Creative Approaches to Food Safety Education

So, what’s his secret to sparking student interest in early morning micro lectures and inspiring micro careers? Answer: A little something Dr. Baumler calls super active learning.

“Active learning, or constructivism, is a pedagogical term for teaching methods that enhance student learning by engaging the students to actively participate, and super active learning is taking this method to the next level of engagement with creativity, props, and activities that really engage the student learning experience,” he explains.

Dr. Baumler’s stash of classroom visual aids includes real and toy musical instruments, costumes, glow powders and sticks, confetti cannons, bubble machines, smoke machines, and post-it notes. He also has dozens of hula hoops, which he uses during the evolution of bacteria lecture to demonstrate plasmid conjugation and the acquisition of new genes such as antibiotic resistance, virulence factors, and new metabolic capabilities. Then there is a collection of more than 100 wacky hats.

“The staff at my local Party City knows me by my first name, and once, while purchasing an abundance of zombie make up and costumes, one of the employees said to me ‘sir, I don’t know what your job is, but I want it,’” Dr. Baumler quips.

In micro lab, he is known to tap into his German roots when making fermented foods like sauerkraut. “Wir machen sauerkrauten,” he sings, while playing his concertina and sporting a chef’s hat and apron. He adds to the fun by using a real sword to chop the cabbage.

To enhance E. coli O157:H7 studies and give his students the opportunity to express any angst with their professor, Dr. Baumler passes out pieces of paper in assorted colors, each color representing a different virulence factor gene category. (The bacteria use these genes in a cascade to cause disease and severely damage the host.)

“I ask the students to pretend to be E. coli O157:H7 and to make paper airplanes and crushed balls representing the different virulence factor categories,” Dr. Baumler says. “Then they shoot them at me in the order the bacteria use them to cause disease, while I run around the classroom being attacked by the audience of pathogenic E. coli. They attack me with their paper projectiles, weakening the host as I stagger around, and after enough Shiga toxin-colored airplanes hit me and my kidneys shut down (feigned), then I fall down, pretending to be dead. It’s always a great way for students to learn the cascade of genes required to sicken and cause death in a human, and it allows them to cut up and vent their frustrations.”

To help his micro students review Gram staining for their midterm exam that is typically scheduled close to Mardi Gras, Dr. Baumler went to the local Ax-Man Surplus store and purchased 16 secondhand Mardi Gras costumes in red, purple, and green for two dollars each. At the neighborhood dollar store he picked up hundreds of strings of red, purple, and green beads.

“I recruit a cadre of food science graduate students to don the costumes and stage a Mardi Gras parade, with signs on their backs denoting different bacteria, including Gram positive (purple), Gram negative (red), and spore formers (green),” Dr. Baumler relates. “I play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ on my invisible trumpet while the grad students march around and toss the beads to the undergrads. Some of the students note that by learning through this activity, they will remember forever that E. coli is Gram negative (red/pink) and Bacillus and Staphylococcus are Gram positive (purple).”

Without question, Drs. Schmidt, Winter, and Baumler convey extraordinary examples of how people can use their talents to liven up food safety presentations and keep any audiences awake, attentive, and more apt to retain important messages, not to mention more prone to jump to their feet, applauding for more. Dr. Baumler, who moonlights as Davey Doodle, a children’s entertainer, is quick to emphasize that even those lacking musical talents should be able to figure out how to think outside the box and incorporate some creativity into teaching any age group. “Magic tricks, costumes, and glow powders with black lights are a few ideas,” he suggests.