Episode 10: UC Boulder’s Dick McIntosh on Workshops in Africa

In today’s podcast, Ilona talks with Dick McIntosh, a Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dick has long been interested in the challenges faced by students in Africa, so through the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) he began creating courses in Uganda, Tanzania, and Ghana, to reach young scientists there and begin fruitful collaborations. With the help of funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Dick created ASCB-sponsored workshops in cell biology, which are short courses focused on problem-solving in basic research, and how general instruction in science can mirror this inquiry-based model. Listen to this podcast to learn about necessary steps toward creating a successful teaching workshop, and why getting US scientists to think about Africa is important. [14:20]

Full transcript

ILONA MIKO: Welcome to the latest edition of NatureEdCast by Nature Education. I’m Ilona Miko, and today we are talking with Dick McIntosh from the University of Colorado at Boulder about workshops in Africa. Dick McIntosh is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado–Boulder. He is now officially retired after an award-winning career as a cell biologist and expert on mitosis. But in retirement he has turned toward global education. Dick had long been interested in the challenges faced by students in Africa. So through the American Society for Cell Biology, known as ASCB, he began creating science courses in Uganda, Tanzania, and Ghana to reach young scientists there and begin fruitful collaborations. With the help of funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Dick created ASCB-sponsored workshops in cell biology, which are short courses focused on problem-solving in basic research, and how general instruction in science can mirror this inquiry-based model. Welcome, Dick.

DICK MCINTOSH: Thank you, I’m glad to be here.

MIKO: Thanks for joining us. So you’ve created these workshops. What is a typical workshop like?

MCINTOSH: Each has been a bit different. They’ve all worked with about twenty-five young Africans who are at various levels of education. All had finished their bachelor’s degrees, some were still Master’s students, some Ph.D. students, and some postdoctoral. A few were senior faculty. They’ve been selected from applicants who have just come in on the basis of a web-type search, an advertising of the course, and what we’ve tried to do is provide them with an opportunity to expand their knowledge in cell biology, which is a very broad-reaching aspect of modern science. The faculty of the course has been either Americans or Europeans and, in most cases, fairly senior people who have a career of research accomplishment in something relevant to African medical problems — for example, the protozoa that cause serious African diseases, like malaria and sleeping sickness — and these people have also been chosen in part because of their real interest in pedagogy. So they’ve provided a very energetic and focused educational experience for the African student.

MIKO: How many days does a workshop go?

MCINTOSH: They’ve been two weeks. The first week — six days with one day at the end for a break — and then five days in the next week. And each day has been quite dense, running from 8:30 in the morning to about 9:00 at night.

MIKO: Oh wow, that’s intense. And so how many students do you get?

MCINTOSH: Twenty-five is what we’ve tried to take for each one. And the number of faculty has usually been about eight.

MIKO: And so you’re working together in this workshop for six days, and you focus on issues that are relevant to the students there — that they can relate to based on their life — so some cell biology topic that’s relevant to the country they live in or the experience perhaps that they’ve had?

MCINTOSH: Most of the students have been trained in some class aspect of biology, like zoology or biochemistry, and so cell biology gives them a new slant on what they know already.

MIKO: I see, and also perhaps an application style of learning. One thing that’s interesting about this kind of structure is that many people in African countries have a sense of irritation at outsiders coming in and telling them what they need or what they need to learn. How have you designed your workshops to take this into account?

MCINTOSH: By choosing subject matter which is of interest to them, such as disease organisms that are relevant . . . and also by bringing them a very kind of open style of education, it feels as if we’ve been successful in providing something that they want. I think that all the faculty have a goal of helping Africans to become well-trained to solve their own problems. But as you say, many people do come with an almost evangelical spirit to tell Africans what they should do, and what we’re trying to do is empower them to solve their own problems. Science is in some sense really organized problem-solving, and so good training in science can lead people to be more competent in dealing with things they care about.

MIKO: So in the early stages of planning these courses in Africa the International Affairs Committee of ASCB identified Ghana and Tanzania particularly as countries for creating these workshops. Why choose these countries?

MCINTOSH: Well, it’s a good question and there could have been many different ones. The factors that went into our choices were: we wanted to be in sub-Saharan African, and we wanted not to go to countries which already had a significant leg up in terms of development of strong science. That meant not South Africa, which really has some very excellent science institutions. We also avoided Kenya because it has had so much external support. And we did favor Anglophone countries because of our English speaking and not wanting to have to deal with a severe language problem in our pedagogy. Finally, issues like local stability and politics were important, and both Tanzania and Ghana are at the moment very safe places for visitors to go and they’ve been extremely hospitable to us. So it’s worked out quite well.

MIKO: So what are some of the challenges that you face in creating educational initiatives like these?

MCINTOSH: The challenges have not been anything to do with the students themselves. They’ve been remarkably interested, keen, smart, eager to learn, and fun to work with. The difficulties that we faced have been, in part, taking complex material — like how do cells work — and finding ways into it which are appropriate for the level of background education of our students, and that are going to be of interest to them. The ways we’ve tried to do this have included lectures, which include a fair amount of interaction with the students [and] questions as we go along, trying to get responses. And indeed this is a difficulty because a lot of African education is very rote-based. They’re highly trained to learn and repeat what they’ve been taught, whereas we’ve been trying to get them into a mode of questioning rather than learning. The ways we’ve gone about that have included journal clubs, where we’ve taken a paper and distributed it to the students, broken up into groups of five students and two faculty, and then discussed the figures one by one, to try to get the students involved in the criticism of data. Because there is a tendency for people who haven’t actually done experiments to simply believe what they read in the literature, and those of us who have produced papers know that science is fallible, and you always want to look at the data with a critical eye. So we’ve been trying to develop that sense of criticism of data and trying to determine what a group of data actually mean. We’ve also gotten them involved in practical work in laboratories because this is a wonderful way to understand scientific information when you obtain some of your own and have to figure out what you think it means, what’s reliable and what’s not. So there have been laboratories, and those have been very enjoyable to the students, because many of them haven’t had a chance to do a number of the assays like the polymerase chain reaction, or electrophoresis of DNA, or sequencing reaction, which they’ve read about but not actually done themselves. Finally, we’ve done two special things, well three actually, to try to get them involved. We’ve had a series of science movies from the so-called iBioSeminars available on public websites through the ASCB, and these are lectures by expert scientists on a lot of topics — and we’ve chosen ones relevant to the African students — and we’ve then stopped the videos and talked about what’s been said, and what it means, and how you could relate to it as the video’s gone along. A second way is something invented by my colleague Keith Gull from Oxford University, which he calls an interactive practical, in which he’s obtained a bunch of data in his lab, and he has those data in a nice presentable form, but he begins with a question to the students. And again, we’ve broken them up into groups and had them then try to answer this question and figure out what experiments they would do. Some of them are web-based, some of them would be lab-based, and the ones that are web-based they can go and do, like studying sequence relations between organisms — DNA sequence. But then another group of things will be laboratory-based and Keith’s lab has done those experiments and we have the results, and so we get the students to look at the data and see what’s come from those experiments and what would they do next? And they then evaluate various possibilities and come up with, well we should now go and try to determine what’s going on with respect to the cell cycle, say. So then Keith has already prepared the data, and so we can provide the data and they can now see, well these are the results you would have gotten if you had done the experiment. This has been a wonderful way to take the students through a long series of experiments that would involve months of extensive work in the lab, but do it in a day.

MIKO: You eclipse the time to a data analysis.

MCINTOSH: That’s right. And that has been a very valuable way.

MIKO: And do you find the students, are they collaborating over these questions together, or are they working alone when they do their analysis?

MCINTOSH: Oh no, we’ve encouraged collaboration, and they’ve, as I say, work in small groups and have been very supportive with one another. That’s been one of the nice aspects — is how helpful the more experienced students have been for the younger ones.

MIKO: And so you’re saying this is a new format for them, to be more interactive in the classroom?

MCINTOSH: I think it is. And the final way in which we’ve tried to get them working hard in things they care about are, we’ve asked them to bring a project of their own to the course. And, in fact, one of the criteria for selection was the quality and interest of that project. And during the course of these two weeks, we’ve met with them in small groups of two faculty and five students again, but now organized around the science that they’re trying to accomplish in the project. And we’ve helped them refine the questions that they’re posing and the ways in which they’re going to ask them — mostly the way you would do if you were helping somebody to write a good grant proposal. And then, at the end of the course, we’ve given them each ten minutes to make a PowerPoint presentation of their project, their preliminary data, and what they hope to do. And this personal involvement in something, plus the criticism they’ve gotten both from their peers and the faculty, have led them really to have I think a tremendous take of enthusiastic involvement in critical thinking about the science that they’re in a position to do.

MIKO: That sounds very productive and also very helpful for you to be able to simulate an actual entire set of experiments in a six-day workshop. So it sounds like it’s a very beneficial experience for these African students, but I also know that one of your goals is to get professional scientists in the US to think more about Africa’s strengths and problems. So looking from the other end, why do you think this is important?

MCINTOSH: There’s a strong tendency for Americans in general to be quite insular. We are such a strong country, and so wealthy, and so distant from the rest of the world, that many of us feel that we can go it alone in many circumstances. Scientists are maybe among the worst of that group because they will tend to be so involved in the work that they’re trying to do that they can neglect issues that are very important from a worldwide basis. And we all know that the world is becoming smaller every day, as a result of increased communication at all levels of business and society. So getting scientists to think about other countries and the problems there seems to me an important thing for the development of a modern American culture that will be successful in a world context. Africa has very special problems as a result of the remarkable diversity of life that’s there, and many people think of it in terms of safaris and beautiful wild animals, but it’s also true in the microscopic world unfortunately. And so many diseases, including bacteria and viruses and protozoa, are significant problems in Africa, both for people in terms of their own health, in terms of animals that they want to raise, and in terms of the plants that they can grow. So there’s a huge amount of biology in Africa to be studied, to be understood, and it has significant practical applications both in Africa and in terms of understanding biology in its broadest sense. So there’s a lot to be learned by American scientists, both from a social point of view and from a scientific point of view, by getting involved with some of the problems, and the organisms that may cause those problems, that are present in Africa. Also, it’s just a good thing to do I think.

MIKO: Yeah, well it’s certainly nice when those kinds of relationships can be reciprocal and not just unidirectional about coming to bring a certain American sense of wisdom over to the developing world. It’s nice to hear that the relationships there can be two-way. Well thanks for talking with us, Dick. That was really interesting.

MCINTOSH: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you for calling.

MIKO: Thank you for listening to this edition of NatureEdCast. You can find this podcast and others at nature.com/scitable. That’s nature.com/s-c-i-t-a-b-l-e. Please join us again next time.