An award-winning scientist talks to Nature Network about how she turned apathetic teenagers into budding researchers.
Ed Yong
Carolyn Stephens from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) runs work experience programmes to get young people from deprived parts of London involved in scientific research.
She was recently awarded the Royal Society’s prestigious Kohn Award for Excellence in Engaging the Public with Science. Nature Network talks to her about her work.
What made you want to work with London teens?
I’d been working with kids and communities all over the world and some of my colleagues at LSHTM suggested that we start to work with communities around London. At a community centre in Barking and Dagenham, a youth worker approached me about speaking at a local youth club and it went from there.
The kids there were very disengaged with, well, everything. I was really disgusted with their lack of enthusiasm because most of the kids I work with overseas are desperate to go to school and don’t have any money.
What changed your mind?
At first, I left. I was at the Tube station before some of them caught up with me and explained that they were just being cool. They were actually very interested and wanted to come into the school and do work experience.
I initially said no because they were just 14 and we’re a postgraduate institution that usually takes experienced doctors in their thirties.
But the council told me that in the youth club’s history, they’d never placed anybody in a university, other than once in a photocopying lab. I thought it was outrageous that kids in deprived boroughs never get to see what real science is like. So I said yes, and we brought 10 of them in.
What sort of projects did they work on?
A real range. I was very busy and I’m not interested in telling 14 year olds what to do if they don’t want to do it. So I asked them for their ideas instead.
Two of them did fieldwork about mosquitoes in Barking and Dagenham and whether they were malarial, while another student filmed them doing it. He went onto win a couple of awards for his films. Another one wanted to look at natural resistance as an alternative to traditional cures and vaccines.
One of the projects, on ethical challenges faced by researchers, really blew away the students at the school. They were a bit surprised to be asked over lunch about their own ethical crises by these very serious 16-year old girls.
Did you help them come up with projects?
We told them about some of our work at a summer school but encouraged them to think of their own ideas. They were a bit blown away at first because they’re told what to think at school. But when they realised we were serious, they went for it. I think we really underestimate teenagers, especially those with that kind of background.
Everyone helped them from the staff in the kitchen to the computer guys. One of the kids wanted to make a computer game on asthma where you had to take on dust mites. It was very cool but we had to give him a stand-alone computer because he was really into creating viruses and we didn’t want him on the network!
How did the work experience programme develop?
The Wellcome Trust funded a three year programme to follow a cohort of these kids from age 14 to 18 and we also started running regular summer schools for kids from all over the South-East.
You took some of the teens on international conferences. How did that come about?
Again, that was the kids themselves raising the bar. I was part of a big WHO conference on children’s health and I noted that it didn’t include any children. The WHO took me seriously but they produced a group of multilingual white children whose parents were diplomats.
A bunch of our kids asked to come so I took them to Budapest with me. They were the only ethnic minorities there and they really shook the place. All the others were terribly urbane, on their way to UN jobs and as old as 24!
What do you think puts young people off science in the first place?
They told us that they get told what to think at school. Their lessons have no relevance to big problems they hear about like global warming and they’re not allowed to challenge anything
We actually heard that the kids went back to school and started challenging their teachers. They would say “Are you sure?” and “Where did you get that evidence?” and “Why?” The teachers were understandably quite shocked but they responded well and the headmasters were really pleased.
I think all we did was to listen to them, let them do what they wanted to and let them use their imaginations. I don’t patronise them and I don’t really know how to talk to them other than to treat them like adults. To start with, they don’t trust that but once they do, they have lots of ideas.
Have the kids continued in science?
They’re doing a whole variety of things. Four are doing medicine and two are doing the kind of epidemiological medicine that I do.
On top of everything, they did much better in their GCSEs than expected. 80% were a grade above their predicted one and many went from a C to an A star, which was a mega-shift for them.
The local authority was delighted. One of the kids got the best GCSEs that ever came out of Barking and Dagenham, and he went to one of the most difficult schools in the borough with a big racism problem.
Do you think your work has changed the culture at LSHTM?
I think so. My colleagues have gone from being healthily sceptical to very enthusiastic. Basically, we were bringing young ‘hoodies’ into a school where most of the staff are public school-educated, white Oxbridge graduates. At one point, we wanted to give the kids book tokens and the ethics committee were concerned that they would swap them for drugs. I had to point out that drug dealers probably don’t take book tokens!
Why book tokens?
One of the kids was experiencing violence at home. I’m not a counsellor and I said that I always read books when I had problems. She told me she didn’t have any books and others said the same, so I marched them to Waterstone’s and gave them each a tenner. They loved the place, and they go back and buy the most unexpected things. One of the kids, who brought a gun into the first summer school, came back with Fly-Fishing for Beginners. So we’ve kept on giving them book tokens on a regular basis since.
What do you plan to do with the prize from the award?
In January, I’m going back to India. Last summer, I took one of the kids out to a Nigerian suburb to make a short film about what kids there think of school, science and education. This prize allows me to do the same in India.
The films help us to show kids here about the problems that those in other countries have. They’ll choose issues that interest them and we’ll put them in touch with the kids in India.
Ed Yong blogs at Not Exactly Rocket Science