The 8th Annual Life Discovery Conference 2023: Variants in Biology Education: What Can we Learn from Pandemics?

What can we learn from pandemics? That was the focus of the 8th Life Discovery—Doing Science Biology Education Conference (LDC) held March 23–25, 2023 at the Florida A&M University (FAMU) Sustainability Institute (Florida, USA). A total of 71 participants, comprising high school educators and college faculty, convened to discuss emerging themes in biology and STEM education. The LDC was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Biointeractive. It is a project of the Life Discovery Ed Partners: co-organized by the Ecological Society of America (ESA), Botanical Society of America, and Society for the Study of Evolution. For the first time, the LDC was hosted at a Historically Black University (HBCU). Support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) provided travel grants for 29 college faculty from diverse backgrounds and institutions, including 23 from either community colleges; tribal colleges and universities, HBCUs, and minority-serving institutions; or both. NSF support also provided registration support for 14 faculty and keynote speakers. The 2023 LDC theme was "Variants in Biology Education: What can we learn from pandemics?" Given how the world responded to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic within a highly politicized landscape, science communication and combating misinformation was of utmost importance. Biology education will need to adapt just as quickly and will need to consider the pace of change and innovation to keep students informed and prepared to contribute to the global workforce. These questions were addressed through over 50 presentations, ranging from data-driven research to demonstrations of classroom lesson plans and curriculum design. Conference events aimed to train participants in additional pedagogical techniques to employ in the classroom. The conference offered: 2 keynote presentations, 17 short presentations, 10 workshops, 28 roundtable discussions, and 1 networking session with five topics. The Education Share Fair Roundtable sessions are a unique feature of the LDC in which participants can share lesson plans and teaching ideas that are in development to garner feedback from their peers and incorporate that feedback prior to deployment in their classrooms. Additionally, networking sessions gave participants the opportunity to collect and discuss the implementation of ideas gathered during the conference. A cross-cutting theme of all Networking Sessions was the importance of bringing science closer to students' daily lives, making it more approachable and relevant, and less about research that is occurring outside of the typical student frame of reference. Discussions were organized into the following topics; summaries of participant dialogue follow each topic. Participants highlighted the value of including a diverse range of topics when teaching disease ecology in the classroom. Aside from cell biology, population and community ecology, epidemiology, and evolution, participants emphasized the need for components outside the usual scope of STEM, such as cultural studies, political science, sociology, and economics. These topics would foster a broader understanding of science by adding a global context, while creating more student interest and investment. Just as climate change education can be obscured through an overemphasis on the science, disease ecology needs to be more relatable to students, by including health inequities and social justice, while incorporating the lived experiences of the study subjects, not just the statistics and numbers. This should make disease ecology more approachable and have a deeper impact on students. Pedagogically, the value of case studies and other hands-on lessons such as outbreak games with live SIR models (Susceptibles, Infected, and Recovered) that explore the realities of tracking and containing outbreaks are of great importance. These will give students the chance to experience careers in disease ecology for themselves and arm them with the critical thinking skills to discern fake news and explain the reality of outbreaks to friends and family. Adapting the classroom to include such ideas as above was concluded to be steps in the right direction and prepare our students for the future. Fake news can be combated by collecting ideas, cases, and opinions from multiple sources before making conclusions and decisions. It is also especially worthwhile to be cognizant of the stereotypes, biases, and overall agendas of those sources. To increase scientific literacy, more scientific journal articles and literature need to be brought into the classroom, especially those that communicate a scientific consensus. It is only through normalizing scientific research and literature that we can weed out fake news and misinformation. It is through a lack of scientific communication that is relatable and accessible that we also have a pandemic of misinformation that was brought to light with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In the classroom, students should be given guidelines when searching for scientific (or any sort of) information, while also learning to pursue opposite opinions to formulate a more complete story of the topic. Assignments should require students to consider the entire scope of the source as mentioned previously in conjunction with corroborating sources. Finally, the scientific consensus should be considered along with peer review, keeping cognizant of how science information can change through further experimentation and discovery. Students will need to be informed about the demands and hot topics pending in their desired career path. It will be the responsibility of instructors to keep up with these new trends and to adapt their courses accordingly. This should also include regular networking and communication between teachers and employers to keep students informed. In the classroom, preparing students can include projects or case studies based on career trends or what the industry and field is seeking from future employees. Scientific societies such as LDC organizers, ESA, BSA, and SSE, have an important role to bring career resources to its community and to support exchange of models for career preparation. Aside from course content, universities and courses should include more field trips and career-related experiences as part of the course, not just as optional activities students have to fit in themselves. Classes can also serve as pathways to graduate and professional schools, jobs, companies, trades, etc., in which guest speakers can inform students of the realities of their careers. This will give students the opportunity to change majors, seek new interests, or to reinforce their passions and trajectories. Students often bounce and fumble through their undergraduate experiences as they try to decide their paths with limited guidance unless they have the innate interest or the capacity to seek experiences on their own. Bringing these activities into the classroom will present career opportunities earlier in the undergraduate pathway and engage all students. To develop student interest, students need to feel that the issues are relevant to their lives. This can include case studies, projects where they collect their own data, and citizen science, which can include the local communities of these students. Data included can be historical data showing changes in their local community, rather than about locations elsewhere that students may be unfamiliar with. The recurring LDC theme of making science more approachable and relevant was strongly emphasized during discussion of climate change education. Typically students' response to climate change is mostly driven by a vague sense of moral imperative to help people, but no one in particular. Climate change is familiar, but the personal stories, experiences, and insights that students can relate to remain unfamiliar. Pertinent issues need to be brought to the students' attention in the classroom, such as mosquitoes and pests, agricultural changes affecting the foods they eat, where vacations may be prohibited or ill-advised, emergent diseases, etc. Furthermore, these issues could include social injustice such as in some countries and cities (or inner cities vs. rural areas) that are being more impacted than others. Students also need more self-determination and choice to place their interest through data-driven investigations and connecting the people to data through community and participatory science. To make external connections, these same investigations can loop in disease ecology and how climate change is impacting disease dynamics and especially people as a result. This can also include case studies addressing fake news, incorporating medical data, vaccinations, and other broad scale topics to eliminate silos in STEM. Faculty can reach students about biodiversity issues by preparing tools and data sets that are relevant to them, bringing a sense of relevance beyond the data and attention to issues that students find relevant. Projects or short modules can provide the entire picture for students, such as those provided by the QUBES platform (https://qubeshub.org/). This is important in that students would rather collect their own data than use those of others to form stories. Tying biodiversity to social injustice and other relevant issues might spark student interest as well, as noted as a recurring theme to bring issues closer to students. The critical factor in bringing students in and the progress of solving these issues in the future requires us to increase the relevancy of the issue to their own lives and that begins through hands-on data collection. Students can engage in data and visualization using tools such as Desmos, Data Classroom, and TUVA, as well as preparing faculty to teach such activities. Math illiteracy and apathy for biodiversity issues can be difficult to bridge, especially when in some instances students are more concerned about their next meal or employment. Teachers themselves are not always trained in data analytics, mathematical tools, and related pedagogy to simplify these fields for students who already feel intimidated. Without networking or knowing colleagues with these skills, it can be difficult for an eager teacher to find the resources to increase their skills in addition to their usual responsibilities. Increasing teacher training in data and meeting students where they are is critical for literacy. The 2023 Life Discovery—Doing Science Conference continued the conversation among educators about how to address the gaps in STEM fields and garner student interest. We noted that student interests can be fostered through hands-on experiences, opportunities to practice career relevant skills, and bringing personal connections to data through community science and stronger connections to the people behind the data. With these insights, we believe that students will cultivate their innate interests in STEM and be better prepared for the ever-changing and adapting workplace of biology. No data were collected for this study.