[wind chimes]

[program music]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Welcome to Spark Science, where our mission is to share stories of human curiosity. I’m excited to share my conversation with Dr. Bryan Dewsbury, who studies STEM education at University of Rhode Island. He’s a great advocate when it comes to creating inclusive teaching environments, and is also passionate about sharing science using every method at our disposal.

One example is a recent partnership with filmmaker and documentarian Dr. Kendall Moore. They created a film called Can We Talk? Difficult Conversations with Underrepresented People of Color: Sense of Belonging and Obstacles to STEM Fields.

In this episode, we’re gonna get into Dr. Dewsbury’s work, our own sense of belonging, and much, much more.

[program music ends]

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Uh, I’m the King of Wakanda.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.

[Bryan laughs]

That’s what I heard.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: You know, I feel like there’s like 5% of your listeners who’s going to believe that the first time I say it.

[Regina laughs]

My actual position is assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island. I’m research faculty; I teach introduction bio classes and grad classes on course design. But my research program focuses on the social context of learning. We mostly focus on STEM classes.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Okay. And like, all STEM, or are you even kind of more focused on biology?

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: All STEM.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: All STEM, okay.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: All STEM. I mean—

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And that’s Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, for my listeners.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Right. Well, the dirty little secret is I’m actually interested in all education. But I’m in the biology department, so I’m contractually obligated to just say STEM.

[Bryan laughs]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And you have a biology background, right?

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: That is correct, that is correct.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: You’re like, “Yeah, I guess.”

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Well yeah, that is correct. That is correct.

[Regina laughs]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well that’s the way I feel, too. I do this inclusion work and that’s why we’re at this conference together. But people ask me, “Do you want to be the diversity officer for the whole university?” and I’m like, “No.” I think I’m going to focus on—I want to stay in my lane. I did get out of my physics and astronomy lane and I do all of STEM, but I don’t—I’m a little different from you. I’m not interested in all of diversity. I kind of want to stick. I’m scared.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Well it’s not even so much diversity; it’s all of education.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right, yeah.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Which I guess the scale is similar, right?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: And maybe it’s not—when I say “interest,” I don’t know if I’ve really thought about CDO positions. I think I’m saying “interest” from the standpoint of the principles that we argue are good inclusive practices are applicable to any classroom.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right, right. So you’re interested in foundational, like the sources of what makes good education, not necessarily good science education.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Right. I mean, I answer the question: what does it mean to educate? That’s a pretty big question. I mean, inclusion aside, what does it mean to educate?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Period.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s deep.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: And that question really is the question that will take you down a rabbit hole of everything. But most particularly, what does it mean to understand the human experience? In this case, it’s the context of the classroom, right?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: So this is really just a subtext of a bigger philosophical question.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. Well I guess we can go into the time machine in a second, because before we get into that time machine I do want to talk about this idea of what the mission is for this podcast. Everything I do in my work is to really dispel that scientist stereotype, to make sure when people hear a scientist is walking through a university that they don’t imagine Doc Brown from Back to the Future or Einstein walking through that university. Maybe they’ll imagine you, or they might imagine me. That would be nice. That’s my goal.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Just last semester, I had a student walk up to me at the end of the first day of class and said to me, “You are not what I thought my professor would look like.”

[Bryan laughs]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh yeah.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: I mean it was a student of color, so she said it as a point of pride. But it’s interesting in 2019—sorry, 2018 I guess, at the time—to still have that be a real thing people are thinking.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I’ve also gotten similar comments. Yeah. Tell me more about your work now at University of Rhode Island.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: So our lab broadly focuses on the social context of teaching and learning. So essentially we’re interested in what goes into the learning process, what goes into the teaching process, the degree to which things like race and class and privilege and bias affect how curricula are assigned, how people approach the classroom setting, what chapters they choose, how they advise and mentor students, how students interact with each other, how they view the discipline or they view themselves or they view the professor.

No matter how you choose to describe it, it is in fact a relationship. And the nature of that relationship is what’s going to drive how much learning actually happens. So really, we’re deconstructing what that relationship could look like and what is the best formation of that relationship that will be supportive of very high quality outcomes.

And by outcomes, I don’t necessarily just mean getting As and Bs in class, right? We’re developing a sense of meaning and purpose, critical consciousness of the world, a sense of responsibility to others—

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Metacognition.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Metacognition. Living for things greater than yourself.

[program music]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Bryan talked more about this in his YouTube video from the Macmillan Learning STEM Summit. Let’s take a listen.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: We are somewhat obsessed in all of our reports and all literature about all of the gaps in STEM learning. But what if we were to flip that and ask ourselves, if you had a classroom where there weren’t equity issues, where there weren’t gaps in achievement, what would our class look like? What would our campus look like? What are the kind of things you’d say as a professor? What would you teach? Would you be doing what you’re doing now?

The face-to-face portion of the education model has to look at something other than expert person comes and gives you information that you can’t get anywhere else, because you can get it somewhere else. They have to feel connected to me. They have to believe what I say. They have to believe that I care. It’s looking dead into the eyes of all 150 students. It’s seeing in the corner of your eyes when a shoulder drops. It’s seeing when somebody might be about to pull their phone out.

I mean, all of these are really fine-tuned skills to get the classroom feeling very, very closeknit. The class is not easy; you know, they work pretty hard. But we support every aspect of their learning. You’re not coddling them, you’re teaching them how to be resilient for the future.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Back with more Spark Science and Dr. Bryan Dewsbury.

[program music]

We’re talking and the Dr. Bryan Dewsbury who studies how we educate science students.

[program music ends]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I think that you’re very lucky to have such a strong identity. You know, I’m mixed and my mom’s from Taiwan and my dad’s from California, but he’s Mexican-American. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere, so there’s part of me that’s like, “How dare you tell me what I should be?” but there’s also, like, “Well, it would be nice to belong for once,” right?

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Right.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So I don’t know if you also had that element of wanting to belong.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Um, I think we all have that element, I mean even people who may explicitly state they don’t.

[Regina laughs]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Whaaaat?

[Regina laughs]

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Well I mean, this is putting on the biology hat, right?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: There’s some arguments out there (Jonathan Haidt’s work and E.O. Wilson’s work speaks to this a bit) about how we tend to be group-ish and tribe-oriented. So I don’t see that necessarily as a negative.

I just want to make a quick separation of two different spaces. So when I talk about nonconformity, I’m talking about professional spaces. And the results I speak of are like my classroom and the arguments that we’re making and the data that supports those arguments. In my personal life, it is a tension.

I was not born here. I was born in the Caribbean (I was born in Trinidad and Tobago, to be specific). But I’ve lived here now for twenty years. Most of it for school, but now I’m married to an American, my kids are mixed, and I live in a part of the country where there isn’t a lot of people from my country. There might literally be five, right?

[Bryan laughs]

And I think I took for granted in the early years I lived in America that I was still essentially Trinidadian. Like I was here studying but I’d go home all the time and I was around Caribbean people. But now in my later years, it’s definitely a bit of a tension, right? But it’s a weird space because when I’m in Trinidad, sometimes you don’t feel as Trinidadian as you felt when you left. But I definitely don’t consider myself an American. Maybe the glass half full way of thinking about that is I’m a mix of a bunch of really positive things that makes me a unique person with a really broad perspective.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: I do appreciate that. But I find myself consciously being aware of my lack of belonging in spaces where I at least historically belonged or think I should, or may be wondering what exactly is this space? At this stage in my life, I do feel that. I will say, I’ll just be brutally honest with you—

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And our listeners.

[Regina laughs]

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Well “you” plural in this case, I got you.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: That when I do return to Trinidad, that is my time of least tension with that question. I do still relax to a degree that I never seem to be able to when I’m here. So I can effectively coat switch: I can go about and do what I need to do; I can navigate different circles (as a professional, as a person, in my personal life). But returning to Trinidad is like the ultimate relaxation point.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. That’d be nice. I wish I had at Trinidad.

[Bryan laughs]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Literally the only time I don’t have to think about this is when I hang out with the only other person of color that grew up in my small white town. And when we hang out, like, that’s it.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And maybe some family stuff. But even because the two families are different . . .

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Well the other piece to this, and I’m sure you can speak to it, is it’s so hard to explain that to people.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: It’s hard to the point where I actually stop trying.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. You can say this to me. No, just joking.

[Bryan laughs]

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: No, to you I can. This is why I’m saying this to you. As somebody who maybe spends a lot of my professional life learning how to articulate things (what I’m teaching or writing on paper or something), it’s really interesting to me how even to many inclusive people in my life I can’t fully explain what that means and what you have to do to navigate your day-to-day life knowing that you’re sort of always in coat switch mode. You’re always in coat switch mode.

And little by little, it chips at you and then you need some point, some inflection point where you can just get that tiredness out. And that’s what gives you the energy to come back and be, you know—and to your listeners, it may sound like it sounds like your life is a daily struggle. Actually no, you know. I do have a great life, great family, great job. I do enjoy what I do. But there’s that little, I don’t know, X percent of it where you’re just aware somewhere layers below the surface that what you’re in fact doing is constantly coat switching.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, it’s constant vigilance. And it’s so crazy. It’s weird to not be able to talk to your kid about that or talk to your spouse about that, right?

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Yeah . . .

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I almost went too far. I think I was telling you this story about really talking to my kid about being, that she’s white. But she’s not,
right? She’s mixed and she sees herself as mixed and I was pushing that upon her because she wasn’t having the same experiences as me and because she could pass. She doesn’t choose to pass, and I should have given her that option.

But my grandma did the exact same thing. She sat me down and said, “You’re not Mexican.” I was like, “What?” So, somebody else making that decision for you, even people of color, even people who are supposed to be like your allies because there are so many layers of power dynamics and hierarchy. It’s complicated.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: That’s a sensitive topic because I have two boys. They’re five and two. And this is going to come up.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. I mean my kid’s ten, so it’s already come up.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: I literally—they have so many identities that they can literally choose from depending on how they grow, right? They could embrace being Jewish, they could embrace being Trinidadian, they could embrace being African American, they can just see themselves as mixed or hit “no report” on that question they ask you. I think I underestimated how not knowing how they may navigate that, how much that frightens me a little bit, partly because—well, a couple reasons. One is, selfishly, I would love for them to embrace their Caribbean heritage in a big way. But I have no control over that except for taking them there and reading books and stuff like that. But I can only do so much. Number two—

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I do that, too.

[both laughing]

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: I know, right? We all do it.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’re like “My team! My team!” I have two teams. We’re like, “These two teams!”

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Number two is, depending on how this nation operates politically in the next decade or two, they are two black men in America. Depending on the circles you navigate, I was explaining how you need to know that. You need to be aware of certain things. We’re going to have to have the talk, right? And I’ve seen in other cases, in other cases where international people of mixed marriages produce mixed kids, and I’ve seen siblings grow up and one make a chance and the other make a different choice.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Absolutely.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: And it’s really, actually, a fascinating thing.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: It happened in my family.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I mean, obviously not in the exact same way you’re talking about, but yeah. Somebody picked to be more Mexican and somebody picked to be more Chinese.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Right, right.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So I picked to be, I’m just going to be . . .

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Under the radar.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: . . . as under the radar as possible, right?

[Bryan laughs]

And then it’s changed over the years, too.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Yeah, yeah. Right, I’ve seen that too. They adopted one identity in that particular space. But then when they moved to a certain part of the country, they kind of really latch on to a different part of it.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. Or they just become more aware and they become more interested and they have their own kids.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Exactly. Exactly.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well it’s funny, because these are things we’ve already been talking about for a fair amount of time. But that’s not the questions people ask me. They’re like, “Did you want to be a scientist?” I get that a lot, right? And my daughter and I barely talk about her career (she’s ten). But we definitely have to talk about the societal things.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Well if you don’t know enough about these things, you could easily convince yourself that if you just don’t talk about it, everything will just work itself out.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. Society’s going to fill those gaps for you if you don’t do it. Same with sex ed and talking about other things.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Right, right.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I really wanted to talk to you because—I’m going to kind of do a spoiler alert for our listeners first and just talk about how I first heard about you at the Inclusive Science Communication Conference and you were there talking about a documentary that you helped create. It was your idea and then you found a filmmaker to help you make this film. Can you tell us a little bit about that film?

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Well I first of all want to give full credit to Professor Kendall Moore because she actually made the film.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: She did.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: She knows all the ways to make films well. She’s been making films since the Eighties. And she has a lot of really exciting products, and I think this is one of them. Before I came to URI—before I met Professor Moore—when I was a grad student, I had founded (I guess) a web interview series called Confluence. Me and some colleagues founded that series based on the fact that the students we taught didn’t really understand how many different things you can do in science. They also didn’t—at least in the FIU context—didn’t really see a lot of examples of people who had life stories that were similar to their own.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: What’s FIU?

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Sorry. Florida International University. That’s where I did grad school. And what my experience doing that really taught me was there’s different ways to communicate this message. I think, for me, it’s always been focused on equity issues and issues of inclusion. I think if you’re going to accelerate the needle on that, we can’t just rely on one mechanism to get the message across.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Which is publish papers.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Exactly. And again, let’s be clear here. There’s great value in that process. But I felt, especially based on my last experience, that getting this into some kind of media format would be exciting. So I had this idea and I approached Professor Moore, who initially thought it probably would have taken a lot longer than it did, but she taught a class where her students—specifically a young man named Jesse Alexander—he just ran with it. He’s the assistant director, officially.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow, that’s such an experience and opportunity for a student.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Absolutely.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s awesome.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: I just love to see when students take control of their educational experience in that way. So it was done in about six months. You saw the preview of it. You saw the original screening of it?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I was not there. My flight was late.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: I hate you.

[Bryan laughs]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: No he does, it’s cool. I had to pay him for this interview.

[Regina laughs]

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Well you know you still owe me some. So yeah, we screened at that same conference and we’ve really been overwhelmed by the international response to it.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, it’s blowing up!

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: But a lot of universities want to see it. And the way Professor Moore runs it, she doesn’t just show it. It comes with a discussion with faculty development around it because that’s the kind of film it is. It’s not just sit down, watch, eat popcorn, and leave. It’s to sit, reflect on it, and actually ask yourself, “Are these voices in my institution and what is my responsibility to hear that and respond to it?”

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So there’s resources associated with the film that people can—like audience participation, sort of, is what you’re saying?

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Yes, and she sort of brings that with her.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, when she presents it!

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Exactly, when she presents the film. So she wouldn’t just send you a DVD, right?

[Bryan laughs]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right, there are showings. And I think Bryan’s suggesting or mentioning that I was at this Inclusive SciComm Conference and I was also at SACNAS—which our listeners have heard many times—the national organization that of focuses on racial equity in science, and I missed both showings.

[Regina laughs]

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Yeah that’s the kind of friend you are, Regina. I see where this is going.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, that’s right.

[Regina laughs]

[program music]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: To give you a sense of what we’re talking about, here’s a clip from their documentary Can We Talk? Difficult Conversations with Underrepresented People of Color: Sense of Belonging and Obstacles to STEM Fields.

Woman 1: I don’t know that the sciences will ever be more welcoming.

Woman 2: But there’s undeniable privilege that comes with being white.

Man 1: I haven’t always felt included or embraced.

Woman 3: I taught them to say they’re indigenous scientists.

Woman 4: Most of what I feel is just isolation, to be honest.

Man 2: I felt that there was always this assumption that I was dumb, that I was stupid or less than compared to, like, my classmates. I felt like I always had a chip on my shoulder, like there was something to prove. And I felt like when I came home, it was very different. Like at home, there wasn’t this surprise that I was intelligent. It was more, like, an expectation.

Woman 5: I remember having a college counselor and getting close to college application times and sharing with her that I wanted to go to medical school. And I remember specifically saying to her, mentioning one of the ivy leagues that I wanted to go to for medical school, and being met with, “Oh, you should never apply there because people like you don’t get into those schools. So you should just decide to do something else. I think you need to tailor your ambitions more towards this field or the other fields,” because my dreams, I guess, for her were a little too big.

Man 3: Resistance to change is the largest challenge that we have. I don’t think there’s a lack of goodwill. But at the same time, a person may have goodwill, they’re going to be resistant to changing a system where they have power.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’ll be back more on science education with Dr. Dewsbury.

[program music]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’re talking about a sense of belonging with Dr. Bryan Dewsbury from the University of Rhode Island biology department. I want to talk about just some pop culture, because I’m a pop culture, like, child. TV was my first friend. I used to hug it and say, “I love you.” My daughter does the same thing.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Mhmm. We’ll unpack that later.

[Bryan laughs]

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: No, it’s okay. I love TV and it’ll never leave me.

[Regina laughs]

So what kind of TV do you like that actually, in your opinion, actually showcases science in a good way or in a terrible way?

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Um, honestly there’s not a lot of TV for me that showcases science in a good way. The ones that I ended up liking and sort of use in my classroom are like the Blue Planet series, for example.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I hear a lot of plug for that on this show.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: But it’s interesting, one comedy that—it’s actually a funny comedy, Big Bang Theory. It’s funny, but it really reiterated all of the science stereotypes ever, right?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, and they don’t mention it. That’s the problem.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: No, right right right. They don’t point it out. And it was one for, what eight years?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: It is still on?

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Well I think they just ended this year or something, right?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: So it says something about the permeability of that show and the popularity of it, and how it kind of aggrandized these stereotypes that you and I quite frankly are trying to work against. So that’s problematic, for me.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Maybe it’s comforting. I feel like maybe it’s comforting for people. Those stereotypes are comforting. They’re like, “I was right all along!” I don’t know.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Right. Because I remember, for example, and this is not a science show that I’m about to mention, but Friends. What was it on for, nine years? How are you going to have a show in New York City and you have no people of color? Like one in season six?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Ross would date a random person.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Right. But it was a hit TV show. Everybody loved it. It was classic, whatever. And it says something to me that these things are the things that rise to the top.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Do you know what I don’t like? And it’s a Sci-Fi show. I keep cutting you off, I’m sorry.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: No that’s fine.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Everyone leaves Joss Whedon because of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and he made—Serenity was the movie—but Firefly was a one season show and everyone loved it and was like, “This is the most amazing thing ever!” And it was set in the future where the U.S. and China have joined forces. But there are no Asians in the whole show! What?!

[Regina laughs]

And I was always—I loved the show—

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: So how did they join . . . ?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: They were no—and then all the characters would speak terrible Mandarin. I don’t speak Mandarin but my mom would be, like, “That’s not that word.” And she loved the show, too, but it’s those little things that they don’t see what would be so obvious to us. Like, you’re going to have a future where China is one of the main powers but there’s no Asians there? Like, what?

[Bryan laughs]

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: My friends used to tell me that about Red October.

[Regina laughs]

Because they spoke Russian in that, and my Russian friends were like, “Yeah, that’s not . . .”

[Bryan laughs]

Like, people who speak it have no idea.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: I mean, I’ll be honest with you. Especially in the last eight or nine years of my life, I don’t watch that TV. I have a TV just to watch soccer because that’s one of the most important things in my life.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I think it’s pronounced “fu?tbol.” No I’m just joking!

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Well that’s the code switching thing, right? I have to figure out the audience and which word they’re going to understand. But anyway, where I was going to go with that is, in terms of pop culture to your point about the potential part we could have, is we think of ways to message things that are important. So documentaries are one thing, podcasts are one thing. We try to see ourselves as the innovators, right? Because honestly, the little I’ve seen out there, it’s not enough for me to tune in every Tuesday at 7pm. You know?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: What did you like in TV that you could modify? I’m just going to steal this idea.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: I used to watch and really enjoy Inside the Actor’s Studio.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes! That guy’s crazy.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: That sort of inspired Confluence in that you want people who are embedded and professional, but you want them to actually reflect on what they’re doing. That’s essentially what an interview was, a reflection. Especially when professional people are typically asked things like their last girlfriend and things like that. He’s asking them things about, you know, “You played this role. How does that impact you to be an HIV survivor” or whatever.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And then he’d show them pictures and be like, make some sort of emotional connection. He’d be, like, “Remember this.”

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Right. He’s like, “I was trying to forget that!” But no.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right, he did used to show pictures, right?

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: Well, yeah. Not every episode. But that’s what we were trying to capture with Confluence. You and I talked about this offline, but your idea about science around the world is something I’ve kind of had a—I think you definitely articulated this better than I did, but I was inspired by Anthony Bourdain’s show and how it’s about food, but no, it was really about the human experience around food.

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And his own reflection.

Dr. Bryan Dewsbury: And his own reflection, right. So maybe, I guess what I’m getting at to an aggregate, is media and shows that really bring out the human aspect of what we do, right? And it’s not performative, right. We don’t have to sing and dance and make this exciting. I think there’s probably a role for that, but that’s not—my professional focus is always about not leaving humanity at the door and then becoming this other thing. Like how does your humanity impact what you do?

Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’d like to thank Dr. Dewsbury for taking the time away from facilitating a multiday workshop on inclusion in STEM to talk to me. Thank you to Dr. Moore for the clips from Can We Talk? You can find out more about this film, or watch more, by going to kendallmooredocfilms.com. That’s K-E-N-D-A-L-L-M-O-O-R-E-D-O-C-F-I-L-M-S- dot-com. If you want to find out more about Dr. Dewsbury’s work, go to seasprogram.net. That’s S-E-A-S-P-R-O-G-R-A-M-dot-net. Also, thank you to Macmillan Learning STEM Summit.

[program music]

Spark Science is sponsored by WWU and created in partnership with KMRE. Spark Science is recorded on location and in Bellingham, Washington at Western Washington University. The producers are Suzanne Blais, Regina Barber DeGraaff, and Robert Clarke. Student editors are Julia Thorpe, Andra Nordin, and Zerach Coakley. Additional editing is done by WWU Video Services.

If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, post a message on our Facebook page or tweet us at SparkScienceNow. Thanks for joining us. And if you want to listen to past episodes, visit sparksciencenow.com.

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