Chapter 4 opens by asking readers to compare learning in formal and free-choice situations. This proceeds to a core goal of conversations for public engagement, which is to make our exchanges interesting enough that people want to talk with us. This chapter compares two approaches to teaching and learning: A deficit model approach assumes that the learner is in some sense empty or flawed, while the funds of knowledge approach assumes that the learner has a rich base of relevant prior knowledge. The latter approach is encouraged so that a science demonstration begins by probing an audience’s interests and then using that as a hook and an organizing principle. Six strands of science learning are introduced, with emphasis on the strand referring to a learner’s interest and excitement. Practical considerations include recognizing that no single science demonstration is likely to hit all strands equally well. The Worked Example shows this with detailed comments on a demonstration of language lateralization. Because public engagement often occurs in free-choice situations, getting and keeping an audience’s interest is critical.

This chapter focuses on the role that discourse relations and structure play in a variety of phenomena of interest to semanticists and philosophers. Not only do discourse relations add semantic content above and beyond the individual propositions expressed by the utterances in a discourse, but they, and the complex structures to which they give rise, can influence the interpretations of individual utterances, having an effect on the very propositions the utterances are understood to express. In this chapter, we look in detail at how theories of discourse structure can be brought to bear on at-issue and non-at-issue content, using appositive relative clauses and discourse parenthetical reports as illustrations. We also discuss recent efforts to use discourse structure to model conversational goals and capture the subjective nature of discourse interpretation as well as recent work extending theories of discourse structure to multimodal discourse. Along the way, we emphasize the importance of corpus work in studying discursive phenomena and raise a series of large questions to be pursued in future work.