The Insect Festival Working Group: A New Initiative to Identify Best Practices

Abstract

Gwen Pearson and Betty Bee at the 2015 Purdue Bug Bowl. (Photo by John Obermeyer, Purdue Extension Entomology.) Insect festivals have multiplied like locusts over the last 20 years. Eighty-one bug festivals have been identified in the U.S. (Hvenegaard 2016, Blevins 2018). The scope of insect education is huge and varied; what distinguishes insect festivals (Table 1) from other entomology outreach programming? Definition of Insect Festivals (modified from Bultitude et al. 2011). Definition of Insect Festivals (modified from Bultitude et al. 2011). Insect festivals encompass many different experiences. For example, Purdue’s Bug Bowl is a choose-your-own-adventure event, with multiple concurrent events indoors and outdoors across a campus. Other insect festivals are closely scripted events with high production values. Across this spectrum of experience, the value of a live event becomes clear: rich social experiences. Because insect festivals feature “aversive taxa,” attention to visitor emotions and developing trust are key. It’s a sad reality that insects and their arthropod relatives engender strong negative emotions in many people (Polák et al. 2020, Fukano and Soga 2021). The festive party vibe of a bug festival means audiences can be more relaxed and open to new experiences, compared to a formal educational setting. We are clearly doing something right; many insect festivals attract huge crowds and have been running for decades. But what, exactly, is it that makes bug festivals work? And can we make the experience for our audiences better? Happily, the literature on science festivals is quite deep and rich. The number of science festivals has exploded in the last 20 years (Bultitude et al. 2011). The Science Festival Alliance, a collaborative network of institutions and individuals, currently has 75 active member festivals (Campbell 2022). In 2014, the EvalFest community of practice was founded to develop and test evaluation methods with 25 science festival partners across the U.S. (Peterman and Gathings 2019). The Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) also organized a shared evaluation: The Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience Studies (COVES 2019) study. This survey was designed specifically to compare visitor experiences and demographics across science centers. It was while studying the literature on science festivals and figuring out how to apply it to the insect festival I coordinated (the Purdue Bug Bowl) that I came up with the idea for an Insect Festival group. In late 2018, I convened the Insect Festival Working Group (IFWG) to facilitate sharing among outreach professionals associated with BugFests. Fifteen festivals are currently participating, from a wide variety of sponsoring institutions. The data available from EvalFest and COVES provide us a unique opportunity to benchmark insect festivals. How different are our audiences? What does it mean that we work with subjects that inspire fear and loathing in some people? At the moment, we don’t know the answers to these questions. While insect festivals represent a huge amount of effort and time by universities and museums, so far there is limited research on the outcomes (Pitt and Shockley 2014). That’s understandable: outreach staff are in a dilemma. We are required to document the impact of our activities, but few of us are fully provided the resources and funding to do that (King et al. 2015). What impacts can we realistically document from Bug Bowl or similar insect festivals if we don’t have a budget to hire evaluation professionals? How do we define what works and what is ineffective if we can’t detect and measure change in a rigorous way? Building upon previous festival evaluation efforts provides access to professionally validated and tested visitor survey materials. The IFWG will develop and provide a framework for sharing research to inform insect festival practice (Fig. 1). Insect Festival Working Group goals. Goal 1: Exhibit and Animal Best Practices. Significant progress on documenting exhibits and practices for insect festivals in the U.S. has already been made with Blevins’ (2018) University Entomology Outreach Events Survey. Live arthropods and insects as food were ranked among the top exhibits. This gives us two “core” exhibits around which to start developing evidence-based best practices. For example, what ambassador arthropod species are most used, and what practices ensure their wellbeing and visitor safety? What messaging is common with entomophagy, and how do different venues handle the issue of potential allergies? Ideally, the IFWG might be able to adapt assessments developed for zoo exhibits (for example, Barriault and Rennie 2019) into a way to evaluate the physical layout and impact of live insect exhibits. Goal 2: Volunteer Best Practices. Thousands of volunteers work each year to help put on insect festivals (Blevins 2018) and are a critical part of the experience. Visitors who have conversations with scientists and festival volunteers rank their festival experience more highly (Boyette and Ramsey 2019). Having a trained facilitator also is linked to deeper understanding by visitors at science centers (Machado et al. 2021). The IFWG will document training provided to volunteers to link that to better outcomes for both volunteers and visitors. As an example of a shared IFWG resource, The American Alliance of Museums (AAM) released a manual of best practices for volunteer programs (2019), including training, risk management, and more. Following AAM recommendations, I developed a detailed “job description” for each of the volunteer roles at Bug Bowl (Supplemental Material). This year’s volunteers had a better sense of exactly what they had signed up for, what training was required, what they should wear, who their supervisor was, and the physical demands and setting of each “job.” Clear volunteer descriptions also helped us do a better job of complying with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) regulations. Volunteering is an important contribution to student development. What do volunteers, especially graduate and undergraduate students, learn about outreach and education from their participation in insect festivals? Common feedback I get from students is about the joy of transformation—helping someone become fascinated with an animal they feared just minutes before. How does student involvement relate to possible career outcomes in the future? Can pre-event training help students have a better experience and be more willing to volunteer again? Shared evaluations will help us learn more. TOP: Bug Bowl Founder Tom Turpin and Chef Joseph Yoon of Brooklyn Bugs at the Cricket Spitting field. (Photo by Purdue University Agricultural Communications 2019/Tom Campbell.) TOP RIGHT: Visitors to Bug Bowl try to spot leaf insects (Phyllium philippinicum) in a display. (Photo by Purdue University Agricultural Communications 2019/Tom Campbell.) RIGHT: The Big Top Tent is one of many sites on campus to meet and learn from extension professionals and student clubs during Bug Bowl. (Photo by John Obermeyer, Purdue Extension Entomology.) Goal 3: Common visitor evaluation.Allen and Peterman (2019) detailed the challenges of evaluating informal STEM education with common outcomes and shared measures. The short version: it’s very hard. Working together and adapting previously validated surveys is a way to jumpstart our efforts to understand who attends bug festivals, their motivations, and their experiences. Human Subjects IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval is required for any research on outcomes and experiences of visitors or volunteers. I shared the Bug Bowl 2022 IRB materials with IFWG members to show what sorts of data security, training, and other considerations go into a successful IRB application—and how much time and planning needs to be built into the process. By building a culture of freely exchanging and critiquing materials, we will answer broader questions about learning and event outcomes, and document the value added for funders and employers. And, of course, sharing materials reduces individual workloads for festival managers. Goal 4: Broadening Audiences. Research on science festivals has developed a profile of “the usual suspects” who attend. Audiences tend to be wealthy, highly educated, and already interested in science (Nielsen et al. 2019, Kennedy et al. 2018, COVES 2019). The constructed nature of science and science events can be alienating to non-majority groups (Dawson 2018, Price 2022). I believe that insect festivals intend to reach inclusive audiences. The reality is, however, that’s probably not happening. Once we acknowledge the extent of both historic and current exclusion in science communication (Dawson 2019), documenting who is (and isn’t) in our festival audiences becomes critical. Do we view our audiences in terms of their deficiencies, rather than identifying structural inequalities that might hinder full participation? Do we talk about “the public” as a mass of non-entomologists uniform in their insect ignorance, or do we acknowledge that all attendees have rich educational and cultural lives, with or without our insect interventions (Burks and Menezes 2018)? Ultimately, how can the IFWG integrate our practices so insect festivals disrupt and transform social inequities, rather than reproducing them? These are questions we must grapple with as we strive for representation and respect for all people. By documenting and evaluating our community of insect festivals with IFWG, we want to understand how insect festivals compare with the broader field of informal science outreach and provide new ways to share data with each other. We plan to use our collaboration to evaluate our efforts to broaden participation in STEM, and make sure we deliver the best programs we can. If you run a bug festival, check out InsectFestivals.org. The group is open to join and we welcome new members. The Bug Bowl Art Contest showcases art from over 1,000 K–12 children each year. (Photo by John Obermeyer, Purdue Extension Entomology.) Gwen Pearson is a Purdue Entomological Research Collection associate and former Bug Bowl coordinator. She also works as a science writer.

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