The Bug Chicks are coming to town.
Kristie Reddick and Jessica Honaker, a team of Cincinnati-based entomologists, are on a mission to bring arthropod education to schools around the world. They will be on the East End from Oct. 10 through 17 for a series of school assemblies and workshops through Stony Brook University’s FoodLab, a food production and agricultural education center on its Southampton campus.
Judiann Carmack-Fayyaz, the FoodLab’s executive director, said she believes the Bug Chicks will be a crucial part of programming this year. Ms. Carmack-Fayyaz met the duo at a U.S. Department of Agriculture conference in 2015 and described them as “very enthusiastic and fairly incredible.”
Ms. Reddick and Ms. Honaker offer a variety of experiences for students, like their Incredible Arthropods Junior Entomologist Program. “We bring our live arthropod zoo and our specimens. We teach kids about arthropods, but we tie it in with social-emotional learning concepts, like bravery, resilience, or empowerment,” Ms. Honaker said. “For older students, our assemblies focus more on career connections and feeling capable.”
“Yes, we teach about bugs,” Ms. Reddick added, “but we actually teach about being humans with totally normal fears and concerns.”
If pushing people to understand their fears is the goal, it’s safe to say bugs are a great way to do it. In his book “The Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe, and Love Insects,” Jeffrey Lockwood estimates that 6 percent of the U.S. population suffers from entomophobia, the fear of bugs.
But Ms. Reddick believes that their inclusion in education is also a unique way to hold students’ attention, especially in the age of dwindling attention spans. “People don’t feel neutral about bugs,” she said. “They either love them or they’re terrified. I think that bugs are the optimal way to create engagement. And because Jessica and I are so in love with bugs and so in love with teaching about them, it creates this infectious enthusiasm.”
Ms. Honaker expressed a similar idea. “From an environmental perspective, bugs are central. They keep our planet healthy. But more directly, everyone has had an experience with bugs. They’re a universal attention-grabber that promotes learning.”
The East End is an ideal host for the Bug Chicks because of its coastal ecosystem. “I’m really interested in where bugs meet the sea. You get really interesting bugs right at coastal zones that you don’t see in other places,” Ms. Reddick said. “There are all sorts of incredible arthropods that you don’t ever really see because they’re down in the ocean, but they’re fascinating and have so much going on.”
“We want people to understand that different is okay,” she added. “At the start of an assembly, students are concerned about themselves. But by the end, they’re asking questions like, ‘Does extracting the silk from the tarantula hurt her?’ The bugs show them a new, empathetic side of themselves in an unexpected way.”