When McGill neuroscience students raised money to beef up and expand their award-winning community outreach program, they were bowled over by the response.
“It was amazing. We did not expect this at all. We weren’t even sure if we were going to reach our $5,000 goal,” recalls Marisa Cressatti, MSc’16, who heads up the high school division of BrainReach.
Instead, donations surpassed $12,000 on McGill’s Seeds of Change crowdfunding platform.
Graduate students in McGill’s Integrated Program in Neuroscience run BrainReach/Mission Cerveau, offering brain-based science lessons in Montreal schools. They also provide material to remote communities that might not have access to the same science enrichment options.
“We do have a neuroscience focus, but in general we just want to make science more fun,” says Cressatti, a PhD student. “We try and encourage students to think about things more critically, or just to consider different fields in science basically.”
Dozens of McGill neuroscience students lead the interactive workshops in more than 30 elementary and high schools in under-resourced neighbourhoods on Montreal Island. The program pairs graduate students with a classroom so that they build a relationship with it. The McGill students visit high school classrooms six times throughout the school year, and eight times at elementary schools.
“We basically send the grad student into the classroom to talk about neuroscience in very relatable terms. So we do cover a background of neuroscience, but then we sort of get into more topics that are more relatable for the young kids, like learning and memory or attention and sleep. In high school we talk about neurotransmission and drugs,” Cressatti explains.
The McGill students encourage kids to ask questions, and they bring props with them such as a calf’s brain and plastic brain models that students can pull apart to see the different structures and regions of the brain.
“We try and do a lot of hands-on experiences so that the concepts that we teach them are more understandable and really hit home,” Cressatti says.
Thanks to the money raised through Seeds of Change, they’ve acquired neat new teaching material, Cressatti says, and have been able to implement a new system into their curriculum called human-to-human interface. The electrophysiology lesson, replete with electrodes, is a hit with students.
“It’s basically where you attach electrodes from one person’s muscles to another person’s nerves on their forearm and when the person who’s connected to their muscles flexes their arm, the receiver gets sort of a reflex in their arm to move it. So we talk about synaptic transmission,” she says.
Among other things, the donations will cover the program’s costs for two years. They also allowed BrainReach North, an online science-education resource aimed at teachers and students in remote communities, to make two trips this year to Northern Quebec. One McGill student taught BrainReach lessons in Kuujjuarapik, a fly-in Inuit and Cree community in Nunavik. Two others drove to the Cree communities of Waswanipi and Mistissini to run workshops in local schools.
“The two trips that we ran this year went really well and the students were really happy and excited to see people from McGill coming in,” Cressatti says.
It was also enriching for the McGill volunteers who wrote about their experiences in Kuujjuarapik, Waswanipi and Mistissini.
Cressatti led BrainReach workshops in high schools for three years before heading up the program division. Students asked many questions – ones that she wouldn’t have thought of, Cressatti recalls. She felt she was learning as much as they did because if she didn’t know the answer she would research it and come back with the information on her next visit.
“It’s really interesting. They think about things in a completely different way,” she says.
“It’s been really fun. They’re always really engaged and it seems like they enjoy the material a lot.”