Audio Transcript

Published: 3 July 2017
APA 7 Citation: Newsome, B. (Host). (2017, July 3). How volunteering for museums opens doors & deepens knowledge [Audio podcast transcript]. Fizzics Education. https://www.fizzicseducation.com.au/podcast/fizzicsed/how-volunteering-for-museums-opens-doors-deepens-knowledge/

Ben Newsome CF is the recipient of the 2023 UTS Chancellor’s Award for Excellence and a Churchill Fellow. He is a global leader in science communication and the founder of Fizzics Education.

[00:00:00]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

[00:00:17]
Ben Newsome: Ever wondered how to land a job in a major science museum? Well, our next guest certainly knows a bit about this. Her name is Karen Player, and she’s been at the Australian Museum for over 20 years, and originally started as a volunteer working front of house, showing all sorts of science exhibits. Nowadays she heads up the Museum in a Box programme, which sends materials all over Australia to libraries and schools to get science into communities with materials that actually come from the museum. She also coordinates distance learning events and certainly has a few things to talk about where things have gone wrong. Including trying to teach by video conference when your server room is flooded. No matter who you are, that’s going to be difficult.

[00:00:56]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast.

[00:01:00]
Ben Newsome: Yes, and welcome again to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. If it’s your first time, welcome, my name is Ben Newsome, glad to have you on board. If you’ve been here before, hi, I’m Ben again. Nice to have you as well. Thanks for tuning into yet another science education programme. This week we’re going to talk with Karen Player. She is a very good friend of mine, she’s been doing a lot of outreach programmes to schools and community groups and libraries and things for many years. She’s also a coordinator for the Museum in a Box programme, as you heard in the intro, and a distance education science teaching expert. So I hope you get a lot out of this, I certainly did, it was great to have a chat with her. She certainly delves into not only how to teach by video conference, but also the value of narrative in how sometimes even the seemingly simple things can really grab people’s imagination and attention, if you give them a reason to listen. Hey, check it out, I enjoyed it, and I hope you enjoy it too.

[00:01:58]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. Why don’t you book us for a science show or workshop in your school? We love seeing students get excited about science, and you will too. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au and click on schools for more info.

[00:02:14]
Ben Newsome: Hi, Karen Player, welcome to the Fizzics Ed Podcast.

[00:02:16]
Karen Player: Hi Ben, it’s great to be here today.

[00:02:18]
Ben Newsome: I got this same look from Vanessa Barrett from a couple of episodes ago where I’m asking a good friend of mine how are you going, and you look at me going, are you seriously asking me a question like that? Right, so obviously everyone can hear that I know Karen pretty well. But you might not. So Karen, what is it you do?

[00:02:36]
Karen Player: Well, I’m going to start off with the first time I met Ben as one of the Science in the Bush events. I don’t know if it was Wagga or Albury or something like that, but it was the first time I remember doing something at the same time as you, and you were presenting of course your amazing physics stuff and I think I was doing minibeasts or spiders.

[00:02:57]
Ben Newsome: You were handling phasmids, I believe.

[00:03:00]
Karen Player: Yes, it must have been a bit of a minibeast magnified kind of session.

[00:03:05]
Ben Newsome: Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, I reckon.

[00:03:07]
Karen Player: Yeah, something like that. So we’ve got a fairly long history together. And I guess where I come from is the Australian Museum, and I’ve been at the Australian Museum for, it’s terrifying, but this year I think is 20 years. So I’ve pretty much spent my entire career at the Australian Museum, and have been really lucky to have so many opportunities working in different areas. So I currently look after outreach, so Museum in a Box, video conferencing, and we’re just starting to do incursions this year. And I’ve been doing that role for probably the last maybe eight years, and prior to that was working on exhibitions, so actually being able to form and decide what specimens go where, and what objects can be touched, interpretation, and that kind of thing. And prior to that was touring and developing education programmes and visitor programmes for the public.

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Ben Newsome: That’s quite a step up from your first days as a volunteer.

[00:04:12]
Karen Player: Yes, that’s right. And like a lot of us at the Australian Museum, we did actually start as volunteers. So there’s quite a few of my colleagues that have now been there for over a decade, and did start as volunteers because it was a great opportunity after I finished university when I was struggling with how do I actually get a job.

[00:04:30]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, I actually got asked this. I was at Macquarie University doing a chat to some scicom people, and a person stood up and said, how do I do what I do? And I just simply looked at them and said, start. Volunteer, start doing something.

[00:04:41]
Karen Player: Yeah. So I was working some really funny jobs, I think I was a tea lady at a hospital, I worked at the Cookie Man doing the baking.

[00:04:50]
Ben Newsome: I love the Cookie Man. Science of dough.

[00:04:52]
Karen Player: It was quite good. And I think I was working in an office. And then on the side, I started volunteering at the museum, and it was the best thing I ever did. I learned something every day.

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Ben Newsome: What did they have you volunteering? Because there’s a lot of things you could have been doing, what did they have you mainly doing on the floor, or what was it?

[00:05:09]
Karen Player: So I became a front-of-house volunteer, which is working with the public. So I got trained in to take tours, I got trained to do what we called activity stations or hands-on stations. So where we’d have them open for the public, and they could come up in each exhibition and sort of have a hands-on engagement linking to their museum visit. We do have behind the scenes volunteers as well, so people that are working in the labs, working with collections, we have people working with members. We also have these event volunteers now, which are a bit shorter term, for things like the programmes like Jurassic Lounge, the Science Festival coming up in August. So we actually have those short terms which have been really good for people going through uni or just post-uni, wanting to get a little bit of extra experience in a different avenue through science communication or education. And so that’s been really good as well.

[00:06:03]
Karen Player: But yeah, I came in as a front-of-house volunteer, and worked helping out. I think the first big exhibition we had was an ancient Egypt exhibition, and we had three-hour queues out the doors, it was really huge. And so the staff burnout was actually quite a lot, so the volunteers actually came in to help quite a lot then. And I got my first casual gig then, because they just needed people to help out because it was just so busy. It was really amazing.

[00:06:30]
Ben Newsome: These things are flat out, especially when you come up to your science festival you’ve got coming up where it’s just, we can’t get more hours in the day if we tried.

[00:06:38]
Karen Player: No, August just kind of goes. It’s a lot of preparation and then it’s just full steam ahead.

[00:06:45]
Ben Newsome: For those people who haven’t worked in science communication, and obviously as teachers you might go out to various festivals and see us do all this fun stuff, for the science communicators, it’s a bit like a duck paddling water, I suppose. And we’d love to even catch up with each other, but we’re so busy out on the stage running programmes.

[00:07:04]
Karen Player: Yeah, often Ben or Holly or some of the other Fizzics team can be on site at the Australian Museum for like two weeks and I might not see them at all because we’re just so busy. So I tend to do a lot of video conferencing on top of that during August. So the festival on site at the museum is absolutely huge. I think we’ve already got 5,000 students booked in, which is huge. We’re kind of expecting we might get 10,000. For the schools that can’t visit the museum, I then either try to present the presenters that are on site and video conference or live stream them so we can have off site audience as well. Or run a separate stream of video conferences sort of like late in the afternoon after the on-site students have gone to enable more students to interact with everything Science Week.

[00:07:51]
Ben Newsome: Now this is something I’m really in love with. In fact, Karen actually taught me to do science education video conferencing quite a few years ago. If you haven’t done it, I actually won’t get into this because this is a real thing that you’ve been very much heading up with the Australian Museum and my gosh it can help out regional areas in a long way.

[00:08:11]
Karen Player: Yeah, it was actually interesting. I was watching a NASA documentary talking about going to Mars a couple of nights ago and it made me remember the first video conference we actually did at the Australian Museum in the year 2000 through ISDN lines. And it was actually with the NASA habitat. So they actually sort of do stuff underwater to train astronauts in how to get used to the conditions of outer space. It was amazing. We had a couple of groups. It was in the evening to deal with the time difference with America. And we probably had like 50 kids. I think there was some scout groups as well that had come in and asked questions. And it wasn’t until I watched that documentary and they were talking about the NASA habitat and it’s like, oh, that’s right. Like 17 years ago, we did in a different technology, we did this connection with NASA. So it made me remember how amazing a lot of the NASA connections and their education programmes for students are and how long they’ve been doing those digital links.

[00:09:12]
Ben Newsome: And those dark days, some people might actually remember this with the ISDN. I mean, the cost of doing this was insane.

[00:09:19]
Karen Player: It was scary. So we did a few in 2000. We had an exhibition on biodiversity and we tried to do a lot of environmental programmes linked to that. But again, very few people had the ISDN video conferencing connections. I think we did a programme called Backyard Biodiversity where we had hundreds of schools across the state sending out kits of how to go out and explore the minibeasts and invertebrates in their schoolyard and then they could send stuff back to us. I think we did Backyard Biodiversity and Dung Beetle Mania.

[00:09:48]
Ben Newsome: You gotta have a mania about that.

[00:09:50]
Karen Player: Oh, you gotta have the great titles. And you know, we found even in the inner city, they identified a new species of dung beetle in Sydney through that programme. But we were trying to video conference and connect with those students that were doing the programme to sort of have our scientists interact with them. So I just say the Australian Museum was just ahead of its time, certainly ahead of the technology. And we really didn’t pick up our video conferencing again until about 2009.

[00:10:16]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, actually, I started doing it in about 2010 or so. I think I ran into you when we were doing, remember the Astro colly programmes with the Country Areas Programme for New South Wales?

[00:10:24]
Karen Player: Yes. They were brilliant. So the Country Areas Programme was something that was run, and it was kind of how Dart Connections, which is the video conferencing providers.

[00:10:34]
Ben Newsome: That’s the New South Wales Distance and Rural Technologies Group. If you type DART NSW into your search provider, you will find them.

[00:10:41]
Karen Player: Yes. And that’s where all of the video conferences are advertised. So they had this programme and they were looking for content providers. So they were seeking Fizzics Education, the Australian Museum, lots of the other cultural organisations to say, hey, we’ve got these thousands of students ready to go, do you have content? So we did our first session, I think we had 25 schools. I don’t think I’ve ever done a session as big…

[00:11:06]
Ben Newsome: We had 15 in one go. I was pretty insane.

[00:11:08]
Karen Player: Yeah. And I think in the space of three sessions or four sessions, we had 6,000 students. Which completely blew my number projections out of the water, because we don’t quite get that many per session. But it was amazing opportunity to really link resources, expertise to regional New South Wales, which is the whole point of the Museum Outreach Unit at the Australian Museum.

[00:11:34]
Ben Newsome: Especially when this is only just after the connected classrooms programme had been rolled out to 2,500 schools across New South Wales, and it was the big thing. Obviously times have changed, and things, we don’t see that many schools in one go. And probably for very good reason.

[00:11:50]
Karen Player: It was, well, challenging. I have to say it was probably the hardest thing that I’ve done. But the team from Dart Connections were really amazing and helped support us through that and kind of gave us a little bit of an idea of what’s possible. I know that Dart Connections had a session for the Premier’s Reading Challenge last year with Andy Griffiths. And they had 100 schools connect. And they hadn’t had that for a long time. I think the other one that they’d done they had 75 schools. So certainly things like that connecting with amazing authors, really just so much opportunity.

[00:12:27]
Ben Newsome: It’s a big thing because some people in North America are well aware of CILC, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, as well as CAPspace from Polycom, where you can get these sort of events, but the sort of volume of schools that come through in New South Wales, Australia is insane when a big event comes up, people certainly get to play.

[00:12:49]
Karen Player: Yeah, and that’s because really it’s almost a decade now that that space has been available for people. So you know there are still some video conferencing units that have probably never been turned on in some schools, but others are really active and a lot of the time I find schools are not necessarily connecting with us, but they’re connecting with each other. And I think that’s still a really powerful use of that technology as well.

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Ben Newsome: So one of the things that Karen and I got to put together along with the Powerhouse Museum and Sydney Olympic Park at the start, it was a family of about six of us there I believe.

[00:13:21]
Karen Player: Yeah, Sydney Living Museums, State Library was early as well, Powerhouse, and Sydney Olympic Park certainly were some of the early groups for Virtual Excursions Australia.

[00:13:33]
Ben Newsome: We used to meet up monthly and the idea was that we thought, hey, if we’re going to be presenting with students, why don’t we share ideas between our groups so that the students get a better deal out of it? And so there’s a bit of an organisation which schools can certainly connect with, certainly within Australia, but of course overseas if you wish to as well, they’d be right to get in touch. Which is?

[00:13:52]
Karen Player: So, Virtual Excursions Australia. So, what that is essentially is a portal that links you through to other content providers. So, people can have a bit of a profile up there. We put blogs and collate sort of, aggregate the sessions that are available under certain topics, and then we can use that for promotion as well. But it was something that Ben and I, you know when you go to a conference and you get really inspired by ideas, and most of the time you get back to your job and you just don’t have time to implement anything. This was one of those ideas that just seemed so important that we just got it going. So we kind of had the idea. We had through this conference there was quite a few people that were ready to get started on that sort of virtual excursion and video conferencing level. And we all sort of came together, we had a competition of what to name it, we got a website, and then sort of ran it from there.

[00:14:35]
Karen Player: And for us, it’s kind of just a bit of a professional network. We’ve been able to share, you know, what works and what doesn’t with new content providers coming in. Very much that let’s not all make the same mistakes over and over. And certainly in this community at our level, it was a really great opportunity to do it. You don’t see it very often in this kind of collaboration that has been so successful.

[00:15:08]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, it’s insane.

[00:15:10]
Karen Player: Yeah, it’s good, 20 or so organisations that are often involved and got up to 40 at one point.

[00:15:16]
Ben Newsome: So people come and go depending on what their needs are, so definitely new people tend to be more involved because they sort of need that helping and nurturing. And some of the organisations that have been running stuff for five years are like, oh you know we’ll just read the minutes and drop in from time to time. So it’s been a really good network.

[00:15:35]
Ben Newsome: Well thinking about this from a, sorry, this is a long way from your first days as a front of house volunteer. I mean, obviously leaving a science degree, entering the big bad world outside of uni is a big thing. But why museums? Why not a national park or…

[00:15:53]
Karen Player: Completely accidental. So I went into university with grand plans to be a volcanologist.

[00:16:00]
Ben Newsome: Oh cool.

[00:16:01]
Karen Player: So I completely got through high school, knew that I wanted to do science, didn’t actually have any idea what science. At one point it was a lot of marine science, I’m just celebrating my 25th year as a scuba diver.

[00:16:12]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, we need to go for a dive again by the way.

[00:16:14]
Karen Player: Yeah, I went on Sunday, it was brilliant. So through school, through high school, there was a couple of short unit subjects. And one of them was a marine studies one when they got to go learn to scuba dive down at Jervis Bay. I wasn’t actually doing that course, but somehow I talked my way into going on the scuba diving course. So I learned to dive, I think it must have been in year 11. And because that was because I had a passion for marine studies. I did my work experience at Sydney Aquarium. Was scuba diving, but when I got to uni obviously I transitioned. I think it’s because I found an old box of assignments that I’d kept from primary school.

[00:16:48]
Ben Newsome: Really?

[00:16:49]
Karen Player: Yep. So two assignments that I’d obviously kept and found. One was on sharks and one was on volcanoes.

[00:16:53]
Ben Newsome: Right.

[00:16:54]
Karen Player: It’s bizarre what you keep and what triggers. And it’s like, that’s right. I always loved rocks. I always loved that kind of landform. So I went, and I had a big thing for ancient history. I did ancient history through high school as well. I went, ok, I’m going to be, I’m not sure where it came from, but I’m going to be a volcanologist. I’m going to go to uni, I’m going to do a couple of arts subjects with my science. So I’ll do all of my geology and those kinds of things, and physical environments. Learn Italian.

[00:17:23]
Ben Newsome: Oh, you were really into it. You were really going to do this.

[00:17:25]
Karen Player: Very geared. This was first-year uni. Yeah, cool. Everything was shiny. And also did some ancient history subjects. So essentially what I wanted to do was move to Italy and be a volcanologist because that’s where all the active volcanoes were. That didn’t quite happen for a couple of reasons. I was not very good at learning Italian. The thing I got top marks for was the regions of food. So I was very good at that bit. I can actually read a paper, I can actually read Italian much better than I can speak it. And all of the ancient history. So that’s what I really wanted to do. And as I went through uni, a couple of things happened. First of all, not a big call for volcanologists in Australia. What I would have ended up redirecting is sort of the geophysics and geoscience and ending up in mining. And it’s not the direction I wanted to go.

[00:18:10]
Karen Player: So I loved all of my geology subjects, I’m still a bit of a nut for a bit of a natural disaster nut. Still love my volcanoes. But I ended up transitioning a little bit into more geomorphology. So more land forms, rivers, those kinds of things. So a bit more recent on top. And what it led me to the museum essentially was then linking to that biodiversity. But the way I became a volunteer was actually having a whinge to a friend of mine going, why can’t I get a job after I finished uni? I contacted every environmental consultancy company in Sydney with resumes and couldn’t get a foot in the door. A friend of mine’s mum came out and said, oh, have you ever thought about volunteering? And she was actually the volunteer coordinator at the Australian Museum. And had said, hey, we take volunteers every six months or so. I’ll let you know next time it comes up.

[00:18:55]
Karen Player: So I had never thought about it. Never occurred to me that that was an avenue for my skill set, my passion, for my love of communicating the science. So it was really a bit of a lightbulb moment. She sent me the forms a few months later, I applied, no one knew that I knew her. I didn’t go through her as an interview. I actually had a three-person sit-down panel interview to become a volunteer. And eventually after I was accepted as a volunteer, then she told people that we knew each other. So it was on my own merit. Just in case you’re wondering. And from there, it really was just an absolute passion for that, the idea of museums, the idea of learning. The Australian Museum has a lot of cultural components, we have a lot of cultural exhibitions come through, but a lot of science as well.

[00:19:51]
Ben Newsome: Actually let’s go down that path, because some people don’t realise just how much active science really happens in a museum. So I suppose describe back of house.

[00:20:00]
Karen Player: Yeah, so for the Australian Museum, the majority of what we do is behind the scenes. So a lot of museums are only public-facing. So the staff that work behind the scenes are just managing the collections. So materials conservation, sort of archiving collections and making sure everything’s where it should be. With the Australian Museum, we actually have an active science department behind us. So 50% of the staff if not more, actually work in the science collection. So there’s collection management, which is really important, but there’s also research. So we’ve got researchers as well. We have a lot of university links, a lot of people coming from overseas to work on our collections as well. We also loan some of our collections. We’ve got things called type specimens, which is the first specimen that was ever collected that was used for the identification. To be described properly.

[00:20:45]
Karen Player: And that then becomes a really important object. And so if other people around the world find another specimen of that species, they might want to go back to the type specimen to make sure if there’s any differences or those kinds of things. Sometimes things end up being a subspecies because they are different enough from the original. So we actually have quite a lot of type specimens. And at the moment, I think we’re almost edging up to about 19 million specimens in our collection. So it’s world-renowned. It’s certainly world class. And most people think of active science happening at universities, but certainly the Australian Museum and a lot of the big natural history museums in Australia do have a very significant science side of it.

[00:21:26]
Ben Newsome: Actually something I want to just throw out there. If you happen to be teaching biology at school, it’d be worth letting your students know that there’s a number of taxonomists are just not as many as needed, not even close. So it’d be worth even just letting them know that. I mean obviously job opportunities are somewhat thin because they’re required with funding, but the number of, just trying to sort out the mess that was created in the 19th century, let alone what is currently around.

[00:21:52]
Karen Player: And we have situations where we get collections that have been donated to the museum by sort of early naturalists. We’ve got some things in our collections that have never been identified. You know we know that we’ve got the collection, it might have several thousand specimens, but we don’t necessarily have any more information than that.

[00:22:09]
Ben Newsome: Well I remember actually being lucky enough to go behind the scenes at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Canada and just looking at all their dinosaur specimens there and the number of bones in plaster jackets that just hadn’t been opened in years and years. It’s just…

[00:22:23]
Karen Player: It’s incredible. And it’s yeah, there’s certainly so much work that needs to be done. In terms of sort of museum preparation, museum on specimens, but also the front of house component. What I love to talk to both teachers and students about is the diversity of work there is at museums. We have people in social media, we have people in marketing. We have people all the way up to our venues and all the events.

[00:22:48]
Ben Newsome: People putting on Jurassic Lounge, let’s have a silent disco.

[00:22:50]
Karen Player: All of the events people, all of the programming people from early childhood to adult programmes. The people that work out what stuff to sell at the shop. So they actually go and commission new things. So they’re actually designing them. We have designers that work on both 2D print material, but also design the layout of the exhibitions. We’ve got text writers. So if you’ve got students that just love writing but want to write things that are interesting, you know the text writers or the editors of those. Not to mention all the education staff and the science communication people, collection managers, taxidermists. Now that is something that we don’t get a lot of these days. The Australian Museum currently has two in-house taxidermists.

[00:23:28]
Ben Newsome: Is that all?

[00:23:29]
Karen Player: Right. Yeah. And they do two different things. So we have display specimens that are taxidermied, but also study skins. So study skins aren’t in a display pose, so they’re usually stretched out nice and long, to be able to fit in drawers, and those kinds of things.

[00:23:43]
Ben Newsome: Jeez, and that’s why often in the science festivals you have careers chats. Because of this, because people just don’t realise how diverse it actually is.

[00:23:49]
Karen Player: Well that’s exactly right. A lot of people think education and science communication is sort of one thing, but at museums, it is really, really diverse. We’ve got carpenters that physically build our exhibitions.

[00:23:59]
Ben Newsome: Someone’s got it.

[00:24:00]
Karen Player: Yeah. One of the staff members that I work with called Tina Manson, she is essentially an expert in moulding and casting. So she makes all of the specimens for Museum in a Box and makes the dioramas. So essentially she is a specimen maker and a diorama maker. So she’ll get the original object, she’ll make a mould of it. Then she’ll make the cast, and then she’ll paint the casts up to look realistic, and then put them in position in dioramas. And it’s an amazing process. And she might, you know, she does stuff for the exhibitions as well, but predominantly she works for Museum in a Box, making sure that resources that we send to schools across New South Wales and further beyond, look fabulous.

[00:24:38]
Ben Newsome: Actually, I saw that in an interview of yours recently, or someone in the AM has done it, because the Museum in the Box has actually just passed a major year.

[00:24:45]
Karen Player: Milestone, that’s right. So last year was Museum in a Box 50th anniversary. And yeah, it’s a real achievement. And I can’t take credit for all of that.

[00:24:54]
Ben Newsome: Oh, please do.

[00:24:55]
Karen Player: I can certainly take some credit for the last 10 years and the growth that we’ve had there. We’ve now got 30 different topics. Most topics have about four boxes, so we kind of, you know, we’ve got hundreds of Museum in a Box.

[00:25:09]
Ben Newsome: So I’m a school, I want to get a box off you, I get on the site, go to type in Museum in a Box on the Australian Museum search box, I find the web page, I order from you. Hey, I want this stuff. What happens next?

[00:25:19]
Karen Player: So we have set loan periods. So we have eight loan periods a year that fit in with the New South Wales terms. So it’s usually weeks one, two, three and seven, eight, nine. So the boxes go out for three weeks, come back to us, go back out.

[00:25:32]
Ben Newsome: Do you have much breakage?

[00:25:33]
Karen Player: Surprisingly not. I think there’s a real, and we do pack, like things are sort of in foam trays and those kinds of things. But I think there’s a lot of reverence towards the specimens. You know, it’s a bit like Christmas, you get these boxes, you open them up, and there’s a preciousness about it. So people, well not in my house at Christmas, those kids go nuts.

[00:25:50]
Ben Newsome: But anyway.

[00:25:51]
Karen Player: Ok, someone that’s really careful opening wrapping paper. But yeah, it’s kind of like a gift and a present and we really find that we don’t have a lot of breakage or theft. Sometimes we get things posted back going, oh so sorry, you know this book ended up in our library or so-and-so popped this in their pocket and brought it back a couple of days later, and it certainly happens. But not as much and there is a cost on Museum in a Box, and that cost does sort of counteract a little bit of that sort of wear and tear. So very rarely do we sort of say, hey, if there’s been massive damage, we will put an extra charge on. But most of the time it’s just absorbed into the cost of the programme.

[00:26:28]
Ben Newsome: Fantastic. Now, obviously this is gonna be a difficult question for you because it’s not really your first day in museums. Always curious to find out, I mean, can you name me one, two or three something that grabbed your imagination, someone was teaching something or you saw something happening in school that was just wicked? It was just cool. It was just working so well. What are some of the things you’ve seen that are just really good?

[00:26:50]
Karen Player: Well it’s been a big journey and I’ve seen a lot of amazing things. And for me it’s that hands-on connection. Being able to touch a real object. So from the Australian Museum’s perspective and certainly even now when I give a tour it’s something that people come back to me and say wow that’s not what I expected. So in the museum in an exhibition called Surviving Australia we have a stromatolite. So stromatolites don’t look like much, they look like…

[00:27:18]
Ben Newsome: Kind of a blob.

[00:27:19]
Karen Player: Yep, a bit of a rock. But these particular rocks are actually fossils. And the one that we have on display is probably 100 kilos if not more. And it is 2.8 billion years old. So 2,800 million years. And you’re allowed to touch it. For me, that sense of scale and the story of stromatolites and the ability, you know, the millions of years that they help produce oxygen which enabled an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which then enabled evolution to come out from the water onto land. That kind of story just blows me away. And the fact that you’re allowed to touch something that old. And I tell people this is the oldest thing you’ll probably ever be able to touch in your life.

[00:28:04]
Ben Newsome: Yeah.

[00:28:05]
Karen Player: You might get something, if you know a little bit older, we do have stromatolites that are sort of 300 million, we’ve got some that are 3.5 billion years. So I can’t even get the numbers right because they’re just so big. So 3,500 million, but those ones are actually not to be touched. But we do have some that are sort of, you know, much older than that, you got a whole…

[00:28:24]
Ben Newsome: Three billion that you can touch, but this one, 2.8, it’s, you know, it’s just that sense of scale and the significance of something that is so kind of underwhelming until you know about it. People walk past it and just don’t even connect with it.

[00:28:38]
Ben Newsome: Which is actually the point, it’s about the narrative.

[00:28:40]
Karen Player: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s about the passion in the story. Like I’ll have people going, I never expected that that was going to be the favourite thing that I had on this tour, but it was because, you know, you telling me the story and the rest of it and how it links to so much, that that. So that kind of thing and just being able to have that physical connection. I’m a bit of a toucher. So you know, when I’m going shopping for clothes like I’ll be running my hand through the clothes. Occasionally if I’m, you know, daydreaming a little bit on the way to work, I’ll be running my hand down the sandstone wall of Hyde Park on my way to the museum, you know sort of looking at the beautiful sandstone building. That’s a…

[00:29:21]
Ben Newsome: You’re still a geologist. That’s the reason why we have yellow paint around hardware and stuff to stop people from going near things because of you Karen.

[00:29:28]
Karen Player: Yes, I yeah. So those kinds of things, and certainly the experiences I’ve been able to give through Museum in a Box and being able to send, you know, resources and in some cases they’re replicas, some cases they’re real, but having this hands-on experience, this mini museum that gets sent around to schools. And you know, I think last year we reached over 120,000 not just students but sort of community organisations and adult learners and you know, just people, and they had a connection with the Australian Museum without having to necessarily come into our doors. And you know, a lot of people live really far away from Sydney, even just in greater Sydney, it can be quite difficult to get into us. So the more that we can provide, the more that we can send out, that sort of a tangible hands-on experience, I think is amazing.

[00:30:12]
Ben Newsome: Well I’d look to ask this with lots of people, and because I’m always curious because I truly believe that you’re only as good as the worst thing you did. I wonder, like none of us are perfect. There are things that go bad whether it’s technical or whatever. What are some things where you’ve been running a class and it’s gone completely pear-shaped?

[00:30:33]
Karen Player: I’d certainly when we used to do a lot of presentations during school holidays, we were doing one on these volcanoes and this little boy just kept wanting to contribute. And he just, we’re in the middle of talking about volcanoes and he put his hand up, yes, my dad’s got a ladder.

[00:30:50]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, that’s right.

[00:30:52]
Karen Player: So, my okay Google is trying to contribute to the conversation.

[00:30:55]
Ben Newsome: It’s trying to find a ladder for you.

[00:30:57]
Karen Player: This little boy just kept wanting to let us know that his dad had a ladder. And then the next part was, volcanoes ate dinosaurs, or dinosaurs ate volcanoes. So sometimes yeah, that can be really challenging to keep the flow going when you’ve got someone that’s really enthusiastic and wants to contribute, but it’s just completely off topic.

[00:31:16]
Ben Newsome: Oh, that’s a skill.

[00:31:17]
Karen Player: Yeah. Yeah, we you know we just kind of go, we have two people, so we kind of you know, want to let the kids contribute, but we also need to keep it rolling. So that was certainly a fun one and we were talking about it earlier in terms of remote delivery. We were doing some video conferencing and it was actually with an external provider, which made it even harder. So we had an amazing author called Aleesah Darlison and she’d just written a book called, The Puggle’s Problem I think it was, about a baby echidna. And so of course we had taxidermy echidnas, it was really great and we had a whole day’s worth of sessions all booked in. Halfway through one, no, halfway through I think the second one, we got someone come up and just say, hey, the entire network is about to shut down at the Australian Museum. We have a flood in the server room. So luckily I had a couple of moments warning and I was able to you know let the people that we were participating with at the time saying, I think in a few moments we’re going to be disconnected. This is why, we’ll reschedule. And sure enough, five minutes later, everything went off. So we did have a heads up, but that’s one of the things, completely a technical issue completely outside the realms of anything we could do.

[00:32:28]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, we’ve had, like I just seen thinking because disasters can and will happen, especially in remote education because what’s going on the other side could be completely different to what’s happening to you. I’m just reminded of a time when we had, it was during fire season in summer. And we were connecting with a school and it turns out that yes, they had to evacuate because the fire was coming.

[00:32:49]
Karen Player: We had the same thing with some storms. I had, I was ready to do a session. It was about ten o’clock. I’m like, where is everyone? And I end up contacting all three schools later. One of them had been flooded, one had been evacuated and another one I think they lost power. So all three and then I thought, oh okay, well I better call the next session, which I think was about an hour later and call all those schools up and say, you know, is everything okay? Are you going to be able to connect? You know, there was a big storm. And they’re like, what storm? So it just happened that the three we had in the morning session were all sort of Riverina way. And the three that we were having in the afternoon session were all Northern New South Wales and had no idea there was anything to do with the storm. And they kind of were like, no no, it’s all good.

[00:33:41]
Ben Newsome: Actually this is not really a natural disaster issue, but I was once connecting to a school and the teacher rang up almost in tears saying, look, I just can’t get into the room because the music class won’t move out.

[00:33:53]
Karen Player: Yes, yes I’ve had that one as well. And I guess something that for me that happens quite a lot is just the logistics of Museum in a Box. Like we have about 1100 freight movements a year with getting boxes in and out. So on average it’s about 500 boxes alone each year. And so they’re going in and out. And the one at the end of term, we’ve got a week buffer to get those boxes back before school closes. But every now and again, some of the paperwork doesn’t work out and the boxes get sent back to the original school if they don’t switch over their paperwork. Or you know they were just having such a good time or the teacher was sick and the other teacher didn’t realise. And they get stuck in school over school holidays. Because the next loan arrives first day back. So I always have this school holiday panic, how many boxes are trapped in the school library or how am I going to get them out, how am I going to get them to the new school so they don’t miss out. So that logistics I have to say is just a constant challenge.

[00:34:48]
Ben Newsome: Oh I can see. You’re actually reminding me of a friend of mine, Deb, who runs this place called Dissection Connection, and she sends these prepared specimens, biological specimens for dissection in schools, which means she’s sending, you know, stuff that can rot in the mail. And the issue is if no one actually picks up the package off the floor, it gets a little little smelly.

[00:35:10]
Karen Player: Yeah, well, again that links me to when we used to work in Search and Discover. So Search and Discover at the Museum is our inquiry centre. So we have people phone, walk in, email with, what is this I found in my backyard? When it’s getting, the months are getting warmer, we get a lot of snake inquiries. So one summer, one very hot summer, over the Christmas period, so the mail slows down, we got a snake in the mail. Right. A dead snake. It was dead before it was in the mail. It had essentially almost liquefied in this bag. And we sent it to identify it. I think we’re actually still able to, from the scales on the belly. But it was terrifying to open this parcel. I’ve never, yeah, it was just like the odour. We couldn’t actually open it. We had to send a very polite but very stern email about how inappropriate it is. So I think from the postmark it was 10 days in the post.

[00:36:08]
Ben Newsome: In 40 degrees.

[00:36:09]
Karen Player: In 40 degree heat of this snake. So yeah, that certainly was, you know, made us change a few things, made sure we were much clearer with people about what they’re allowed to post in with us, if they want to send things like that to deliver it to us. We get cabs that come with little cooler bags from like from Westmead Hospital and those kinds of things with snakes or spiders.

[00:36:33]
Ben Newsome: How’s the cabbie feel about that?

[00:36:35]
Karen Player: Hey, he doesn’t have to make chit chat. Just throw the red back in the back, no problem. So yeah, we often get those kinds of things to say, hey, can you identify them? We need this for medical reasons or, you know, just to put in the book’s kind of thing. So we get those ones as well. But yeah, you just never know what’s going to arrive in the post.

[00:36:53]
Ben Newsome: Look, thank you very much for coming along. I mean, you’ve got a very busy day ahead of you. You’ve got stuff to go on, look thanks very much. And obviously there’s going to be people here listening who would want to get in touch with you. So how would they do that?

[00:37:04]
Karen Player: Okay, so the easiest options actually to get me through the Museum in a Box website. So you can google Museum in a Box or do it off the Australian Museum site, you’ll get to all of the contact details there. The email address is museuminabox, all one word, @austmus, which is A U S T M U S, .gov.au. And yeah, we get emails from all around the world and inquiries. Even if we can’t send you a Museum in a Box, we can certainly try to send you some of our educational print resources that go with it. We often can do video conferencing, you know pretty broadly around the globe depending on time zones. But the Australian Museum’s website itself is just, I think it’s got like 40,000 fact sheets. It is absolutely amazing. So very much worth if you’re looking at anything sort of Indigenous culture in Australia or any sort of animal components, definitely search that. It’s really worthwhile, there’s lots of lots of resources there. So yeah, look forward to hearing from you.

[00:38:03]
Ben Newsome: Alright, thanks very much, Karen Player, thanks for coming on.

[00:38:04]
Karen Player: You’re welcome.

[00:38:06]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re all about science, ed tech and more. To see 100 fun free experiments you can do with your class, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F I Z Z I C S, and click 100 Free Experiments.

[00:38:26]
Ben Newsome: Well there you go, that’s Karen Player from the Australian Museum. Look clearly she’s a good friend of mine. We’ve worked together on many education projects. One of which comes to mind is a conference we did in 2012 I think it was. It was in Cairns with a number of distance learning professionals from the Sydney Opera House, the Powerhouse Museum and a number of others. And we got to actually spend a bit of break out time with her, with herself, her partner and I. We just jumped on a reef cat and went out to the Great Barrier Reef to do some scuba diving. That was an awesome time. Yeah, we talked science but let’s be honest, it was just a time for a great break. And Karen, if you’re listening, I think it’s time for doing some more diving again if we can ever pull ourselves out of teaching, which is not going to happen anytime soon either. We will see how we go.

[00:39:15]
Ben Newsome: Anyway, I want to make sure we cover some of the points that I certainly got out of this interview. And I know that you got out a lot more than just a couple of points yourself as well. But here we go, here’s a first one. Don’t rush through museums. No really, try not to rush. I know there’s so many objects and you want to run to each gallery and hall to check out the new stuff, especially the new exhibits. But in the process you can quickly miss the cool stuff that might just be a little bit understated. Karen talked about that meteorite, you know, three and a half billion year old meteorite that people often blunder straight past and don’t realise it’s even there. So next time you’re in a museum, whether you’re there with a family or a school group, try to take your time.

[00:40:00]
Ben Newsome: And if you’ve really got a chance, and let’s be honest we don’t always have the chance, if possible see if you can break your visit into several days. I know certainly when I visited Washington to the Smithsonians, of which there are quite a few of them, that is a whole heap of work to look around and check out. There’s so much to learn in museums. So stop and smell the roses if possible. Secondly, if you’re trying to go into museums, if you really want to break into them as an educator, consider volunteering. It doesn’t have to be about getting a paid job front up and centre. Look these things are highly competitive and whilst I’m not involved directly in teaching within museums, I mean our job is that we get invited into museums to do this as well. But if you want to work full-time in a museum, you need to get some experience up. And volunteering is a great way to go.

[00:40:45]
Ben Newsome: And thirdly, things can go wrong. And if they can go wrong, they will go wrong. I think that’s Murphy’s Law. Well that description of what happened to the server room in the Australian Museum when Karen was in the middle of a video conference, it’s going to happen. Things can go wrong. But you know what, inevitably people can always reschedule. Even live events where you’re on stage and you’re running a programme, or if you’re in a school and you’re trying to run this one experiment where you’ve only got one chance to do it. It’s okay if things don’t go quite right. Now hopefully it’s not as catastrophic as a server room getting flooded, I mean that sounds expensive. However, it’s okay. Things will go wrong. You can usually pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get going. So there you go, there’s some of my learnings. I’d love to hear in the comments of the iTunes or on our website about what you think. What were your learnings?

[00:41:51]
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. Love your science? We do too. Here’s this episode’s education tip of the week. Grab your pencil and get ready to make some notes.

[00:42:01]
Ben Newsome: So now it’s time for another education tip, which I know is being used in primary schools around the place. Set up a garden which teaches science. Now of course there are plenty of primary schools where you set up a garden where they grow their vegetables, and this is a good thing. Healthy nutrition and good eating habits is very much part of the curriculum. However, is it worth considering putting a garden in as well which is all about variable testing? And what I mean by this is maybe the kids can be looking at what is the impact of shaded areas versus well lit areas. Or if you’re feeling a bit meaner, areas that have good soil and areas that have poor soil. Example, maybe literally an area that’s been salted. Is there a difference in terms of the amount of fertiliser that you add to your plants in one garden bed versus another?

[00:42:45]
Ben Newsome: Is there a way that you can look at well even just the structure of the plants? Like get them to grow different versions of plants themselves so that they can learn a bit of different flowers and their insect associations and that type of thing. You can teach science about composting. You could set up a worm farm. A school garden is quite useful when it comes to teaching biology and by association therefore ecology, interrelationships between different living things. So there you go, there’s a simple tip you can set up. Don’t just look about setting up a school garden because it looks pretty or because it can grow food, but is there an area that can also teach science? You could be setting up rain gauges and anemometers to work out the local climate conditions. There are many different things you can do about teaching science, and it doesn’t just have to be about being in a lab.

[00:43:43]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re excited about science. Grab a copy of our new book, Be Amazing: How to Teach Science the Way Primary Kids Love, from our website. Just search Be Amazing Book. It’s available in hard copy and ebook. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F I Z Z I C S.

[00:44:03]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, there’s definitely different ways you can be teaching science, and there are so many avenues that you can do this. One way that you can do this is with, well, getting students to produce documentaries. In our last interview with Brett Salakas, that’s by the way the primary teacher who founded the Aussie Ed Twitter chat, which every Sunday night has hundreds if not thousands of teachers from all over the globe participate in talking about education and getting it really pumping in their schools. He’s been very keen on getting students to produce their own content. And in the process certainly learn a lot about science.

[00:44:39]
Brett Salakas: They can film it, and the last two years that I’ve taught, I have the kids capturing the rocket launch of the bamboo skewer in slow motion and then collating their experiments and collating their knowledge and making like a mini documentary. So they’re able to sort of voice over, narrate their own learning. They’ve got this beautiful digital resource that is a reflection of their learning. It’s like a journal I suppose of their learning. But they’ve got their own footage. So they’re not just downloading stuff off YouTube, which we all love to do, and you know they’re not just consuming content, but they’re actually creating their own content. So it’s tangible, they’re getting in there making the experiments, but then they’re actually building their own content as well in the process. And for me, that’s magic.

[00:45:29]
Ben Newsome: Yes you can imagine students would have a lot of fun with that. I mean, filming their own projects and getting to post it online, kind of showing off about their skills and what they’ve learned so far in your class. That’s going to really grab their attention because suddenly their learning is centred around them, than about what you specifically want to tell them all the time. They can be a bit of masters of the things they are learning about, and in the process learn a bit of film editing as well. If you want to check out that whole interview with Brett Salakas, certainly jump onto the Fizzics Ed Podcast, just jump onto iTunes or visit our site, we certainly got links there. And you’ll find out a lot about how Brett’s been not only teaching about getting kids to do mini documentaries, but also why he set up the Aussie Ed Twitter chat and a major project that he’s got called World STEM, which involves teachers uploading videos about how they’ve been teaching science lessons and well beyond in their own classrooms.

[00:46:25]
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. Sign up now for our fortnightly email newsletter. It’s loaded with details on new experiments you can do, STEM teaching articles, new gadgets, exclusive offers and upcoming events. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au. Scroll to the bottom and add your email.

[00:46:43]
Ben Newsome: And that just about brings us to the end of yet another Fizzics Ed Podcast. Hey, thanks for tuning in, especially over the weeks we’ve been releasing more and more of these podcasts out. We’ve been getting some great feedback and I hope you’re really enjoying it. Hey, to help extend your teaching, jump on our website. There are so many free things that you could be using. Look, there’s over 100 articles on teaching science. There’s a whole resource section on free experiments in force and movement, heat, light, sound, kitchen chemistry, space science, geology, you name it, it’s probably there. And if it’s not, well, you should write it as well. Yeah, all you’ve got to do is read how to do the experiments and go and get the materials from your local shops, and you’ll find most of the time they are very cheap and easily accessible. You can easily get them quite easily. So definitely check that out.

[00:47:30]
Ben Newsome: Hey, speaking of checking things out, go onto iTunes and check out all the other podcasts. And maybe subscribe. There are a number of interviews lined up and next week is well, an interesting one. We’re going to be speaking with the education team from the GWS Giants. Now for those overseas listeners, GWS Giants is a major football team in western Sydney. They’ve been doing a lot of community outreach for several years, well frankly since inception, to get kids involved with their schooling and get them to leadership and really just embedding themselves in the community. We’ve been also working with the GWS Giants on delivering paired programmes with them on science, and you might find this a bit interesting. How we work with a major sports team to deliver science outreach in primary schools. So definitely check that out. And look, as always, may your science lessons be fun, please make them as informative as possible and make them grab your students’ imagination. You’ve been listening to me, Ben Newsome, I’m from Fizzics Education and of course you’ve been listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. Catch you next time.

[00:48:35]
Announcer: You’ve been listening to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re excited about science. Subscribe to us on iTunes to download the next episode as soon as it’s released. And don’t forget, for hundreds of ideas, free experiments, our new Be Amazing book and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F I Z Z I C S.

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. How can someone start a career in science communication or at a major science museum?
Volunteering is highly recommended as a starting point. Karen Player began her 20-year career at the Australian Museum as a front-of-house volunteer after university while working various odd jobs. Volunteering provides hands-on experience, networking opportunities, and a foot in the door that can eventually lead to casual or permanent roles.

2. What is the “Museum in a Box” programme?
Museum in a Box is an outreach programme run by the Australian Museum that sends physical boxes filled with real museum materials, specimens, and educational resources to schools, libraries, and community groups all over Australia. This allows people who cannot physically visit the museum to engage with authentic science and history.

3. What happens behind the scenes at a natural history museum?
While the public sees the exhibitions, a massive amount of active science happens behind closed doors. The Australian Museum houses around 19 million specimens. Behind the scenes, scientists and collection managers work on conservation, archiving, research, and managing “type specimens” used by researchers globally.

4. What is a “Type Specimen” and why is it important in biology?
A type specimen is the original, physical specimen that was used to formally describe and name a species for the very first time. It acts as the ultimate reference point for scientists around the world. If researchers find a similar animal and are unsure if it is the same species or a new subspecies, they compare it back to the original type specimen.

5. Is there a demand for taxonomists in science today?
Yes, there is a severe shortage of taxonomists. Ben and Karen highlight that if you are teaching biology or have students interested in the field, it is worth noting that the scientific community needs far more taxonomists than are currently working to help classify and manage the vast diversity of life on Earth.

Extra thought ideas to consider

The Hidden World of Museum Science:
When we visit a museum, we only see the tip of the iceberg. Consider discussing with your students or peers the vast scale of what happens “behind the scenes.” With collections reaching up to 19 million specimens, museums are not just display spaces, but active, world-class research hubs. How does this change our perception of the role a museum plays in global scientific advancement?

Breaking Geographical Barriers in Education:
Programs like video conferencing and “Museum in a Box” are vital for equity in education. They allow students in remote or regional areas to interact directly with experts and touch real museum specimens. Consider how your local school or community group could better utilize distance learning tools to bring world-class experts into your own classroom without the need for expensive travel.

The Value of a Non-Linear Career Path:
Karen’s journey from working as a hospital tea lady and baking for the Cookie Man to heading up major outreach programs at the Australian Museum is a great lesson in career building. It highlights that no experience is wasted and that volunteering can be a powerful stepping stone. This is a valuable discussion point for senior students who may be anxious about finding a direct path into their dream STEM career immediately after graduation.