Engaging profoundly with our publics: Dr John O'Donoghue

O’Donoghue discovered early on that science education would play a central aspect in his career. After completing a PhD in University College Cork, in which peer-assisted learning showed him the logistic side of learning alongside demonstrating and tutoring, he realised during his postdoctoral post in chemical engineering in Queens University Belfast that he missed working in education. That was when the position of RSC Education Coordinator in Trinity came up.

This gave him the opportunity to start exploring the multidisciplinary area of “chemistry education”. While a unique role in Ireland, Chemistry or Chemical Education research is a very well established area in the US in particular, and he hopes it can become better established here. Following his own experience, he wanted PhD students to have a more varied programme of learning: one with freedom and flexibility in research, but with added formal skills training. O’Donoghue has contributed to this goal through his Chemistry Education and Public Engagement (EPE) module as part of the school’s DubChem programme for Trinity Chemistry PhDs. EPE was previously called the Outreach Module, he explains, but they renamed it to reflect the module’s additional aims: “outreach usually only means that you're going from the university out, whereas we also want to invite people in too, as well as provide schools with informal learning opportunities.”

Two years ago, O’Donoghue established the module’s newest project, Current Chemistry Investigators (CCI). Through CCI he has established a new partnership for Trinity with the Atlantic Technological University (ATU) Sligo, and the two institutes joined together to design a workshop from scratch. The focus of their public engagement work is raising the awareness of the science behind energy storage and chemical analysis. In recent years energy has become very important in the world of chemistry: In 2019 the Nobel Prize for chemistry was in lithium-ion batteries. A year later the Ukraine war started, and fossil fuel prices increased drastically. Now there’s a huge uptick in the sales of electric cars in Ireland and worldwide.

For their schools engagement, they identified that electrochemistry is the least attempted question on the Leaving Cert Chemistry paper, and also leads to some of the poorest answers. As a result, according to O’Donoghue, they’re taking a two-pronged approach to tackle the shortfall in student learning about this vital area. “We’re helping students with career advice, but also a very difficult topic that students are having major issues with. With the move towards net-zero, we need future scientists interested in the area of electrochemistry.”

The concept CCI is based on is called the ‘Scientist in a Classroom’ model of informal learning. “You can’t just turn up in a classroom and talk for an hour,” he argues, “you'll just bore everybody to tears.” Instead, his teams of trained PhDs introduce ideas like clean energy and batteries through a practical lab workshop. This means they get opportunities to talk to the students informally while they teach key lab skills. “If you ask a lot of 16- or 17-year-olds as a large group if they have a question, they won’t have one. But if you have them all working in small groups, and they're all chatting, and as the PhD students are walking around, they’ll actually stop them on a one-to-one basis. They always have some questions in relation to careers, in this way the PhDs are acting as tangible role models.”

The shape CCI would take at its beginning was far from certain. In 2021, they didn't know what was feasible, because the country was still adhering to COVID guidelines. It was difficult to predict what the next two years would look like. They took precautions including one school visit per week, wearing masks, and changing the PhD teams for each school.

CCI have also set up micro-workshops at larger events: recently they attended the Cork Carnival of Science in June and the Dublin Maker Festival in July. “We prioritise doing outdoor events if we can. That way we are reducing the risk of spreading COVID a lot, especially for our PhD teams. This of course means there is a lot of logistics involved, but careful management makes everything run smoothly”. As with the school visits, they were very pleased by the responses. They had initially planned to engage with 1,000 people and have already engaged with nearly 10,000 people in 18 months.

His own research is currently orientated around the exploration of new methods to digitize evaluation and feedback data from their activities. Currently, O’Donoghue notes, despite the large amount of feedback we all see conducted at public events, there is comparatively little work done evaluating that data. And while the numbers may already suggest success, he wanted to ensure that CCI’s public engagement was having a demonstrable impact. They spent four months in 2021 running pilot workshops in schools, consulting teachers and researchers. “We got suggestions and rearranged things. And we asked the students in pilot workshops. ‘Does this question make sense to you?’ Then, when it came to September, we started rolling out workshops to as many schools as we could reach to ensure we had sufficient data to make solid conclusions.”

Safeguarding and privacy requirements meant CCI had to be innovative in collecting data: most schools ban phones in classrooms, so instead of using a digital system like a QR code they used wireless clickers, so pupils can give anonymous answers to questions. For larger events they’ve incorporated the use of the emoji system, as seen at Dublin Airport and major franchises around the country.

What do the findings look like? When asked if they enjoyed meeting the researchers, 96% of students gave a resounding yes. Which is also great for the researchers, to see that they were appreciated, O’Donoghue observes. “But the other question was, did this workshop encourage you to consider a career in science? And it varies depending on the group.” When it comes to Leaving Cert students who are taking science subjects, 70% of them were encouraged by the workshop. There’s a lot to unpack with data from 1,200 students with an 80% response rate. These findings have recently been submitted to the Journal of Chemical Education. He remains cognisant of negative responses as well. The 3% negative feedback for our public events is valuable, he reflects: “The unhappy face actually reinforces the huge majority that chose the happy face. And, if you're making the argument that you are encouraging interest in science, you have to accept the fact that you might also be discouraging a minority of them as well.”

Around his busy schedule O’Donoghue makes time for lab work, keeping education as a focus even then: he is currently working with a summer student on their experiments. Indeed, it is clear from CCI that he views experimentation as key to engagement in chemistry, and encourages participation in school- and college- based exhibitions, such as the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition and the Mini Scientist Competition, where students get an opportunity to put together a project, something outside of the curriculum. This is so valuable, he argues, because, “you come up with a theory. You test in the lab. It works. And if it doesn't work, you try something else. Then you're really proud of yourself because you've actually literally worked out something.”

When asking the Leaving Cert students if they had met somebody in a career they were interested in, O’Donoghue learned that many of them had missed that opportunity as their transition year had been in the middle of COVID lockdowns. In this way, Indeed, the CCI project Is already addressing an urgent requirement. And thanks to their social media presence across various platforms, O’Donoghue has been invited to give numerous talks. CCI has also been asked to give schools workshops in Belgium and Luxembourg. Clearly CCI has made valuable headway in engaging with their public, and will build upon their success in the coming years: after all, as O’Donoghue points out: “Chemistry is universal and the future of energy affects us all. The periodic table is the same everywhere in the world, regardless of language or culture, so our work always has global appeal.”

- Article written by Dr Sarah Cullen