How guest experts tell stories about environmental socio-scientific issues in an undergraduate class

ABSTRACT

To broaden perspectives presented in undergraduate courses, instructors often invite guest speakers, yet there is limited research on students’ perceptions of guest speakers and the potential influence they may have on student learning. In this exploratory study, we describe how senior undergraduate students, in a natural resource management capstone course, perceived guest speakers, who were invited to lecture on environmental socio-scientific issues. Through qualitative content analysis (guided by frame theory) of student interviews, student artifacts, and transcripts of lectures, we determined that, compared to other speakers, ‘memorable’ speakers (1) told stories, (2) evoked emotion, and (3) either explained theory only after sharing cases studies or intermittently explained theory while sharing a case (rather than beginning with theoretical explanations followed by case studies). Because storytelling was a consistent theme across the ‘memorable’ speakers, we posit that this instructional strategy can be effective in engaging students. We make recommendations for how instructors can select or prepare guests in interacting with undergraduate students.

KEYWORDS:

• Socio-scientific issues
• frame theory
• undergraduate
• storytelling
• guest speaker

Acknowledgements

We thank all the guest speakers who consented to have their presentations analysed, the students who participated in the study, and the course instructor for engaging in meaningful discussion about the study. We especially thank Peter Leipzig for his help with inter-rater coding and sharing his expertise on science storytelling. This study was approved by the institutional IRB office (#047-15).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author via email ([email protected]). The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.