Publication Alert: Reflecting on Collecting
Reflecting on Collecting: Ethical Challenges in Entomology Education (Fore & Barrett 2024; American Entomologist)
Acknowledgement of Conflicts of Interest: MB reports a relationship with the Insect Welfare Research Society that includes: board of advisors (unpaid).
I was really excited to work on this Ethos article with Dr. Grant Fore, an expert in incorporating ethical reflection practices into STEM education. In it, we tackle how entomology professors might consider changing their pedagogical practices around lethal, physical insect collections in introductory entomology classes.
This article was inspired by a few sources:
The story in Byrne (2023) about a student’s discomfort with collecting, and other online sources (Cox 2023) mentioned in the article.
The stories shared with me personally after seminar or conference talks on insect welfare by students uncomfortable with collecting exercises, or who felt that being asked to lethally kill insects represented a challenge to their religious beliefs and feelings of inclusion in the entomology classroom.
Questions I’ve been asked by other entomology faculty on how to teach collecting lessons more respectfully, given increasing evidence for the plausibility of insect sentience and the current knowledge around insect biodiversity declines.
“Indeed, even the idea of killing insects can discourage some students from studying entomology entirely: “As much as I love insects, I was terrified of this [undergraduate entomology] class. I thought it would require making a physical insect collection—which, in turn, would require me to kill insects, and I simply didn’t think I’d be able to do that” (Cox 2023; and see student perspectives in an online forum, Launimals 2020).”
In the article, we first point to a few resources already in existence that can help structure dialogues around more ethical collecting in entomology classrooms; however, these codes of practice and tools don’t actually help students develop ethical reasoning skills in the discipline, they just share with them a set of existing professional norms.
We argue that opportunities for explicit ethical reflection can develop students’ capacity for discipline-specific moral reasoning. Ethical reflection is an essential, if neglected, practice in STEM classrooms that is necessary for students (who will later be professionals!) to be able to reason through new ethical challenges they will undoubtedly encounter in their careers, and for which no codes of practice yet exist.
“Arguably, STEM instructors have a responsibility to their students to develop their capacity for ethical thought and practice within their disciplines. If so, then the collection exercise can be used as a scaffold for the incorporation of ethical reflection activities into general entomology courses. First, the aforementioned resources (collector’s codes and guidelines) can be used to establish disciplinary “norms” for best possible practice. Then, critical reflection exercises can be incorporated into the course alongside the collecting process.”
In what remains of the article, we recommend, and describe, the DEAL framework for ethical reflection, which involves Describing the situation, Examining their experience and its ethical meanings, and Articulating how their Learning will affect future experiences - all through reflective prompts. This approach is commonly used in the biomedical and engineering fields, where ethical reflection is a more common component of undergraduate education than in entomology.
Ultimately, our goal is not to suggest that collecting exercises necessarily must change (though many instructors are choosing to reduce the number of animals sampled or switch to/offer photographic collection options, for biodiversity, ethical, and inclusion reasons). Many instructors see physical collections as having irreplaceable pedagogical value. Rather, we aimed to offer an option for using this ethically fraught exercise as a way to teach not only about the insects, but also about ethical thinking - with the goal of making entomology courses more valuable for all our students.
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