Pseudomonas fluorescens
I have just completed my second full week at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences and I have learned a ton! This week we isolated Pseudomonas fluorescens(a type of bacteria found in the roots of dandelions and known to be very helpful to plants), attempted to created flourescent/color coded photographs showing the microbes living in dirt, worked on our lesson plans, spoke with scientists about how to speak with children, prepared a museum style scientist talk for a presentation, and spent a lot of time trying to make our citizen science project accessible to teachers and students everywhere.
Citizen science projects are a collaboration between trained scientists and volunteers (or students) in which all parties involved are adding to our collective understanding of our world by way of the topic being studied. By bringing citizen science to middle school children we are sending the message that 1)Science is an ongoing process, 2) they are real scientists, and 3) their ideas matter. When students receive a message like this we are empowering them as critical thinkers. Could you imagine the types of adults that kids with a sense of meaning and empowerment will grow to be?
Since becoming a Kenan Fellow I have been looking forward to designing and implementing citizen science lessons for my kids that will leave a lasting impact. However, the more days I spend actually working on this project and the more I learn about citizen science, the more I find myself thinking about the fact that I only teach 50 kids a year. If I am able to spread my new found love of citizen science to my planning team we will influence 100 kids a year. If I can get my whole school on the citizen science bandwagon we would reach 300 kids a year. This just doesn’t feel like enough. I want all of the children to have access to science that inspires them, so the idea of making our project scaleable is really important to me.
This week my thoughts have been consumed with finding ways for all teachers to be able to access our lesson and feel confident doing so. So far we have made 3 major leaps toward making this happen. Writing the lessons in a way that is easy for people outside of the lab to understand is a little tough, but finding ways to study microbes without fancy lab equipment has been much tougher. For our project we want students to collect plant samples (leaves, soil, soil on the root, and the root itself), create bacteria and fungi cultures for each part of the sample, examine what grows on the plates and how much of each thing grows, and report their findings back to Julia (Dr. Stevens) who is looking for plants that attract bacteria and fungi and take bacteria into their roots to live symbiotically. Julia will use the student findings to select plants to study further. To make plates in the lab their is a whole process of mixing ingredients ordered from Science companies, adding antibacterial or antifungal powders, autoclaving, and pouring into dishes. Most teachers do not own an autoclave or have access to medical grade antibacterial/antifungal so this week we experimented with using over the counter supplies.
I am proud to say that we successfully created petri dishes full of agar made with potting soil, grocery store agar powder, Neosporin (antibacterial), and Tinactin (antifungal). We were even able to sterilize them using a microwave! We put some samples on them before leaving for the weekend and I am hopeful that we will find some healthy bacteria and fungi growing when we arrive tomorrow morning! If this method works out many more teachers will be able to bring this awesome project into their rooms and many more students will get to be citizen scientists and contribute to Julia’s study of symbiotic plant microbes. This is our first major breakthrough.
Second, on Friday I got a chance to talk with a representative from the Science House (an organization that aims to assist k-12 STEM Educators) and he told me that we may even be able to make kits that teachers can check out from the Science House to complete our project! This will increase accessibility even more and I am super excited by this possibility!
Third, next week we are going to make videos of ourselves following the lab procedure outlined in our lesson making it far easier for any science teacher to understand. This should increase confidence and allow more teachers and students to use our lessons! Awesome!
Part of Julia’s mission as a microbiologist, as a researcher, and as a human is to involve the general public in real science. I am 100% onboard with this mission and I am glad that Team Dirt has been able to make huge strides in this area over this past week. It has been a really great week for us and I am excited to see what our final lesson and videos look like!