Integrative approaches to dispersing science: A case study of March Mammal Madness

Abstract

Objectives: Public engagement is increasingly viewed as an important pillar of scientific scholarship. For early career and established scholars, navigating the mosaic landscape of public education and science communication, noted for rapid "ecological" succession, can be daunting. Moreover, academics are characterized by diverse skills, motivations, values, positionalities, and temperaments that may differentially incline individuals to particular public translation activities.Methods: Here we briefly contextualize engagement activities within a scholarly portfolio, describe the use of one public education program-March Mammal Madness (MMM)-to highlight approaches to science communication, and explore essential elements and practical considerations for creating and sustaining outreach pursuits in tandem with other scholarly activities. Results: MMM, an annual simulated tournament of living and fossil animal taxa, has reached hundreds of thousands of learners since 2013. This program has provided a platform to communicate research findings from biology and anthropology and showcase numerous scholars in these fields. MMM has leveraged tournament devices to intentionally address topics of climate change, capitalist environmental degradation, academic sexism, and racist settler-colonialism. The tournament, however, has also perpetuated implicit biases that need disrupting.Conclusions: By embracing reflexive, self-interrogative, and growth attitudes, the tournament organizers iteratively refine and improve this public science education program to better align our activities with our values and goals. Our experiences with MMM suggest that dispersing science is most sustainable when we combine ancestral adaptations for cooperation, community, and storytelling with good-natured competition in the context of shared experiences and shared values.

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“…In this process, we all are learners and knowledge are co-created by promoting critical thinking and reflection (Freire, 2000;Lomeli & Rappaport, 2018) Our colleagues have also shown that the use of social media can be used to reach even wider audiences. March Mammal Madness, a yearly game that teaches about mammal ecology, adaptation, and lifeways currently reaches hundreds of thousands of people and engages educators and their students at all educational levels (Amorim et al, 2021;Hinde et al, 2021) As kids growing up in the Global North, many of us do not learn that observational science or natural history are a possibility in our science classes. Many K-12 students are forced into ideas about experimental science for Science Fairs while organismal focus has largely disappeared from textbooks and high school/college biology curricula (Blumstein & Saylan, 2007;Tewksbury et al, 2014).…”

“…Our colleagues have also shown that the use of social media can be used to reach even wider audiences. March Mammal Madness, a yearly game that teaches about mammal ecology, adaptation, and lifeways currently reaches hundreds of thousands of people and engages educators and their students at all educational levels (Amorim et al, 2021; Hinde et al, 2021). March Mammals Madness stands out because it has grown over the past ten years and has been effective due to stakeholder partnerships that contribute to and build lesson plans around content.…”