ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which socioscience can inform teaching across the humanities and sciences, emphasizing the ways that socioscience pedagogies not only support students in garnering communicative trust with their audiences but also the ways that this approach can situate post-secondary STEM institutions to reimagine how STEAM coursework can best align with ABET and HLC outcomes. Using a STEAM-based Communications course as an example, this chapter considers how courses outside STEM fields can be framed to invite students to examine the many ways science is framed and disseminated across society. This upper level, writing-intensive course requires students to step outside their disciplinary wheelhouses—a space where they are trained to convey science to specific and discrete discourse communities—in order to expose and reflect on their lack of resources for engaging with nonexpert, public audiences. Specifically, students are invited to rethink their personal and disciplinary definitions of trust in order to better understand how and why narrative genres are able to increase comprehension, interest, and engagement when communicating science to nonexpert audiences. The primary data used to inform this chapter will be student reflection and teacher-researcher analysis.
