How to narrate science in times of pandemia

  Francesca CAPELLI, Escuela italiana C. Colombo, Argentina
  Marcelo Raul RISK, Instituto universitario del Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, Argentina

The aim of this presentation is to describe an experience of science communication in a secondary school in Buenos Aires (Scuola italiana C. Colombo, a bilingual Italian-Spanish private institution) during the 2020 lockdown, which in Argentina lasted more than 7 months. During that period, coinciding with the southern hemisphere, students were attending presencial classes for the first 2 weeks. Thus, we - as teachers - tried to offer online activities to replace the traditional extracurricular workshops, internship, educational visits. 
Thanks to the collaboration with Instituto Universitario del Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, we organized a series of lectures holded by scientists and physicians. The cycle of conferences was entitled “How to narrate science in times of pandemia ”, it was opened by a lecture on Covid and closed, 7 months later, with the same topic, to show how much progress has science made in such a short time. The other lectures focused on different topics (ethics and animal models, gut microbiota, bioengineering, data mining, patents) just to let the students know that science deals with complexity and with the human factor. In this respect, we tried to provide a sort of frame story based on Boccaccio’s Decameron: an informal get-together to cope with the boredom and frustration of the lockdown and show a light of optimism, based on science and research. 
The purpose was to show the socio-economic implications of research: patents vs collaboration (which outspread due to Covid), the role of ethic committees in clinical trials, animal well-being, role of data mining in decision making and decision making in a context of limited resources, interdisciplinarity, the transition from base science to clinical application, new ways to rethink what is “human” whether we consider gut microbiota as a part of out body or not (and the consequences for medicine).

Principal achievements

• A number  of 30 to 50 students attended each lecture. The chat of Meet platform let them write comments and questions in real time, a way to interact they preferred to the classical Q&A section at the end of the speech.
• They declared that the lectures helped them better understand the complexity of the pandemic situation while looking for information on the Internet increased their anxiety level because they couldn’t select facts and fake news. 
• Most of the students  found the lectures useful to complete curricular school programs, for instance could see the practical application of theories. 
• Some of the final year students said that the professional experience of the lecturers was useful as an orientation to university studies. For instance, a student decided to study Engineering when he found the applications in the medical field. 
• The teachers of the school who attended the lectures took part in this initiative and contributed to create a collaborative environment and propitiate opportunities for debate, horizontal learning and information sharing.