Immersing undergraduate students into research on the metagenomics of the plant rhizosphere: a pedagogical strategy to engage civic-mindedness and retain undergraduates in STEM

Do you find yourself teaching courses and watching the students’ eyes glaze over, clearly disengaged from the class material? Are you concerned that bright young undergraduates spend too much time memorizing esoteric facts from a textbook and regurgitating them on exams rather than motivating themselves to delve deeply into scientific literature, explore the questions and issues confronting modern scientists, and seek out solutions by employing their critical thinking skills and creativity? Have you ever asked your undergraduate students how they would make 100 mL of a 10% sucrose solution and they don’t know the answer? Students most certainly encounter this type of quantitative reasoning problem in their Chemistry courses, so are you surprised when transferring this highly practical skill set to analogous problems in a Biology course presents such a challenge to students? If any of these questions provokes a “yes,” you should consider offering a course that ties research and teaching together and at the same time addresses issues that are relevant to real life. By implementing such courses at UCLA, where we focus on global climate change, soil erosion and degradation, increasing numbers of antibiotic resistant bacteria, and non-sustainable farming and forestry practices for a growing human population, we have not only energized our own teaching, but also have inspired our students to become fully engaged in a scientific undertaking to contend with globally-relevant environmental issues confronting twenty-first century society.