Spotlight on the Genetics Teaching Team

By Peggy Ni - YSP Volunteer

This month, we spotlight the Genetics Teaching Team.  Laura VanArendonk and Erica Schoeller, the two co-heads, shared some insight on how the team operates as well as personal thoughts on their volunteering experiences with the team. 

The Genetics Team is a widely popular arm of YSP – with over 150 volunteers subscribed to its email list – that teaches fun and interactive demos to students in St. Louis.  One of the coolest demos the team does is extracting DNA from bananas; here, students use common household items such as shampoo and salt to obtain genetic material from fruit.  Demos like this one allow the students to have fun with science while learning about DNA and what each step in the procedure does.  For each teaching outing, the ratio of volunteers to students is comfortable, with approximately 3 volunteers for a group of 20 students.   This lets the volunteers gain experience teaching a large group of students in a non-overwhelming environment, with lots of opportunities for individualized interaction with the students.  Volunteering opportunities are fairly frequent – a maximum of probably 2 or 3 times a month plus participation in special events such as Women in Science Day – so volunteers wishing to participate have no shortage of chances to do so.

Laura VanArendonk is in her third year at WashU, and she has been volunteering with YSP since her very first year here.  Her involvement started with participation in a few Genetics Teaching Team demos as well as one with the Family Med School at the St. Louis Science Center, and soon enough she began going to YSP Steering Committee meetings frequently.  Laura has found volunteering with the Genetics Teaching Team to be extremely positive.  "I've never had a bad teaching team experience; pretty much all of them have been really fun and enjoyable!" she says.  The Genetics Team teaches a spectrum of students, and her favorite interactions have been with high school students.  For Laura, being able to work with students who already have a pretty good grasp of the science topics the Teaching Team is presenting is very enjoyable.  For instance when she does the DNA Extraction from Bananas demo, she explains that these students have  "a little clearer idea of what DNA is and why it's really cool, and they often get really excited when they learn they'll actually get to see what DNA looks like." 

As a YSP volunteer since her first year in graduate school (with plans to graduate next semester!) plus two years of being co-head of the Genetics Teaching Team, Erica Schoeller has acquired a lot of volunteering experience and thus has many great thoughts and memories to share about the teaching team.  Regarding future demos that we can potentially expect from the team, Erica reveals to us some exciting ones developed by Jessie Geahlen, a former teaching team head, to use in situations where the students already have a solid foundation of genetics knowledge and thus the general, introductory demos on DNA would not be advanced enough.  Erica says, “One [demo] involves mitosis and meiosis using giant pool noodles to represent chromosomes. The other one is a genotype/phenotype game - it's sort of like a live demonstration of a Punnet square where the kids put on hats and sunglasses to represent phenotypes that are associated with different traits.”  When I asked Erica to divulge to us some of her most memorable Genetics Teaching Team experiences, she was happy to share.  “Oh, man, I have so many good stories from YSP.  It seems like the younger the kids are, the more hilarious things they say,” she tells me.  One of her stories has to do with a game the volunteers play with the kids called “How Big is Your Genome?” where the kids rank organisms based on their genome size and explain to the volunteers the logic and reasoning behind their choices.  Erica says, “One kid told me that trees obviously have the biggest genome because they're the "fanciest."  I do love those fancy trees, but unfortunately they do not have the largest genome. The reality is that the amoeba has the largest genome by far, and no one really knows why, so it's fun to talk with the kids about why that might be.”   These days, since Erica is graduating soon she is transitioning in someone new to co-head the Genetics Teaching Team along with Laura VanArendonk; this smooth transfer of leadership will certainly keep the team operating as well as it has been and will continue to provide great experiences for students and volunteers both.