Sarah Steele Cabrera stands in front of mammoth skeleton and speaks to the audience
Sarah Steele Cabrera speaks at the Fieldwork Fails with Guts & Glory GNV event. Florida Museum photo by Kristen Grace

My love of stories began at a young age. I was always asking to be told a story and before I learned to put words on paper, my parents would transcribe my tales for me so that I could illustrate them. Throughout middle and high school, I used stories as an escape from an awkward existence, and in college as a distraction from my studies. As a young adult, my understanding of stories and storytelling has broadened to include a source of community and connection.

I was introduced to this concept when I took a storytelling 101 workshop in 2017 from Taylor Williams, the creative director of Guts & Glory GNV. I was fresh out of grad school for museum studies and looking for new ways to communicate about museum collections and the natural world. Guts & Glory GNV is a storytelling group whose mission is to bring live, original, true, first-person, polished storytelling to Gainesville, Florida. At this time, I had no intention of getting on a stage or pressuring scientists to do so.

Since that first workshop, I’ve volunteered at countless storytelling shows and have even taken the stage to tell my own personal stories. I also co-produced all three of the Museum’s popular Fieldwork Fails events with Guts & Glory GNV and presented on the topic of science storytelling with Taylor at the Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research conference at the New York Institute of Technology in 2019.

The premise of Fieldwork Fails is simple – give scientists a platform to share true, first-person accounts of doing science, using only a microphone and their own voice – no slides.

Studies have shown that facts presented in a story context are much easier to remember, more interesting, and easier to understand than facts presented in a scientific, logical way. Stories also make it easier for folks to transmit what they hear to another person. This is not a new concept: as we know, people have been using storytelling to share information for millennia.

Science is messy – it’s full of blunders, discoveries, observations and misunderstandings, all things that make up a good story! The goal of this program is to take those stories and use them to build connections and community between science, scientists and the general public.

Despite this, scientists often get stuck in presenting data in dry or overly complicated ways and miss opportunities to deliver compelling presentations to those outside of their field. Storytelling can be used to bring science, data and research alive. By adding entertaining elements and effective storytelling methods, a scientist can bring new life to the information they are presenting to any audience.

At the time of this writing, Fieldwork Fails has brought 12 scientists to the Museum stage to tell harrowing tales of the times their science didn’t go quite as planned. Each story also brings in elements of growing, exploring, and defining what it means to be a scientist and a person trying to find their footing on a changing planet. Emotions and vulnerability aren’t just allowed, they’re encouraged. Despite this being a new concept to some of our scientists, they have each embraced the opportunity, bringing audiences to both tears and laughter, two things you don’t typically see in a science lecture (trust me, I’ve been to a lot of those, too).

Here are a few short stories from past and future Fieldwork Fails scientists!

In co-producing Fieldwork Fails with Guts & Glory GNV, I’ve learned that live science storytelling provides all the things I’ve always loved about stories – an escape, a distraction, and an opportunity to learn, grow and create alongside a community of people. I hope by attending a future Fieldwork Fails or by reading, listening or watching the content on this page, we can provide you with those same feelings.

With that, I encourage you, professional scientist or not, to find outlets to share your own stories because they truly do matter!

More

Fieldwork Fails Interview:

Heather Rose Kates:

Hear Heather Rose Kates, a Florida Museum postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics & Evolutionary Genetics, tells her story from Fieldwork Fails a second time at Gainesville’s semiannual Story Summit.

Read: Unvarnished: Trouble In Thailand

Former Florida Museum scientist Randy Singer participated in two Fieldwork Fails events. Hear his popular story “Trouble in Thailand” on WUFT’s Unvarnished podcast.