Opinions | Sebastian Pilichowski | EDUKACJA BIOLOGICZNA I ŚRODOWISKOWA 1/2015
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EDUKACJA BIOLOGICZNA I ŚRODOWISKOWA | ebis.ibe.edu.pl | ebis@ibe.edu.pl | © for the article by the Authors 2015 © for the edition by Instytut Badań Edukacyjnych 2015
When I am writing this sentence, the year 2014 is slowly coming to an end – it is 11.11.2014 today. There-fore, it is a good time to summarize last months and reflect upon the situation. Among many positive obser-vations, I find two areas which have drastically changed my opinion about some people. To organize the text in a logical form, I dare to divide it into two sections: 1) guided tours and outdoor lessons, and 2) student con-ferences.
1. Guided tours and outdoor lessons
My experience is based on my work which involves guiding school trips in the Botanical Garden of the Zielona Góra University. I dedicate this section to all teachers and supervisors who take their pupils and
stu-Opinions
Tours, conferences and bad practices
in the contemporary natural science
Sebastian Pilichowski
mgr Sebastian Pilichowski: Botanical Garden of the
University of Zielona Góra, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Zielona Góra Zielona Góra 65-392, Botaniczna 50a street; s.pilichowski@wnb.uz.zgora.pl
dents to Botanical Gardens, Zoological Gardens, forest educational centres and other similar institutions.
Ladies and Gentlemen – a guide and any other per-son responsible for guiding is not a supervisor. It means that only you are responsible for your behaviour dur-ing the lesson/trip, as well as for the behaviour of the group and you are responsible for disciplining your students. You know very well, how irritating ignoring a teacher can be. . Such ignoring behaviour gets worse when combined with other types of misbehavior, and when the group exceeds roughly twenty persons. Until the summer holidays, I managed to conduct guided les-sons for the groups of Polish middle school students of even eighty persons (I highlight it because of the times are hard). However, I would like to question the pur-pose of my guided tours, if the supervisors were bored because they visited the Botanical Garden for the third time during the holidays and three of them left the group they were in charge of, leaving the fourth one (who didn’t show much enthusiasm either) with me and a really large group of unruly children and youths. It would have been better for them to enter the Botani-cal Garden and organise some activities themselves – who knows, maybe the activities would have been better than my guided lesson – and let me take care of an other group of guests. I can only add that there is hardly anything worse than a school group supervisor/ teacher, who, posing as an expert, tries to talk dismiss-ively about the stories and facts I say. What I mean by “facts” and “stories” here are some aspects of the envi-ronment and nature conservation, biodiversity, ecology and so on. I have never limited the lesson to a simplistic form of „Dear guests, here is X, and here we can see Y”. I have always tried my best to mix numerous narrative threads to make the lessons more attractive, to show the practical character of the natural sciences, challenge some stereotypes and inspire curiosity to learn about
the whole world of nature. If teachers, however, ignore my requests (to touch leaves, to smell flowers) it is small wonder students ignore them too. Such “physical” tasks, engaging other senses than vision and hearing, make the lessons different from watching wildlife on TV or computer. Screens and speakers will never replace the contact with nature, even if it is changed by human ac-tivities.
Another topic are students’ manners during the classes. Let me say that every botanical garden and oth-er similar institution have their own REGULATIONS. Every guest is obliged to read and understand them; fur-thermore a guest who enters such places, is ACCEPT-ING them. Among the regulations we find paragraphs concerning exhibit and garden property protection, frightening animals, feeding animals and many others. Since students do not know that they must not pluck flowers in botanical gardens and damage plants, maybe the teacher should acquaint the students with the rules before entering a botanical garden? Everyone who has participated in my classes does know that I have always allowed students to collect cones, leaves and flowers, but on condition they naturally fell down on the ground. However, how to allow students to satisfy the desire to explore the world of plants and other aspects of nature, if one of them, standing next to me, suddenly plucks a plant? If such person was a very young child or men-tally disabled, it should be forgiven and the rules should be once more explained, it is natural. It is the duty of teachers and supervisors to keep an eye on their stu-dents. Also, it would be nice to use such words as „good morning” or „goodbye”. It is worrying that groups treat guides like an object or an android, whose duty is to guide a group and it is not worth of any sign of respect.
Another question to ask is: when does the risk of meeting a supervisor with negative mind-set increase? Clearly when we deal with a person, who sees the
out-Opinions | Sebastian Pilichowski | EDUKACJA BIOLOGICZNA I ŚRODOWISKOWA 1/2015
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EDUKACJA BIOLOGICZNA I ŚRODOWISKOWA | ebis.ibe.edu.pl | ebis@ibe.edu.pl | © for the article by the Authors 2015 © for the edition by Instytut Badań Edukacyjnych 2015
door classes as the greatest evil. But I wouldn’t like to focus too much on that topic, and move on to biologists and gardening enthusiasts. Among them we find many fantastic partners to talk and exchange experiences, on the other hand we meet self-styled experts ”I know everything / I cultivate every one of these plants”. It is easy to be critical about a young botanical garden like ours, however it is hard to believe that every biologist and hobbyist have the Chang’s Sweetgum Liquidambar acalycina or the cultivar of the Durmast oak Quercus
petraea ‘Muscavensis’. The problem starts when they
express their criticism aloud. Students, hearing that, immediately lose respect toward a guide, which is, sim-ply put, not fair. The climax comes when we confront an „everything-possesing” and „everything-knowing” teachers. As it turns out, the guide should give up the work and leave it for a more competent person, and fi-nally find time to improve his/her skills and knowledge. But... we, the naturalists, have to keep learning all the time and we are well aware that probably we will never reach the satisfying level. The above problems concern not only the author of this text. After numerous talks, for example during the education conference held at the Faculty of Biological Sciences of the University of Zielona Góra last September, I know that such problems are common for nature educators.
2. Student conferences
In this part of the text I would like to describe an-other dysfunction of the system, a dysfunction which started some time ago, and is currently so common that it is incredibly difficult to fight with. It applies to PhD students especially, however, more and more often it concerns younger students as well. On the one hand, a conference is a chance for students to exchange their experiences and views, meet new people, learn about
other institutions, present the results of their work, on the other hand, however, conferences have just become tools to get a scholarship. That is one of the reasons why students, organizers and other honest participants have lost their respect for this type of events. I recommend opening a book of abstracts and check the index to see how many times different authors are listed. Not long ago if someone was mentioned twice, it was a proof of a high level of scientific activity. Currently, however, it is not unusual to be listed three or four times. There are two kinds of reasons: 1) guest authorship (adding other authors, even though they have no contribution to the presented study), 2) presenting a number of oral presenta-tions or posters. As an example I will use the last student conference that was held at my faculty of the Biological Sciences (6–8.11.2014), that conference had an interdis-ciplinary character. Unfortunately, the attitude of some of the participants became an inspiration for my text.
It was the first time that two participants collected the conference materials, uploaded their presentation files on the computer at the conference office and... did not show up during their oral presentation sessions (they had more than two presentations). They were pre-sent, however, during the lunch, get-together party and closing ceremony. There are no words strong enough to describe such behaviour.
Similarly, many participants had evidently more urgent duties to attend to than be present next to their posters to discuss their results with others. One of the participants called us the day before their presentation and asked whether it would be possible to just email two presentations due to (sudden) absence the next day. And what then? Should we just start an auto slide show? What is worse the percentage of poster-submitting par-ticipants who were unable to attend the event was even higher than the previous year. They only sent us their posters.
The last straw was ignoring the closing ceremony. To make it possible for everybody to attend the ceremony, the time of the conference had been changed from Fri-day–Sunday to Thursday–Saturday. The intention was to allow the participants to come back home during the weekend. Naturally, there are special situations that need to be understood, however, as the result of treat-ing conferences instrumentally, the border between real and sham excuses is getting more and more blurred. Participants have many reasons for attendance prob-lems (connected with health, obtaining visas) and often appear only to present their own results. If guests from Ukraine can stay till the end of the conference, I think that Polish guests are (or rather should be) able to do the same. It is strange to receive e-mails with questions such as: “When will you send the diplomas/awards?”. I do not aim to sound hysterical, nevertheless it is true that huge efforts of organizers are all in vain, when there is no audience during sessions or there are only a few participants (authors of the next presentations).
It is also a time to warn potential participants off repeating their results during different conferences; please understand that it is self-plagiarism. Indepen-dently of all what had been said, there are no proce-dures that would verify the participants. An ideal so-lution would be creating a network managed by some national institution and gathering information from all institutions organizing conferences. Such informa-tion would contain participants personal accounts with automatically generated annotation about their con-tribution in conferences (absence, passiveness, poster/ oral presentation). It sounds idealistically, however in our times of progressing digitalization, more complex systems and networks are being developed and created. Of course I am aware of the fact that it is only an idea worth of considering and hard to realise, but is it really unreal?
Opinions | Sebastian Pilichowski | EDUKACJA BIOLOGICZNA I ŚRODOWISKOWA 1/2015
71
SCHOOL
SCIENCE
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EDUKACJA BIOLOGICZNA I ŚRODOWISKOWA | ebis.ibe.edu.pl | ebis@ibe.edu.pl | © for the article by the Authors 2015 © for the edition by Instytut Badań Edukacyjnych 2015
The problems that I described above are common in Poland and abroad. Potential solutions for such prob-lems should be taken into consideration, moreover it must be said that there is a supervisor behind a stu-dent participant. And sadly, it is becoming more and more frequent that such person, instead of teaching some basic rules and scientific savoir vivre, induces and strengthens such negative manners. Some time ago, my former supervisor told me the words of his supervisor: „There is a quantity of the supervisor behind the PhD student”. That sentence did not lose its value, and should be remembered. We have to fight back the system and not support it.
