Sci-Ed

There is an unexplainable phenomenon in the zoo world.  People will pass by an exhibit with an incredibly unique animal in it and  barely give it a glance. Put a human in there, even just cleaning the glass with a squeegee and the next thing you know there is a crowd watching intently to see what the human will do next.  Now imagine this, in front of the komodo dragon cage at the reptile house you have two scientists in chairs roped off so people cannot get too close. A  third is in the cage interacting with a dragon. This is the five alarm fire of the zoo world. People desperately trying to see what is going on, literally  rubbernecking a scientific experiment.  Invariably someone would always ask, “So what are you guys doing?”  I would go into the detailed explanation of the experiment, because they were there and they asked and I presumed they really wanted to know. Plus I loved Komodo dragons and wanted everyone to love them like I did.  It was here I discovered the different degrees of  “wanting to know”.

Author (on left) with Trooper Walsh in a Komodo Dragon enclosure. Humans in enclosures always draw a crowd.

I found that the majority of the time I was diluting this impressive animal to an understandable set of basic behaviors because the complexity was lost on the general public and they didn’t care about the specific jargon I was using. They wanted the simple bread and butter version of the answer, not the entree.

None of my friends are really that into reptiles, and none of them really care about how many tongue flicks or claw rakes we recorded that day. Believe me, I wanted them to, I desperately wanted them to ask me and genuinely care about my answer. I mean this was a study to see if Komodo dragons exhibited play behavior. Something that is on the more interesting spectrum of the reptile research scale.

Believe me, this sucks. I often couldn’t figure out why everyone didn’t love Komodo dragons as much as I loved them. But 11 years ago I made a conscious decision to change that. I left research to become a high school science teacher because for me it was about getting the awareness out to young people and to champion for an underappreciated group of animals.

So after a decade in a classroom and many, many, many mistakes I feel I have found a decent balance as a science communicator.  I admit I have an unfair advantage, I have real time metrics in front of me on a daily basis. I get to utilize various forms of explanations and see how they are received by my audience. I get to see what works and what doesn’t and then refine them two or three more times that day until I have them perfected.  Not only that but my audience often replies back with brutal and blunt honesty.  High school students will let you know if you are coming across in a condescending manner. A lot of people, and myself included , are unaware that their methods of explanation often have a condescending tone to them. It is not purposeful, but sometimes unavoidable when the person is in the position of explainer. It takes a while to pick up on your own cues and attempt to avoid them.

If you really wanted to get offended, try discussing something you passionately love and put a lot of work into what you think is a great lesson only to be met with yawns, blank stares, glances at the clock, and snoring. It takes a lot of strength to not take it personal, even when it is.

So where does this all fit? Well the one thing a teacher has to know before they begin a lesson is “what is my end goal? What do I want to achieve with my communication? Do I want to explain? Do I want to inform? Do I want to infect? Do I want to extrapolate?” All these come with much different methods of communicating.

In science education I can’t avoid the jargon, but I need to know when to drop it into play. If I throw complex words right out from the get go and say “memorize the words” then I lost them. If I come up with a great analogy or metaphor that the students can relate to and then slide the word in there I have them hooked. I need to sell them on cell division before I introduce mitosis. I need to make them feel like they were asking me if there was a specific word for what I was describing instead of telling them the word and describing what it means.

A subtle trick I use to hook my students is to discuss the material is to pretend I am searching for the right word and let them fill in the blank for me.  This makes them feel like they are contributing to the explanation process and lets me know they are getting it.

My end goal with my students is to get them interested in science.  At this point as juniors in high school it is not important to me that they understand every detail of biology, but that they have an interest in understanding it.  I have seen this with freshman students taking a conceptual physics course. The students are  begging their teacher to learn trigonometry so they can better understand what is happening when they launch a projective off their desk.

Yes, begging to learn trigonometry. Why? Because they were hooked by the bread and butter and  are now hungry for the main course. This is why the first thing I do in Chemistry is drop a gummy bear into molten potassium chlorate. Hook the students with a dazzling example of candy becoming bright light and make them want to learn more.

I truly believe that the role of the scientist is changing. With the advent of blogging, twitter, and social media scientists are becoming accessible to the general public, and we want to be accessible because we love our science and want people to love it as much as we do.  But we need to realize if they did love it as much as us we would be talking to a fellow scientist, not a layperson.

Follow John Romano on Twitter at @paleoromano

[This is an excerpt from a longer blog I wrote on my personal site. It has been edited to reflect the audience of PLoS]

Here in Sci-Ed we like to link science with popular topics, so we can draw in some more resistant learners. Atif posted about NHL Hockey for teaching statistics, and I wrote about NFL football (specifically on how football star Robert Griffin III caused everyone to learn about knee anatomy). Today is our guest Dr. Laura Guertin’s turn. Below, she shows us how she combined basketball when teaching geology. Dr. Guertin’s bio is at the bottom of the post. 

Springfield, Massachusetts, is the birthplace of many great things, from Breck Shampoo to Sheraton Hotels to Friendly Ice Cream. But in addition to being the city of my birthplace, Springfield is also the birthplace of the sport of basketball and home to the Basketball Hall of Fame. During one of my family visits, my brother and I took the opportunity to visit this shrine to basketball – a place neither of us had ever visited growing up, despite being raised die-hard Boston Celtics fans.

As we began going through the displays of uniforms and lockers, we came around a corner and I saw this:

My brother, who works for an insurance brokerage firm, looked at this lighted wall and continued to walk on by. But as someone teaching historical geology at the time, a course that covers the 4.6 billion years of Earth’s physical and biological changes, I immediately saw several historical geology concepts visually displayed in the NBA Family Tree!

Let’s review some of what caught my eye… and go with me on some of these…

Evolutionary radiation, or explosion – With the invention of basketball, new burst of diversification appeared in the number of teams. All at once, the environment and ecosystems were present to support the large number of teams that appeared on the far left of the image – think of the Cambrian Explosion from ~540 million years ago, when most of the major animal phyla appeared in a biologic burst of diversification in an incredibly short period of geologic time.

Evolutionary experimentation – As we see in the fossil record of the Early Cambrian Period (~540-520 million years ago), some new life forms appear and go extinct very short periods of geologic time. This is true for short-lived teams such as the Sheboygan Redskins and Providence Steamrollers.

Stasis – Two teams in the NBA are still in the original location where they were founded and have the same name, never relocating because of “environmental” (or financial) pressures. These teams are represented in the continuous bars for the Boston Celtics and New York Knickerbockers (now shortened to the Knicks).

Punctuated equilibrium (or just adaptive radiation?) – During expansion years, when many NBA teams are added in multiple cities at once, you can see a pulse of new life on the scene, or speciation. In contrast, if I were to show you a family tree of the WNBA, we would see an example of phyletic gradualism, with 2-4 teams being added each year when the league was established.

Extinction – Some teams just don’t make it in our world, just like some living species do not survive. This makes a great topic of discussion with students – why do some teams fold? Are there similar pressures that cause species to go extinct? I also bring up how some teams move from one city to another, like the New Orleans Jazz becoming the Utah Jazz, and the Seattle Supersonics moving to become the Oklahoma City Thunder. Why do teams pack up and move to a new city? Does this parallel why species or entire communities of organisms migrate and establish in a new environment? Again, financial reasons are a huge motivator for a basketball team’s migration or collapse, but there are other general reasons that apply to both sports teams and natural living communities as a cause for movement, such as the lack of a supporting physical environment.

Binomen nomenclature – At times, I have students struggle with genus and species names in the Linnaean biological classification system, such as the similarities and differences between Homo habilis and Homo sapiens. By using the city name as the genus and the team name as the species, this has helped students visualize that the Boston Celtics, Boston Bruins, and Boston Red Sox are all athletes (or individuals of a particular “species”) in the same city, but basketball players do not mix or cross over to hockey, who do not cross over to baseball.

Certainly, what I share here is a loose connection between basketball and understanding patterns and changes in Earth’s biologic history. But it is a fun way to bring basketball in as a supplemental, visual tool for getting students to learn and to easily recall these concepts. I have used the NBA (and WNBA) Family Tree every time I’ve taught historical geology, since 2001.  The students react very positively to the basketball references, both male and female students (gender does not seem to be an issue).  At first, I was concerned about the students that are not big fans of basketball understanding the connections, but a student doesn’t need to know the rules of the game in order to understand what the visual is showing.

I think one of the reasons my students are comfortable with having basketball brought in to the classroom is that I teach at a university located right outside the city of Philadelphia. As my campus is a commuter campus without any dorms, the majority of my students were born and raised in the Philadelphia area with the Philadelphia 76ers (which makes it difficult to talk about the Boston Celtics – no brotherly love between the two cities, I assure you!). But teachers can use any team that is closest to their school, or even another sport besides basketball (baseball, football, hockey, etc.). I think soccer would fit very well with these historical geology concepts, and discussing with students how Major League Soccer (MLS) has been successful, yet the Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA) and Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) leagues have both folded in short timeframes (more examples of evolutionary experimentation, I suppose!).

My take-home message – there’s no need to shy away from bringing sports in to the classroom. Even those students that don’t know the rules can still “play the game” in understanding how the structure and evolution of teams can apply to historical geology and additional biological concepts.

Dr. Laura Guertin is a marine geologist and educator that cares deeply about increasing the scientific and geographic literacy of students pursuing non-science degrees. You will typically find her outdoors mentoring undergraduate student researchers and emphasizing the connections between disciplines via technological tools.  Connect with her on Twitter at @guertin

The author’s original “The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau” book set.

One my earliest memories is sitting down with my dad as he turned the colorful pages of “The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau”. His love for the undersea world was palpable to my young, developing brain. I haven’t thought of these memories in years. Life has a way of getting busy. But recently I stumbled upon these old friends.

I have been trying to organize my life more, so I have decided to tackle my basement.  Boxes upon boxes of material that haven’t been touched for years. My mind is telling me to let them go, but I convinced myself to be absolutely sure there was nothing of priceless value hidden away in those boxes. Who knows, an errant original Van Gogh could be in there.  So there amidst the cardboard boxes was the milk crate containing my “Ocean World of Jacque Cousteau” book set.  I have seen it in its spot a hundred times, but today I noticed something different.  Peeking out ever so slightly from the holes of the milk crate was a very faded, very old, scrap piece of paper diligently holding a place in one of Jacques’ books for the last 25 years.

I became intrigued as it was literally put there by an 8 year old me and hadn’t been touched since, indicating something I found to be of great importance at the time.  So I picked up the book and flipped to the marked page….

“Chapter III. Survival of the Fittest” emblazoned across the top of the page in aquatic blue.  A two toned white and gray map showing the Pacific coast of  South and Central America with a zoomed in window highlighting the Galapagos islands. On the facing page a full color photo of a giant tortoise giving the camera a coy look. This literally marks the first time in my life that I learned the single principle that would dictate the rest of my life.  While the term “survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert Spencer, the text in the book focuses on Darwin’s theory of natural selection.  I have studied evolution for years and it is now the cornerstone of my teaching career. It was buried in the  pages of a 20 volume book set, but 8 year old me was struck by it, and so marked it for reference.  I sat there, reading over the words, memories I forgot existed came flooding back.  Then, as if scripted, I looked up at the rest of the books and saw many more hastingly ripped up scraps of paper marking various pages of significance to a younger, less knowledgable me.

And as I revisited each page and followed the now unrecognizable path of my 8 year old thought process pieces began to fall into place. My whole life suddenly came into clear and perfect focus.

These books shaped my life.  Going through them as a child, page by page, over and over again, mesmerized by the pictures and intrigued by the words, they began to sculpt and shape my brain.  Sure the initial interest was there before the books, but how many children when asked what they want to be when they grow up say “I want to be a vet” or “I want to work with animals”…..and how many do?

Genes are interesting.  You can have the genetics  for a specific trait but if you are never introduced to an environmental stimuli that gene might never get turned on.  For example, the arctic fox is brown in the summer and white in the winter. The simple reason is that the gene that produces melanin (responsible for brown) does not work below a certain temperature and thus no color is produced and you get a white fox.  If you take an arctic fox and keep them in a warm climate they will never turn white.

Photo Source: http://jwlloyd.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/arctic-fox_winter_summer.jpg

So I began to wonder, if I never got those books,  would my interest have subsided?

My dad purchased them at a yard sale when I was around 4 years old. I remember, clearly, sitting on our couch with him and flipping through those books before I could even read.  Looking at the pictures.  I have a clear memory of the  joy I would get seeing that shade of green on the cover of the book because I knew that color meant something I liked was in there (is it coincidence my favorite color is green?)

Then I began to think: why of all things did my dad choose these books? I asked my dad this very question and he replied

“My dad and grandfather were commercial fishermen and I used to sit and watch the Cousteau series on TV with my dad. It was a big event in the house. I bought them because I wanted you to have a connection to the sea, but honestly, I think I bought them for myself knowing I would eventually give them to you”.

In the early seventies, at 17 years old  he purchased an old tank, weight belt, and double-hosed regulator at a yard sale for $125. His first underwater adventure was when “my dad’s fishing boat was tied to the pier and the water was about 12 feet deep. My dad tied a rope around my waist and let me go to the bottom.. I walked around, and when I felt a tug I came back up.”

Did I inherit the genes for science and exploration of the natural world from my father? His career path was exactly the opposite of mine, so I always assumed the answer was no.

But something was in there, because  he was scuba diving before it was really a hobby, and something made him buy those books. There was a seed in there that just never got germinated.

Growing up he did not choose his career path as much as it chose him.  Having to work at a young age and not having a lot of money limits your opportunities, as does having a son at 23.  He didn’t have the freedom to choose as much as the need to support.  He became a laborer, was in a union, experienced injustices in the laborer environment and when he did have the opportunity to choose his own path he became a labor lawyer.

No doubt, largely influenced by his years as a laborer.

What if when he was barely old enough to read someone handed him a set of books about the natural world. If his parents brought home a set of books from a yard sale about outer space.  Would that have triggered the same genes that are responsible for my inquisitiveness?  Would that have been the water needed to germinate that seed? What if he brought me home a set of books about outer space, would I have chosen a very different career in science?

Perhaps if he got those books on space, he would have purchased a telescope instead of an old scuba set and I would have grown up watching him peering into space instead of disappearing below the water.

I sat there, having just realized for the first time the real impact these books have had on me. This is the responsibility we have with young children. As parents, as educators we need to make sure those seeds of science germinate. Never underestimate the value of a lego set, an old microscope, a solar system poster, an old set of books, but most importantly, you.

[I previously wrote about these books on a personal blog. This is has been re-edited for the science education audience.]

I only noticed the cold after my fingers had stopped responding.

I wasn’t able to press the camera shutter button any longer. In that 20 degrees F night, I was standing in the sidewalk with Science Online friends, and I had only a party dress on.

We had attended a few days of SciO14 lectures, when the conference attendees gathered for a party. One of the party guests, astrophysicist Katie Mack, bursts through the double doors and approached us with the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen. She had an ominous look in her face. It was urgent. Through background chatter and music, I overheard:

“Jupiter’s four Galilean moons are visible tonight. We got big binoculars and we are going outside.”

Everyone in an audible radius of Katie immediately followed. No questions asked. No time for coats.

A small crowd of Science Online partiers scrambled outside in the sidewalk. One of the attendees set up the giant binoculars on a tripod. The term “binoculars” does not give it justice: the instrument looked more like a small telescope on stilts. (It’s peculiar how Science Online attendees arrive prepared. In their suitcases I found vials of freshly-collected caterpillars, and supersized mascot costumes. Which gives me an idea for my next photographic project. But I digress).

People took turns shivering and looking through the binocular lenses. Every time someone re-joined the crowd, a “just-seen-a-ghost” expression took over their face. An expression I knew very well.

I had felt it growing up, every time I peered through my telescope lenses. My first time feeling part of the global community when I could, like them, see the same comet. Or, years later, about to witness a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, stood in a Florida sidewalk with NASA fans watching the International Space Station flyby.

You finally understand that something is truly, literally, out of this world.

Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, and Io (my favorite) were all brightly visible surrounding Jupiter. I had never seen the moons before. The scene reached its poetic peak when Katie, trembling (cold, giddy, or both?), narrated the story of Galileo’s discovery.

I was not sure I would be able to describe that moment, which is why I had pulled out my camera earlier that night. I had to flash-freeze the “human behind the scientist” scenes I’ve been observing throughout the Science Online conference. Before, I was secretly shown a squirming caterpillar, heard a first-hand speech on lemur costumed gloves, and got pulled out of a party to watch Jupiter.

Those warm and fuzzy Science Online moments can easily make one forget any turmoil.

This community made me feel welcome.

Later I noticed someone had draped a fleece coat over my shoulders.

Photo credit: ScienceOnline Together

Tomorrow, Sci-Ed team members Cristina and John start their journey to attend Science Online 2014. The conference starts on the 27th and is packed with science communication topics (in fact, there are so many interesting sessions it makes it difficult to choose). The organizers call this event an “unconference”: attendees are active participants in open forum discussions.

I’ll attend the Non-English Science Communication panel, and both John and I will attend the video workshop, among several other sessions. We’ll also tour the Duke Lemur Center and hopefully see a sideways hopping Sifaka (fingers crossed).

Sifaka lemurs, when on the ground, hop sideways. Photo credit: Duke Lemur Center.

Feel free to send us questions (@russo_cristina and @paleoromano), and follow us in real time using twitter hashtags #scio14, #sciox, #sciolang, and #scioprep.