Since 2020, Amy Angert has incorporated a Spotlight Scientist assignment series into the BIOL 406 course. In these assignments, students engage with short podcast and video clips or brief written profiles featuring scientists who challenge traditional stereotypes. Students then write a paragraph responding to specific prompts that ask them to connect the featured scientist to course concepts and to reflect on how diverse perspectives shape science.
Below, Amy describes her motivation for creating this assignment series, how she designed and implemented it, the impact it has had on students and the course, and what she has learned along the way.
What was your motivation for developing the Spotlight Scientist assignments?
I always want to give the students a sense that science is done by real people. It’s not just stuff that appears in textbooks, but it’s a process that’s actually accomplished by people. Because I use classic or foundational examples in the course that go back in time, there tends to be a limited subset of the population that gets represented, and that mismatch was really starting to bother me. So I thought that if I’m trying to give students a sense that science is done by people, and people like them, then I needed a more inclusive and modern take on the diversity of scientists out there and the backgrounds and the viewpoints they bring.
I also introduced the assignment series during COVID when the interpersonal element of the classroom was really lacking. So I thought, well, if we can’t be physically together in community, this might help to give students a sense that there’s a larger scientific community out there.
How did you create and implement these assignments?
I scanned the syllabus and tried to choose scientists who would pair well with the topics we were covering during the lecture, and sometimes that worked better than others. For example, when we were talking about plant-pollinator interactions, I used a spotlight of a scientist who studies plant-pollinator interactions, although the spotlights are not on the scientific topic itself. I was just trying to have some coherency between the scientist spotlight and what we were covering in the course so the assignments didn’t feel like a completely standalone and unrelated thing.
I also thought about different axes of diversity and who tends to be represented or underrepresented in science. I didn’t want it to feel like tokenism, but I did try very hard to get a big breadth of different kinds of diversity in the scientific population. So I thought about who are some voices that traditionally haven’t been as prominent and I tried to bring those in.
I leaned heavily on other resources, so I looked at websites, like 500 Queer Scientists, and different threads or groups, like BlackBotanistsWeek. I also went to different places where people were gathering and sharing information and finding who were the voices that were leading conversations on these topics.
I was also trying to think about how to include the practice and process of doing science, rather than just the scientific topic, and so some of the spotlights touch on things like safety in the field and what it’s like to travel to do fieldwork when you come from different backgrounds.
And these assignments are pretty low stakes. It’s just like, listen to 8 minutes of this podcast clip and then write a paragraph. So, I hope it’s the kind of thing that they can do while they’re out walking, or just as a lighter break from other kinds of work. To get an idea of what these assignments look like, see the example below.
What impact have these assignments had on students or the course?
For the course, I’d say probably the biggest impact was it caused me to be more mindful when I was choosing new case studies because I usually try to feature a photo of the scientist in the field or a headshot of the scientist who was the lead author of the study, and it really made me think about choosing a more diverse set of studies and not just going to the tried-and-true old ones. It’s encouraged me to diversify the examples and the people I’m featuring in class, not just in the spotlights.
For students, I have received narrative feedback from folks who say that these assignments have really opened their minds and have made them feel included. There are also students over the years who’ve said that the assignments have made them think about things they hadn’t considered before. I don’t think that’s true for every student, but when they do write that in the narrative feedback, it feels really meaningful.
This year, one of the scientist spotlights that touched on imposter syndrome and the myth of the lone genius prompted a student to write a really heartfelt post on Piazza that they’d been musing on that and it made them feel like they might actually have a path in science, and did anyone else feel that? And it ended up prompting this little discussion with others in the course that I was really happy to see.
What have you learned or found surprising?
These assignments are graded based on completion, they either do it or they don’t (though the TAs and I do give feedback to let them know that we are reading them and they are being received with care), and with the rise of Generative AI, I feel like there’s a large number of students that are just trying to get it done because it’s a point for participation, which is why I’m always on the verge of taking them away. But then, some students just take it so seriously and they write these really thoughtful reflections. So I’ve learned not to worry so much about the ones that phone it in, because there are those students out there who are going to be really impacted or touched positively by it, which makes me think that it’s still worth it.
I’ve also learned not to assume. I got some pushback from a student about a prompt that I had written about a scientist who was studying floral evolution from the point of view of physiology instead of the attraction to pollinators, which is a pretty unusual angle to take on plant pollinator or floral trait evolution, and this scientist had also spoken about coming to science as an outsider based on their identity. In the prompt I sort of married those two things and assumed that the scientist’s outsider perspective had given him a new lens on the scientific problem, and the student pushed back and said I shouldn’t be assuming or implying that one begets the other. Through this I learned I needed to be very careful with my prompt wording and really reflect and ask myself, am I making hidden assumptions? In trying to open up minds am I actually just perpetuating biases? So it caused me to really scan carefully and try to question my assumptions before I put them out there again. This experience challenged me, but in the end it turned into a learning opportunity.
What challenges did you encounter when creating or implementing these assignments?
I think the biggest part for me was whittling down from a list of many possibilities to a selected few scientists to feature and then writing prompts for the reflections that I wanted students to do that were thoughtful and tried to draw connections to the course or to other things we’ve talked about. I found the prompts really hard to write in a way that wasn’t just generic or asking them to regurgitate something, so that’s been a challenge.
Additionally, dealing with AI has been a challenge, and also keeping the spotlights current. I built these around 2020, and so some of them are seeming a little dated now, like someone who’s a postdoc has now moved on and I’m still using the old link, and so I think one challenge is keeping them up to date. But the ones that I have now have been curated and they work well, and so that balance between throwing out something that’s working well, just for the sake of keeping it really current, is the trade-off I’m struggling with a little bit right now. Like, this year, for the first time, some of the podcast clip web links were broken or I was having trouble finding them in the archives, that kind of thing.
How has the assignment series changes over time?
It really hasn’t, although I have brought in new ones. I think at first I had six and now they’re almost weekly, so I’ve brought in quite a few more. I haven’t dropped many, if any, I’ve really just expanded it. Now it’s one a week, except for reading week and exam weeks. And even though I’ve expanded them, nobody’s complained about them being too numerous. Students can automatically miss one without any need to email me and worry about lost points or anything, so I think that takes some pressure off. But it’s astonishing to me, actually, how many students do all of them, even though they don’t have to. There’s a few students who get to the end of term and just don’t do the last one because they don’t have to, but they’re the minority.
What advice would you give someone who wanted to incorporate something similar in their course?
I would recommend that people try to crowdsource it a bit. When I was initially brainstorming scientists to spotlight, I was using these online resources that other people had collated. But then I also ran it by all my grad students at a lab meeting because I figured having a younger, fresher take would probably be a good idea. I also felt quite nervous about putting this out there in my course, and so I just wanted more eyes on it. I think that doing this helped me find good sources, it helped me tune the prompts, and it helped me feel more confident when I did open it up in the course for the first time. Bringing in suggestions from grad students was very helpful, they had great suggestions.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
The idea of spotlight scientists is not mine – I was inspired by seeing it mentioned in some papers on inclusive pedagogy. And though I didn’t know about this resource at the time (and wish I had!), the website https://scientistspotlights.org/ has tons of useful resources for getting started, as well as links to primary literature on this topic.
Looking for more information about Scientist Spotlights? Check out the Bio News Scientist Spotlight Assignments resource page here.