Student Identity and Aversions to Science: A Study of Translation in Higher Education

Biodiversity informatics (BDI) is a science focused on biodiversity data management, and BDI courses cast students’ attention to matters related to the physical environment, global change, translating data collections across multiple sciences, and also to the translation needed to bring BDI findings from the scholarly community to the public. Even as students learn about science communication in BDI courses, they struggle to translate their studies into their own identities and lives. Based on an examination of student talk in a course on BDI and Science Communication, this research illustrates how students linguistically frame science and their science identity. The data show that obstacles barring the taking up of a science identity are plentiful, and that those barriers often relate to issues of identity and language. Interventions for addressing this translational problem, the disruptions to sharing scientific information, are discussed.