This afternoon we will be trying an experiment in “service learning” – a concept introduced to me over the summer by Susan Sutheimer from Green Mountain College in Vermont, one of the top US colleges for undergraduate education in environmental and sustainable practices. Service learning is a method of teaching that they have used successfully in their Green Chemistry programme, and involves engaging students actively in projects that directly benefit the community. One of her more elegant examples (in my opinion) was the natural dying of romper suits (known in the US as ‘onesies‘) that were later donated to a local charity. You can read more about Susan’s approach to Service learning and the developments they have made in J. Chem. Ed., 85 (2), 231-233, 2008.
Our plan today is to do a more general science and society session as part of the final year research skills module. Why include this in research skills? The reason is we think it is extremely important for our students to be able to interact with the community to share their enthusiasm about science (that which hasn’t been beaten out of them by three years of modern university education), especially if they are going on to apply their skills to research. It will allow them to develop an appreciation for how their science and research can be applied to wider problems of society, or at least start to get them to think in this context. However, in our session we do not just plan to discuss what science can do for the community, but what the community can do for science. This is little touched on in conventional academia, which is filled with Impact statements and the like, imposed by research councils to demonstrate value for money for the tax-payer. Often academics feel under seige in the constant need to justify the utility of their work, especially when the goals/questions are much broader in a specific attempt to generate unforseen impacts.
The role that the community can play is becoming significant. As scientific data is becoming more complex and relying more on sampling of larger and larger populations, data collection and processing is often becoming the limiting step. Often, computing programmes are not yet sophisticated enough to deal with the classification methodology required; or physical data collection is more than one research team can handle. The use of the community to help now has its own term: “Citizen Science” and has been helped enormously to come to fruition by the advent of general access to the internet.
Citizen Science aims to help optimise processing bottle-necks, for which a sophisticated analysis (easy for humans but difficult for computers) is required, and also help to engage the public in science. Initial examples, such as SETI@home involved public computers, but in a passive way. Recently there have been a couple of stand-out examples requiring active participation of the citizen scientist:
Galaxy Zoo recruits the general population to analyse galaxy structures – an example of too much data that is too complex yet to be sorted by computers. This approach could potentially lend itself to other complex datasets, such as (protein) electron microscopy (EM) data, where snapshots of thousands of molecules need to be grouped and classified to generate a 3D image.
Fold-It harnesses the ability of humans to identify improved strategies for energy minimisation of protein structures, over the current algorithms used computationally. This approach has already been successful in generating experimentally unknown structures that are much better suited to applications such as drug design.
A summary of these approaches was published in the journal Nature as one of their news features.
Organisations such as the BBC and the Guardian are also actively engaging in involving the public in science and related journalism. Sucess has been had over many years with the bird-watch survey, publicised through Radio 4, that gets people to report in birds that they see in their local area. This is an example of how the broad geographical location of citizens can aid in getting simultaneous observational data that would be extremely difficult with only a small team of scientists, even aided by specialised equipment.
As part of our session, we will hopefully develop awareness in our future scientists of how they might engage the public with their science in an active fashion.
Of course this is not all one way, and the major outcome of the session will be for the students to contribute to the local community with their current science. My approach will be to break them into groups to discuss ideas of what they might contribute, come up with a list of suggestions, get a vote for some of the most popular ones and then spend time this week and next week organising to make it happen. For me, I am quite excited to see what these students come up with – this particular group were exposed to problem-based learning as part of one of our newly developed first-year modules, and some of the groups excelled in their creativity and attention to detail. The ‘service learning’ approach is along similar lines, but now it will be for real. How they cope two years later with more experience will be exciting to see and I have high hopes.
We have already brainstormed some ideas for what they could contribute:
- Setting up information sheets on nutrition for the local farm vegtable box scheme
- Food education stand at the local food fair
- Taking out a primary school group to do an activity like water-sampling, or going out and doing a chemistry show
- Having a science bake-sale (with appropriate information to the public) and donation to a charity – this idea was inspired by the excellent ‘Not so humble pie’ science cookie roundup and the periodic table cupcakes.
- Painting a science/chemistry mural on our local building site fence (we have made enquiries and have preliminary permissions :). This has the advantage of being up for more than a year, fully exposed to the entire public of Bangor. We might also get local artists involved in this, as I have some contacts. [may need to combine the above bake sale to raise money for paint though!]
The real science content may vary, but we hope the students primarily have fun and get some engagement with the public. Wish me luck for this afternoon!
[...] In a previous post, I described my plans for a short service-learning project to be run with third-year undergraduate students. [...]