Thursday, 30 March 2017: 11:00
Silver Hall (The Square)
Food microbiology encompasses three aspects of food production, food stability (shelf-life) and food poisoning (infection and intoxication). It is both laboratory-based and managerial with numerous, in-house and legal requirements to be met. For the purposes of this presentation, my focus will be on the teaching aspects of laboratory-based, food poisoning control; and not HACCP, etc. Advances in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) have given a greater depth to understanding foodborne pathogens; and, as with other aspects of our lives, access to technical information, which has drastically changed since many lecturers were students. In addition, information/teaching resources (e.g., smart phones!) have changed. In fact, "NGS" should stand for "Next Generation Students". Despite all of these advances, we still have issues with the control of foodborne pathogens, including Salmonella, Campylobacter, and E. coli pathovars. So as lecturers/mentors of the next generation in food safety, do we examine according to knowledge, or according to understanding? In our experience, problem-solving scenarios can be a useful approach for individual, final year undergraduate projects and we have trialled a modified SCALE UP approach with teams of final year students. SCALE UP stands for "Student-Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs" and "Student-Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies". Initially, the students are given a two to three sentence description of an outbreak and a budget to work within. From the description, they draw up a short list of plausible causative organisms and decide on the next step of their investigation. This is submitted to the lecturer for approval. In this session, I will share my experiences with individual and modified SCALE UP, group-oriented, problem-solving teaching and its relevance to assessing students, as well as preparing students for food microbiology in the real world.