Susan Flowers

Tyson Education and Outreach Coordinator

“What we do at Tyson is hands-on participation in authentic research experiences. I work with students on in-the-moment, in-person interaction, processing the monotony that is required to do rigorous environmental biology research. If you want to have accurate science, you’ve got to have large data sets. And that sometimes means counting 40,000 trees, sorting thousands of seeds from prairie mesocosms, or transcribing hours of interviews. As an experiential educator I want to foster collaboration, group learning, and peer review through synchronous interaction in a shared space.

We’ve had to translate to the new hands-on: a keyboard. The lack of in-person interactions has radically changed how I help people process things. Going into hiatus from some of my typical research questions has allowed me to dig really deeply into how to construct a good online remote situation for people. And with the overflow of protest to white supremacist culture in the U.S. starting to happen, I’ve been able to fully embrace the diversity, equity and inclusion work that has always fallen in my work at Tyson. We should always be paying attention to the social, political, economic climate, during any given field season. With both online and anti-racism learning elevated this summer, I’ve been able to dig into these areas in a much deeper, almost-emergency fashion.

Last week we were running a remote training for high school students in our SIFT program that normally would take place at Shaw Nature Reserve. I went from a Zoom-interface meeting with my Tyson staff colleagues, directly into a GroupMe chat with the students who were using iNaturalist to do a bioblitz in their yards or local parks, from their phones. They are students who are just starting to understand what environmental biology is. Then back on Zoom, I set up break out rooms for my Tyson colleagues with the students to discuss their personal career paths.

All my layers came together: mentors, undergraduates, my colleagues on staff at Tyson, the high school students who are just beginning their journey. It was like a giant lasagna with all these layers! It was exhausting but super-exciting, because I was getting emails from Tyson mentors who had met with the SIFTers, saying, ‘Those high school students were great! Can you give me critical feedback on how I did with them?’ I had so much fun. Everybody was learning and meeting and it was all over the computer, which was ridiculous and not ‘best practices’ for how these things should go down. But it still turned out really great.

Learning is happening.”