Hello my name is Tiffany Taylor, I'm an evolutionary biologist at the University
of Bath within the Milner Centre for Evolution and I have written a
children's book on genetics called 'Little Letters' and it's aimed at six to
nine year olds and this book introduces concepts of DNA, genes and genetics
through fun fictional characters called the 'Rinkidinks' and the idea is that
because it's told as a fun bedtime story
it should explore the ideas of genetics through a narrative that engages
children. I'm here with Professor Laurence Hurst who's the Director of the
Milner Centre and we're here to discuss the book and some of the ideas that led to the project.'
Hello and welcome, very nice to see you Tiffany.
Why do you think it's important that young people engage in genetics?
Well why is it important that
anybody engages in genetics? It's actually one of the oldest questions.
You can go back to the ancient Greeks and they were always wondering
about why it is that offspring look a bit like their parents and there's a
hidden mechanism somewhere there and the remarkable thing about genetics is we
only really know that answer since the latter part of the nineteenth century
and even then we didn't really understand it. We had a an idea of what
must be going on from Mendel but it took until the discovery of DNA and the
structure of DNA for us to really work work that out. So we've only really
understood genetics in a deep sense for the last 50 years or so but
understanding genetics is then really helpful on so many different fronts. You
want to understand genetic diseases, well you need to understand the basis
of a genetic disease. For example, you want to do crop improvement, you want to
make a difference in agriculture, you need to understand the underlying
genetics. So it's got very big applications but it's also just one of
those questions that is one of the great blue skies questions, why do offspring
look like their parents? One of the amazing things about genetics is that
we've now discovered that this stuff DNA seems to be universal to
all life and you've come up with an interesting world in which you've
invented your own life, these Rinkidinks. Why did you go down the line of
inventing an organism that had DNA rather than using a rather than using a
well-known organism you might say?
That's a good question. So in 2012, I
released my first book 'Little Changes' which is where the Rinkidinks first
appeared and this is aimed at the same audience age range, about six to nine
year olds but it explored the major concepts of evolution. My approach
for both of these books firstly was to make a story that was the centre focus, I
wanted the story to be the important message and storytelling has been a tool
used in teaching for as long as we can tell and there's lots of evidence to
suggest that when learning is structured around a narrative it helps to improve
both understanding and retention of information. I decided to use a
fictional character to underpin the scientific concepts I was trying to
impart, partly because it means I could exaggerate features that were important
to communicate ideas so in the case of the Rinkidinks the tails of the Rinkidinks
are very central to their story of speciation and adaptation but also what it
allows is more imagination from the reader and engaging the imagination is
also really key for communication because it allows the reader to engage
with the story and as such the story's content at a much deeper level and
that's obviously better for learning. So my motivation really for introducing
these seemingly complex scientific ideas to a young audience is that evolution
allows a foundation on which biology can be understood and I think this is the
order it should go in because biology in the living worlds are inherently complex
and I think to start with this complexity without any understanding of
where the complexity comes from seems the wrong way around and not just to me
but also there's a very famous scientist Dobzhansky who once said 'but nothing in
biology makes sense except in the light of evolution' and I'm very much inclined
to agree. So the idea for 'Little Letters' came about after reading about your
paper Professor Hurst that showed that teaching genetics prior to teaching
evolution improved understanding of evolution. So I thought that by extending
this imaginary world and the Rinky-Dinks across both disciplines, evolution and
genetics, of which there are many obvious overlaps and links, there's the potential
for connections to be made by the reader between the two stories that could then
facilitate links as their knowledge of the two disciplines grew. So hopefully as
they're introduced to more in-depth learning and more in-depth material in
the curriculum as they get older, the seeds of knowledge that were planted
from these simple stories from when they were younger might accelerate the growth
of these seeds and their understanding of topics in later years. So I think this
this fictional imaginary world just helps implant those ideas and those
seeds in younger children.
I think a lot of what you say makes
perfect sense in terms of the research that we've done. So yes as you say we
found that if you teach genetics before you teach evolution it improves
students' understanding of evolution and it improves their understanding of
genetics interestingly. It provides a concrete framework around which to build
evolutionary ideas otherwise they can be rather abstract I think. But I think some
of our more recent data actually from in-school trials in primary schools very
much also supports your idea of the role of narrative as a means to engage.
We've been having a look in primary schools to see what's the best method to
teach about genetics and evolution and we've actually found that giving them
a story, a narrative story, a picture book story, is actually more effective than
getting them to actually do hands-on experiments which is a most
unusual result I think. But it's very clear. The other interesting
result is again rather against the conventional wisdom. We found that
teaching them about things that aren't human actually engages them.
It engages them in terms of their imaginations so we gave a choice
between studying trilobites, long extinct things that they couldn't possibly have
as pets versus studying their own bodies for example. They actually do best
when they are given in a storybook format, learning about something that isn't
themselves. I suspect that it'll be interesting to see what the data comes
back as from as regards to your book but I suspect the Rinkidinks story will
actually be a very effective mechanism to really engage the students and
engagement is the first component of all good effective learning I think.
So I will be very surprised if it doesn't work!
I hope so! So Laurence, could you tell me a little bit more about the Milner Centre for Evolution and
its role in communicating research to the wider community?
Yes so the Milner Centre, is, well
we think it's probably unique in the world. It's an
accumulation of 25 or so researchers and from the outside we look as though we are
normal academic researchers. We ask brilliant blue sky questions about
organisms that are evolutionary questions. Why, for example, do two
organisms ever cooperate with each other? The sort of questions that you ask
Tiffany I think again are fantastic blue sky questions. Why is evolution
sometimes incredibly repeatable and other times you give the same organism
the same evolutionary tests and it comes up with a different answer every time.
Questions like those are just really great questions. So we we study these
great blue sky questions. Why? Because they are just profoundly interesting
questions. But the flipside of asking just really good blue sky questions is
that people really want to know the answer to them. If you actually pose a question
really well evolutionarily, it's like reading a great Agatha Christie. You want
to know who did it, you want to know what the answer is. And so we also see that we
have a responsibility not just to do good research but to explain that
research. But explaining the research doesn't just simply mean going out and
trying to explain it. There are good ways and there are bad ways and a lot of our
research is also to know how best it is to actually do
outreach, do teaching, do engagement and so on and so forth and in many regards
this is just another empirical question. How best do we actually teach? How best
do we get across difficult concepts? And in the case of evolution
concepts that many people find hard to take. What we're finding though is that the
bigger problem is that the ideas of evolution and the ideas within genetics
are actually very abstract concepts. They're quite hard to get get a handle
on. But finding good techniques, techniques that you can actually show by
randomised control trials, for example, that they do actually work and that they
make a difference, a positive difference, is I think a very important platform for
the Milner Centre itself.
Well thank you very much for listening. The book
'Little Letters' was funded from a public engagement grant from the Genetic Society.
It is available to read for free at www.littlelettersgenetics.co.uk and for any further
information you can go to the website and find out more.