Natural resource management (NRM) professionals transform ecological concepts and research into practice. Inviting guest speakers with careers in a given field into the classroom is one technique that has been used in multiple disciplines to help prepare students for their classroom to career transition. However, there is a lack of research on what makes guest speakers effective in the classroom, especially in ecological fields. The way people frame their discussions, or the words and examples they use, influences how audiences interpret a speaker’s message. To help determine what makes a guest speaker effective in an applied ecology classroom we asked: How do the guest speakers structure their messages and what kinds of messages are they conveying? In the class that we studied more than half of the lectures were given by guest speakers, and we focused on the seven guest lectures that students identified as influencing their learning in our analysis. Some lectures included more than one speaker. We performed a qualitative content analysis of transcripts of guest speaker lectures and the PowerPoints speakers presented to analyze how speakers presented their material in a capstone natural resource management class.
Results/Conclusions
We found that four major frames spanned all seven guest lectures analyzed: identity, characterization, storytelling, and facts. Identity involved the speaker discussing their own identity, actions, and thoughts and characterization was the speaker discussing others’ identities, actions, and thoughts. Storytelling involved the speaker contextualizing the information in a real-life situation which the speaker was directly involved in. Facts involved the speaker providing background factual information, and could be imbedded within storytelling. Speakers usually embedded facts within contexts of the other three frames. Our results indicate that the speakers students identified as helping them learn contextualized their information in real-world situations. While we did not analyze specific student learning outcomes, our results are consistent with existing literature, which indicate that helping students contextualize information helps them learn. Guest speakers may be uniquely situated to help bring contextualized information into the classroom, because they can speak from their own personal and work experiences. While instructors may use case study examples in their classrooms, the personal connections and in-depth perspectives that guest speakers bring into the classroom may allow them to provide a stronger context for students.