Broadening the impact of plant science through innovative, integrative, and inclusive outreach

Abstract

Population growth and climate change will impact food security and potentially exacerbate the environmental toll that agriculture has taken on our planet. These existential concerns demand that a passionate, interdisciplinary, and diverse community of plant science professionals is trained during the 21st century. Furthermore, societal trends that question the importance of science and expert knowledge highlight the need to better communicate the value of rigorous fundamental scientific exploration. Engaging students and the general public in the wonder of plants, and science in general, requires renewed efforts that take advantage of advances in technology and new models of funding and knowledge dissemination. In November 2018, funded by the National Science Foundation through the Arabidopsis Research and Training for the 21st century (ART 21) research coordination network, a symposium and workshop were held that included a diverse panel of students, scientists, educators, and administrators from across the US. The purpose of the workshop was to re-envision how outreach programs are funded, evaluated, acknowledged, and shared within the plant science community. One key objective was to generate a roadmap for future efforts. We hope that this document will serve as such, by providing a comprehensive resource for students and young faculty interested in developing effective outreach programs. We also anticipate that this document will guide the formation of community partnerships to scale up currently successful outreach programs, and lead to the design of future programs that effectively engage with a more diverse student body and citizenry.

FIGURE 1

Advancing outreach in plant science through Inclusion, Innovation and Integration. Successful outreach programs thrive when a holistic approach is taken. Inclusive programs are crafted with awareness of the demographic, cultural and institutional contexts they exist in. Innovative programs use the state of the art organizational models in their design and devise a means of evaluating their effectiveness through assessments appropriate to their scale. Integrative programs communicate their outreach efforts across labs and institutes to disseminate and share what works. All of these activities need to be supported by an ecosystem of funding from the government, universities and private foundations that recognize excellence across these areas

FIGURE 2

Trends in global food demand and number of PhDs awarded in biomedical and plant science fields. (a) Current yield trends are insufficient to address food demands by 2050. Global projection of yield trends indicates a deficit to achieve the needed doubling in crop production by 2050. Closed circles indicate measured yield for the four main global crops until 2008. Solid lines are the projections following the measured trends, and the dashed lines show the yield increase needed to double production in each crop by 2050 without adding additional land. Data regraphed and adapted from Ray et al., (2013). (b) The number of PhDs in applied and basic plant science has not kept up with trends in other disciplines. Data regraphed and adapted from Jones (2014)

FIGURE 3

CLEAR outreach program. CLEAR members (a) isolating DNA from veggies at Bay Area Science Festival (b) talking about food waste at Downtown Berkeley's Farmers’ Market (c) talking about citrus diversity at Downtown Berkeley Farmers’ Market (d) teaching in a CRISPR‐in‐the‐Classroom high school class. (e) CLEAR PubScience event featuring a UC Berkeley astrophysicist talking about extraterrestrial intelligence

FIGURE 4

A logic model tool to aid in the planning and evaluation of the impact of outreach activities. A logic model is a hypothesized road map that presents the cause‐effect relationships among the resources, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact for a program. While it can be in the form of a narrative, it was commonly represented graphically to show the connection between the program's activities and its intended effects using a series of “if/then” statements. URM, Underrepresented Minority. Modified from (Taylor‐Powell & Henert, 2008). While “URM'' is a commonly used term to indicate members of under‐represented groups in STEM, as language evolves, new terms arise, including by members of the groups being referenced. Two more recent terms include “minoritized” (Minority vs. Minoritized, 2016) and “Persons Excluded because of their Ethnicity or Race” (PEER; Asai, 2020)

FIGURE 5

Plants4Kids outreach program. Students participating in the “Plants 4 Kids” outreach program in North Carolina (images provided by Anna Stepanova [NCSU]). (a) A welcoming sign at a typical Plants4Kids museum demo booth. (b) Three‐week‐old light‐grown pea plants sprouted in recycled yogurt cups: green peas and other legume seeds sold in pound‐size bags at most grocery stores are inexpensive and large enough for young kids to handle with ease; museum visitors of all ages plant seeds during hands‐on Plants4Kids demos and take the cups home to observe plant germination and growth. (c–e) Representative scenes from a Plants4Kids booth at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences demonstrating active public engagement in the hands‐on activities the program provides