“So have you found this conference useful,” I was asked near the end of the conference. I answered, and as I answered in my head the thought surfaced, “Life would be a lot easier if I could just lie instead.” The diplomatic answer is obviously to be effusive, but I’m a slow thinker. The honest answer was “I don’t know yet.” This blog post is, in part, me processing the conference and having the think I need.
To get back to the beginning, over January 7th and 8th, there was a Plant Biology Education conference at Lancaster University. The delegates were from a mix of career stages, from 1st year PhD students to heads of department, along with some of us who don’t teach Plant Biology in any form, but are happy to turn up and cheer from the sidelines. We were mostly from the UK, but there were people from Europe as well.
I think, very broadly, I could categorise the talks into three subjects.
- Inspiration, how do we create the next generation of Plant Biologists?
- Inclusion, how do we help as many people as possible find a satisfying role in Plant Biology?
- Information, what is there, that I don’t know about, that could help my teaching?
…and often a talk would straddle those topics.
I think that Prof. Stephen Spoel’s opening keynote is an example of a great talk that doesn’t immediately have any relevance to me, but I think is useful to educators. He looked at UK Plant Science strategy and funding, and then examined how that can feed into planning education. Personally, I am never going to get funded nor am I going to teach, so that’s not something I can apply directly to what I do.
But I think this, and Alec Forsyth’s later talk about the content of “Plant Science” degrees were both important in giving context to the educational and research environment that Plant Biology degrees work in. Instead of degrees, Plant Science often sits as a collection of modules within a wider biology course. Understanding this context makes a Plant Biology module more useful to a student, and more competitive with its immediate competition on Biology courses. And to be selfish, it gives me something to think about regarding some of the audience for this site.
Inclusion was a recurring theme of the afternoon. It’s particularly timely as DEI comes under threat, unfortunately. I think it was Sara Lopez-Gomollon that brought up research showing diversity helps all students, not just those from underrepresented minorities. She talked about the Diversity Mark at the University of Kent. It’s a useful way of moving from the wooliness of meaning well, and actually putting in something measurable to show improvement in diversity.
Kelsey Byers in the same session talked about making accessible fieldwork. I had a dry throat so, to prevent coughing, had some water – which promptly went down the wrong hole. That meant either coughing through the session, or leaving to have a really good cough, which also seems a bit rude. I went with the latter to minimise disruption, which meant I missed some of what seemed a powerful talk.
One of Byers’s points was that not all people with a disability identify as disabled. Nevertheless these hidden disabilities can be there, even unacknowledged by the student in question. I think this makes accessible fieldwork design more difficult, because instead of making accommodations for a concrete example, you’re having to anticipate issues that you may not recognise in your cohort of students. Yet this is one of the situations where a ‘problem’ is also an ‘opportunity’, in that it means you have to think about what the goal of the fieldwork is, and what makes it an important experience for everyone.
If you see accessibility simply as “lowering the bar”, then you may need a rethink of what it is your fieldwork does.
Another three talks of the first day touched on practical elements of courses. Enrique Lopez-Juez spoke on how laboratory practicals should be used to reinforce the information that students get from lectures, if they think to turn up to lectures.
Anne Plessis spoke on student-lecturer relationships in fieldwork, and how students came to have a more rounded understanding of their lecturers, and also how they felt more seen and understood by lecturers. I think this feeds into the importance of inclusivity in fieldwork.
Beth Dyson’s talk on Authentic Assessment wasn’t focussed on practicals per se, but did cover what the practical use of assessment was. The way she introduced the topic, it’s clear Authentic Assessment is a common phrase in education, but it was something I’d not come across before. As I understand it, it’s about connecting assessment to knowledge and skills that will be of use beyond the module, so something that isn’t an exam paper, like designing and conducting a plant survey.
I think if I were going to run a module, then I would have found this a useful talk. Starting with the assessments and working out what you then need to teach seems a lot more focussed than starting with ideas to teach and then trying to work out how to assess them.
Day one finished late. After dinner there was discussion about what could appear in a Plant Biology Education manifesto, building on ideas from a workshop in the morning. This went through to about 9pm. I’d skipped dinner for various reasons, I don’t do alcohol, and sometimes I need a bit of a run up to cope with people who do do alcohol. Socially, I found this part of the conference a bit of a struggle. In terms of usefulness, it certainly had that. Gripes about various aspects of academic and botanical life were shared. Some were reasonable. Some, I thought, were not – but it’s useful to know where people are coming from.
Day two I found much harder. Breakfast didn’t happen for me either for similar reasons to dinner, and in retrospect I shouldn’t have been surprised when I hit the wall early on.
David Smith and Nigel Francis started with AI in education. They highlighted the usual problems, but also pointed out others that don’t get mentioned so often. For example, who has access to AI? Who can afford whatever ChatGPT’s $20 per month? They argue that planning around student use of AI is now as necessary as planning around use of Wikipedia.
Identifying problem students isn’t going to be part of that. Spotting AI use is a lot more difficult in individual cases than aggregate. For example, there are plant journals where over 60% of the use of the word ‘delve’ in their whole history happened in the past twelve months. Yet the use of the word ‘delve’ in papers before that suggests that some of these 2024 papers may not have used AI.
Smith and Francis also pointed out that you’re getting AI in your tools, even if you’re not aware. That rephrasing tool for a sentence in Grammarly to improve your English may also be subtly altering your vocabulary if you delve into the word frequencies. This may then trigger some blunt AI-detection software.
Jeremy Pritchard and Samantha Dobbie showed that I need a 360 degree camera for reasons. They also talked about their educational resources, and how they’re integrating their teaching with the COP conferences. I thought their example of virtual quadrats in Norway offered an interesting way to gain botanical skills in an exotic location, even if at a distance.
Silvia Manrique took a different approach, working locally with schools for a citizen science project about crosstalk between reproduction and stress in aubergine. She’s found that embedding the projects within schools helps reduce the problem of dropout rates for projects. This gives students the opportunity to work on genuine plant biology problems before they necessarily have prejudices about science.
We then moved on to more plant teaching workshops. Liz Alvey & Andrea Paterlini started with the workshop on Building Effective and Inclusive Plant Science Teaching. They listed a few resources, such as this paper of Fourteen Recommendations to Create a More Inclusive Environment for LGBTQ+ Individuals in Academic Biology. Mia Cerfonteyn in contrast offered various tools to help with communicating science.
Dan Jenkins from the Gatsby Plant Science Education Project talked about plant science in 11 -19 education. Plant Biology at this conference was based in Higher Education, so secondary education wasn’t always viewed with sympathetic eyes. I think he helped explain some of the problems secondary school teachers face. Higher Ed teachers are understandably worried about their own problems, so I think it will take a while for bridges to be built across this divide.
Katharine Hubbard closed with discussion of how to do research in education. I can see that this was necessary. Being a lecturer doesn’t make you an expert in education research any more than being an owl makes you an expert in ornithology. The introduction to the problems of crossing into a new field was welcome, as was the discussion of other ways to make an impact.
Putting it all together, what came out of the conference?
My first thought is that simply providing a point for people involved in plant biology education to come together was helpful. Something that came out of a few talks is that research is valued. Teaching is not, even though it is the foundation of everything else. Being able to talk to other people who value teaching is a great psychological benefit. Having a body of people who recognise the importance of your work is something you can take back to your departments next time you need to hit them over the head with impact.
Another feature was the diversity of talks. I think this indicates that an event like this was long overdue. This wasn’t an event to tackle a specific problem. Topics from all over Plant Biology Education were identified for discussion, which suggests there hasn’t been anyway else to discuss them. Katharine Hubbard has clearly tapped into a lot of pent-up energy in organising this conference. I can foresee this becoming a recurring event.
I think the workshop elements worked well in fostering discussion. For future events it might help to see some theming of talks in sessions with the last part of a session being a workshop to see where there is common ground in the presentations, and maybe help find common language for discussing problems.
The speakers, and indeed all the delegates, were friendly. That might seem a bit of a personal comment, but you probably have a lot of demands on your time. I doubt you’ll want to spend any of it with people who are a pain. I don’t agree with everyone on everything, but that’s more productive than divisive, and a meeting with no disagreement would be stale. I didn’t meet anyone who I’ll be trying to avoid at other conferences.
I can see a future in further events. Unless all problems are solved over the next twelve months, then there’s going to be plenty to discuss. There’s a mix of career stages for the delegates which gives a mix of experience and youth that points to a sustainable long term project. Quite what that project would look like is more of a mystery. It will be interesting to see what ideas develop.
Have I found it useful? I still don’t know, and it might take a couple of months before I can answer that. But have I found it interesting? Definitely, yes.
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