Academy and Studying in Germany

In order to have a successful career, scientists and scholars must be able to write. In recent years, therefore, many universities have established writing centres. Researchers need to learn more, however, than merely “good writing”: they should also have mastered the ABCs of scientific and scholarly communication. And these ABCs are multi-medial.

Grammar schools pass on to universities only pupils who have learned how to write correctly and to do scientific and scholarly research. Or so one would suppose. The reality looks different. “Pupils with their A-levels have learned to accumulate and reproduce information”, states the Internet page of the writing laboratory at the University of Bielefeld. “As undergraduates, they have to adjust themselves to another kind of productive handling of knowledge”.

At the beginning of the 1990s the University of Bielefeld set up its writing laboratory along the lines of American writing centres. It was aimed at not only students but also teachers. It goal is to use writing as a tool for active learning – as one of several “vehicles of scientific and scholarly communication”.

Today there exists a gigantic selection of studies that has significance for everyday life. It is only thanks to scientific and scholarly communication skills that the relevant information can be made available to a broader public.

Writing as pre-school for research

“Before, I used to write long and complicated term papers that were actually unreadable”, says Thomas Welskopp, Professor of History at the University of Bielefeld. “It was only in America that I learned how to write.” An experience at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore decisively helped the then student: his tutor took the time to correct his term paper down to the last detail.

At American universities writing centres have belonged for decades to everyday academic life. There professional writing is not banished to the ghetto of the literary scene.

Teams of authors with journalists

In order to place their work in newspapers, researchers need not even write interestingly. What they do need, however, are open-minded journalists. For example, Henning Noske, editor of the Braunschweiger Zeitung, accompanied researchers as they developed a new cancer drug out of a natural material. Scientists Gerhard Höfle and Hans Reichenbach of Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research searched African soil samples for new bacteria – and discovered Sorangium cellulosum. When they then isolated the metabolic product epothilone, they didn’t yet know that pharmacologists would develop a new cancer drug from it.

Journalist Noske stuck to their heels. He held conversations with the researchers for months, and they provided him with all the important information about the development of the new medication and disclosed to him the details of negotiations with American pharmaceutical companies. “In this exceptional case I didn’t need even to have the researchers’ authorisation for the interviews,” says Noske. For the impressive nine-part series that appeared in the Tageszeitung, the team of authors won the first prize in the highly endowed competition “Biology Is The Essence”.

Research in the market place

“Ten years ago Germany was clearly lagging in scientific and scholarly communication”, says Eva Maria Streier, press spokeswoman for the German Research Foundation. “Since then a lot has happened – not least because the large scientific and scholarly organisations have combined their efforts in the initiative Science in Dialogue.” That universities have entered the public marketplace is also owing to the fact that there are still too few young people who go to university. By thus taking the bull by the horns in the media arena, they hope to lure young talents.

Universities therefore already address themselves to primary school pupils. At children’s universities, researchers tailor the material to the experience and prior knowledge of the children. And throughout Germany they have made science and scholarship into an experience for everybody: for example, with the SS Science, the floating science centre of Science in Dialogue. Further, year after year at “Science Summers” and “Long Nights of the Sciences” researchers from all disciplines present their results in such a way that any layman can understand them. This in turn motivates researchers to concern themselves with teaching and scientific and scholarly communication.

Science TV: research made visible

The trend to popularising the sciences spilled over in the 1990s from England to Germany. The exchange of knowledge was now to take place not top-down, but rather as far as possible in dialogue and at an equal level. The German campaign “Public Understanding of Science and Humanities” (PUSH) arose in connection with the English movement. Science in Dialogue is its official platform.

In the meantime, knowledge has long since been being transmitted not merely through words. Scientific and scholarly organisations increasingly rely on moving pictures, which exert an immense fascination, especially with young people. As lure, researchers themselves make three-minute video films for the “Science TV” portal of the German Research Foundation.

“Love à la Darwin” is one of the titles of a total of ten research diaries with several episodes. In it behavioural biologists of the University of Göttingen furnish evidence for the view that love is a matter not only of inner values but also of biological inheritance. Thus in the course of its evolution, the edifice of science and scholarship has acquired in the twenty-first century a third pillar along with “research” and “teaching”: communication.