"Exploring Science Literacy and the Literacy Communities of the Anti-Vaccination Movement"
Wyn RichardsWyn Andrews-Richards is a rhetoric scholar with specific research interests in literacy studies (particularly science literacy/aliteracy), writing center studies, political rhetoric, and feminist rhetoric. She will begin her masters program in August 2016 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Contents |
StorytellingFacts do not change the minds of members of the anti-vaccination community. Attacking their intelligence doesn’t work either. These tactics to address science illiteracy often end up reinforcing science aliteracy. Perhaps if vaccines weren’t so critical to public health, it wouldn’t really matter. But it does matter. Vaccines remain one of the greatest accomplishments of humankind. The disease that European colonists used to wipe out entire Native American populations, smallpox, is a dead disease. This is due to the smallpox vaccine. Measles, a disease that can cause blindness, deafness, brain damage, and death, was all but a dead disease, until the anti-vaccination movement began their campaign of science illiteracy/aliteracy to devastate one of the greatest achievements in public health. With no form of science literacy seemingly even present within the anti-vaccination movement, we must challenge ourselves as a society to study what can be done to alleviate this serious problem. Perhaps it is through humans’ earliest form of literacy that this public health problem can be alleviated – storytelling. The article “Story and Science: How Providers and Parents Can Utilize Storytelling to Combat Anti-vaccine Misinformation” addresses this very idea. The authors Ashley Shelby and Karen Ernst identify that the anti-vaccination movement, with arguments without evidence and based on fraudulent research, has relied heavily on storytelling; parents conveying personal experience with perceived vaccine injuries. The authors suggest, “Utilizing some of the storytelling strategies used by the anti-vaccine movement, in addition to evidence-based vaccine information, could potentially offer providers, public health officials, and pro-vaccine parents an opportunity to mount a much stronger defense against anti-vaccine messaging" (Shelby and Ernst, 2013). It is ironic that in the year 2015, when we have so much information available through easy technology, the effort to promote science literacy in the anti-vaccination movement could fall to one of our oldest traditions. Socrates defamed the written word, as a technology that is dangerous to literacy. Socrates’s oral tradition ensured the ethics required of learned men to convey what is true and right to the masses. Though the written word has proliferated our contemporary world (much to Socrates’s chagrin), the responsibility of spreading science literacy falls to ethical storytellers. Scientists, physicians, and researchers, those who work in any facet of the vaccine safety industry, who have personal experience and investment in the advancement of fact-based knowledge regarding vaccines, could be very well served to fall to their own storytelling abilities to educate their patients and the public. Ethical lovers of science, such as myself, could take a cue from the literature available about the specifics of science literacy, as it relates to the anti-vaccine movement, to utilize personal stories meshed with facts, not petty name-calling and insults. |