Educating in antimicrobial resistance awareness: adaptation of the Small World Initiative program to service-learning

Abstract

The Small World Initiative (SWI) and Tiny Earth are a consolidated and successful education programs rooted in the USA that tackle the antibiotic crisis by a crowdsourcing strategy. Based on active learning, it challenges young students to discover novel bioactive-producing microorganisms from environmental soil samples. Besides its pedagogical efficiency to impart microbiology content in academic curricula, SWI promotes vocations in research and development in Experimental Sciences and, at the same time, disseminates the antibiotic awareness guidelines of the World Health Organization. We have adapted the SWI program to the Spanish academic environment by a pioneering hierarchic strategy based on service-learning that involves two education levels (higher education and high school) with different degrees of responsibility. Throughout the academic year, 23 SWI teams, each consisting of 3-7 undergraduate students led by one faculty member, coordinated off-campus programs in 22 local high schools, involving 597 high school students as researchers. Post-survey-based evaluation of the program reveals a satisfactory achievement of goals: acquiring scientific abilities and general or personal competences by university students, as well as promoting academic decisions to inspire vocations for science- and technology-oriented degrees in younger students, and successfully communicating scientific culture in antimicrobial resistance to a young stratum of society.

Implementation of Antibiotic Discovery by Student Crowdsourcing in the Valencian Community Through a Service Learning Strategy

“…Due to the large number of students who applied to participate in the project, a selection was made in order to carry out their training, in a coordinated manner, with the Microbiology MMPIs in three laboratories of the Faculty of Biological Sciences at UV, each academic year. MMTAS were trained through five theoretical-practical sessions in laboratories with the support of a manual adapted from Hernandez et al (2015) and Valderrama et al (2018). Briefly, these practical sessions included: (1) explanations on bacterial resistance, soil sampling, and use of a new geolocation application; (2) diluting and plating soil samples for isolation of microorganisms; (3) observation of soil microbial diversity, plate counts, and selection of colonies; (4) testing soil microorganisms for antibiosis activities; and (5) antibiosis observation, results interpretation, and surveys.…”

“…MicroMundo Teaching Assistants surveys consisted of four closed blocks to assess their opinion on the scientific interest of the project, stress the concept of antibiotic resistance, and expose their experience as teachers for younger students and on their collaboration in the project. The MMTAs survey was based on that of Valderrama et al (2018) which, in turn, was based on the United States SWI Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment document (URSSA, SWI, United States). Surveys for high/secondary school students were simpler, with three closed blocks of questions on their scientific interest, their previous knowledge about antibiotic resistance, and their participation in the project.…”

“…In July 2017, the SWI@Spain network was created at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), sponsored by the group of Teaching and Dissemination of Microbiology (D+DM) of the Spanish Society for Microbiology (SEM;Valderrama et al, 2018), in which SWI@Valencia from the Universitat de València (UV) participated as a foundational member. 1 Currently, 31 groups are working in different universities from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), under the common name MicroMundo, joining the efforts of nearly 100 instructors and an even higher number of secondary education schools.…”

“…The MicroMundo@Valencia initiative was implemented at the UV in the academic course 2017-2018, similarly to SWI@ Spain/MicroMundo at the UCM (Valderrama et al, 2018). Likewise, the main objectives were: (i) to generate sensitivity toward antibiotic resistance and the need to spread awareness of the problem to the society at different educational levels, (ii) to awaken the interest in science through experiential learning and student discovery of bacteria that produce new antibiotics, and (iii) to encourage scientific training and learning in science by mutual cooperation among students of different education levels through a community service.…”

MicroMundo Upside Down: Targeted Searching for Antibiotics-Producing Bacteria From Soil With Reverse Antibiosis Approaches

“…The basic idea of the program is to enhance awareness on the AMR problem among students by letting them participate in a real and exciting experiment that is aimed at antibiotic discovery. In Spain, the program, named MicroMundo, is run in a service-learning set-up in which undergraduate students, after receiving training by academic researchers, perform as teaching assistants during teaching sessions with high school classes (Valderrama et al, 2018;De Groot et al, 2019). When running the program for the first time at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) in Albacete in 2019, we decided to focus the experimental protocol on isolation of Gram-positive actinomycetes, the main producers of most clinically used antibiotics (Procópio et al, 2012;Barka et al, 2016;Butler et al, 2017).…”