Despite the challenges of working and studying remotely, we’re really proud of how our whole community has worked together to deliver creative learning and teaching solutions throughout the pandemic. The loss of practical learning and access to specific equipment has produced challenges for both staff and students, but that hasn’t stopped our staff from delivering these valuable lessons.
With access to university facilities restricted in line with government guidelines, Dr Sarah Arnold had to get creative in order to deliver practical classes to her 3rd year BSc Biology students. Sarah has been exploring kitchen table insect taxonomy, with her entomology classes featuring behaviour bioassays with mealworm larvae in her own kitchen.
In a normal year, this would be covered over a series of practical classes - one on insect ID where each student would each get a beetle and work through identification keys to establish its species, and then work through some real-life insect field samples to familiarise themselves with different orders and families of insect. There would also be a practical on insect behaviour, where the students are presented with some ‘mystery’ chemicals and some insects, and then have to design experiments to find out what the chemicals do in terms of influencing insect behaviour.
Given the restrictions of practical learning during coronavirus, Sarah was able to adapt her practical entomology classes to demonstrate mealworm behaviour livestreamed from her kitchen; although her home environment didn’t necessarily provide ideal conditions as the kitchen was cold and the mealworms were sleepy!
To provide the best possible learning experience, Sarah ran several practices before going live on Teams to the class. She had to make sure that everything she needed was set out on the kitchen table and then ran some sound-tests and practiced switching between feeds. Sarah admits that the setup was probably much quicker than for a regular lab class, but it can never replace the real thing.
I believe that there’s a lot we can learn from making mistakes in the low-stakes environment in a lab class – it’s a better lesson sometimes to try it yourself and understand why it goes wrong, than to just take the lecturer’s word for it.
Despite these challenges, Sarah says that the students have made the most of the experience:
The students are brilliant! They have been so willing to try new things and adapt to the environment, and when they chime in with their thoughts and speculation I value it so much. I honestly look forward to working with them and am grateful for their efforts.
Today's #KitchenTableEntomology is going to feature behaviour bioassays with mealworm larvae (hopefully with lots of insect misbehaviour to demonstrate how awkward good bioassay design can be!). Hope it goes well and the tech plays nicely... #OnlineTeaching pic.twitter.com/g84J1fEtih
— Dr Sarah Arnold (@sejarnold) February 19, 2021
It has been great to hear your stories about how the whole university community has adapted and shown such resilience over the past year. If you have a story to share please get in touch with Internal Communications.
It reminds us why we are #ProudToBeGre
