no interac‑
tion, discussion nor networking takes place on Twitter. Twitter’s multiple technical specifications and functionalities to create postings are hardly used in
the online construction of #klimawandel. The identified communicative practices represent a predominantly uncommented but contextualised spreading
of hyperlinks. The discussion of these results contributes to the further development of concepts defining online engagement and participation on social
networking sites and other social media (boyd 2011; Grönlund, 2009; Nielsen, 2006).