Tracking down resistances: a co-design approach for a biomedical educational program on antibiotic resistance

Abstract

Professional societies and institutes have stressed the importance of a dialogue between scientists and the public over the past decades. Especially the life sciences include many highly relevant research topics pertaining not only to scientific progress but also to decision-making in society. Surprisingly, few educational researchers and biological scientists make interdisciplinary efforts to communicate life science topics to society in an adequate manner. In our project, scientists from evolutionary biology, medicine and biology education worked in an interdisciplinary manner to design an educational program to make scientific research on antibiotic resistance and cystic fibrosis accessible to students (ninth, tenth and eleventh graders). In this article, we explain the communication objectives from the science education researcher’s and the life scientist’s perspectives. We provide a systematic description of the co-design process, a step-by-step procedure and the link to the open-source-materials used in the course. We conclude with a reflection about the implementation in consideration of the two perspectives. In sum, our results highlight that the co-design approach provides an effective method of communicating current biomedical research to school students. Our description of the co-design-process can help future applications of this co-design approach when designing science outreach activities.