STAR TEACHER

How an innovative teacher, an Emmy Award-winning director and a Hollywood celebrity came together to make science cool (or hot)

BY MONICA KORTSHA

There’s no shortage of fun things to do on a Friday night in Austin, Texas. For many locals, attending the monthly “Hot Science–Cool Talks” event at The University of Texas at Austin is at the top of the list. On a warm March evening, that’s where hundreds of Austinites have gathered, packing into Welch Hall to hear UT associate professor and astronomer Caitlin Casey talk about how pictures of deep space from the James Webb Space Telescope are “breaking the universe” — or at least challenging scientists’ long-held theories about how it works.

Attendees are as diverse as couples on a date night, retirees and wriggling kindergartners. Collectively, they fill almost all of the auditorium’s 483 seats. Five minutes before the start of the event, and there are still about a dozen people waiting outside the auditorium doors, ready to fill any open spots that ushers can find among the crowd.

“Hot Science” has been going strong for 25 years, with the free lecture series bringing the science on campus to a public audience. Most speakers are UT faculty members and researchers from across all scientific realms, from robotics to dinosaurs.

But according to Jay Banner — the founder of “Hot Science,” the master of ceremonies at each talk and a professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences — there’s something about astronomy that gets people excited, especially kids.

“I feel like this is my Ph.D. exam all over again!” replies Casey before delving into a response.

Banner created “Hot Science” to help people forge connections with the science and scientists around them. The series has been a hit since its beginning. So many people showed up to the first talk in 1999, which was about birds as modern dinosaurs and was delivered by Jackson School Professor Timothy Rowe, that they lined the back of what is now the school’s Boyd Auditorium and overflowed into the stairwells.

“We turned away over 100 people who couldn’t fit in the room,” Banner said. “Then we knew there was an appetite for this, and it’s really just grown and grown from there.”

While filling up auditoriums on the UT campus for over two decades is an achievement on its own, Banner thinks “Hot Science” has the potential to reach even more people. He is working to boil down the essence of the “Hot Science” experience — the scientific wonder and the personal connection — into a new television series called “Hot Science TV.” The series is still in its early stages. There are currently six episodes, each one about seven minutes long, available for free online. Each episode showcases a “Hot Science” topic and speaker, who, first and foremost, must be a great teacher.

This is something Banner knows all about. This year, he received the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, one of the highest honors for teaching at the college and university level. The award is presented by Baylor University every two years and comes with a $250,000 prize for the winner and $25,000 for the winner’s home department.

The Cherry Award is agnostic about subject. Recipients include English literature instructors, mathematicians, choral directors, and now with Banner as a winner, geoscientists. The award is open to all university or college instructors in the world, as long as they teach in English. With such a wide variety of teachers entering the contest each cycle, a large part of choosing a winner comes down to evaluating who has had a transformational effect on students, said Kevin Dougherty, chair of the Cherry Award committee.

“This is beyond being an engaging person in the classroom,” he said. “Recipients are people that students can look back and say, ‘Having Dr. Banner in my first year at the University of Texas changed the trajectory of my life.’”

According to undergraduate student Isha Bhasin, Banner’s engaging teaching style is why she is a geosciences student today. She became an environmental science major at the Jackson School after taking Banner’s course, “Sustaining a Planet,” as a first-year student. It’s a class she now recommends to all first-years she meets.

“He became my favorite professor,” she said. “He opened my eyes not only to what sustainability means but how it’s applicable in every part of our lives.”

MaryLynn Musgrove, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and Banner’s first graduate student, said that Banner’s mentorship, motivation and enthusiasm have been a guiding light through her own career.

“He has a way of motivating people by being interested in what they’re interested in,” said Musgrove. “It’s motivation through mutual respect and support.”

The Cherry Award is the cherry on top, so to speak, of a long list of Jackson School and UT teaching honors that Banner has received. This includes being part of UT’s Academy of

Distinguished Teachers, a select group of the university’s top faculty members recognized for their pedagogical prowess.

But the award is also a reminder of how far he has come. That’s because, according to Banner, he started out as a terrible teacher. When he first joined the UT geosciences faculty in 1990, his teaching style could be politely summed up as maximalist. Banner said he tried his hardest to pack everything he learned in his own 16 years of post-high school education into the five months of a school semester. He recalls completely misjudging his students’ reaction to this “more is more” approach.

“I can remember coming into the room one day with two of those full slide trays, swinging open the door, and the students turned and looked at me and their eyes were really wide with, what I thought at the time was wonderment,” Banner said. “But as I learned once I saw the reviews at the end of the semester, they were wide with either terror or hatred.”

Banner credits a pointed critique from an anonymous student in a course evaluation with helping him realize that he needed a new approach to teaching. It simply read: “Banner should be giving these lectures to the other faculty.”

“That just jumped off the page at me,” Banner said. “I’m not very good at this, and I want to do better. And I became better over the next several years.”

According to Banner, this process involved learning how to break down big concepts into smaller, memorable building blocks and finding opportunities for students to experience the excitement of discovery for themselves.

On a recent trip to Barton Springs Pool and the surrounding greenbelt, these teaching tactics were clear, with Banner engaging the class in a discussion about aquifer recharge next to a looming limestone cliff eroded with holes. Far from packing every minute, Banner gave students the time to engage with their surroundings. The class spent a few quiet minutes to watch a blue heron stalk its prey along the water’s edge

Now, as Banner works to get “Hot Science TV” to bigger audiences, there are some parallels between the development of the show and his own teaching journey. “Hot Science TV” isn’t the first attempt to expand the reach of the “Hot Science” speakers through video. The current iteration of the program grew out of some constructive criticism. This time, it wasn’t from an anonymous review, but from someone with a bit of a higher profile — the actor Adrian Grenier, a celebrity who has starred in numerous Hollywood movies and played the lead on the early 2000s HBO series “Entourage.”

Nowadays, in addition to acting, advocating for environmental causes, and working the land on his Bastrop farm, Grenier is a member of the Advisory Council of the UT Environmental Science Institute, which Banner directs. During a council meeting about five years ago, Grenier said that if “Hot Science” was going to go big, simply taping the talks and uploading them online, as the institute had been doing for years, wasn’t going to cut it.

“Hot Science” needed to be transformed from a long lecture into, as he put it, “a little show.”

“They have all these great speakers, and they all have this amazing content on stage for people who are there, but what about all the people who can’t be there in person?” Grenier said, recounting the conversation at the meeting. “Why not make a show that people can access from afar?”

Banner agreed whole-heartedly. But this time, he would need some help. That’s where Scott Rice and his team of students majoring in radio-television-film at the UT Moody College of Communication come in. Rice is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and an associate professor of practice at the Moody College, where he teaches the film production class “Script to Screen” with Matthew McConaughey. The class is all about giving students a first-person look into how films are produced from beginning to end. This often involves Rice inviting students to take part in his own film, TV and commercial productions.

When Rice found out about Banner’s interest in turning the “Hot Science” lectures into a show, he said he was excited to work with his students to make it happen. “There’s a lot of hard-core learning that happens on the production side,” Rice said. “The students are not doing some little small task or activity. They’re actually running the show.”

Each episode of “Hot Science TV” is shot in a single day, with students managing the scheduling, the set staging and videography. All the footage is pieced together into a program where the speaker is talking directly to the camera, taking the audience on a journey through their research. “In this show, the scientist is the host. They speak directly to the viewer and express their particular passion for what they do, why they do it, and the heart behind it,” Rice said. “The heart element is very important. It’s the human element.”

So far, “Hot Science TV” has been funded by small grants and fundraising campaigns. Banner and Rice are currently looking for a long-term funder or larger platform to invest in the show. Although film is a tough business, Rice said he is confident that the show has what it takes to be a success, with the program receiving positive reviews — particularly from K-12 teachers, whose students have always been a staple at the “Hot Science” lectures and critical to the success of the series.

But Banner said that schoolteachers and their students aren’t the only audiences who can benefit from tuning in to “Hot Science TV,” or spending a Friday night out at a “Hot Science” talk. “I think another audience is university professors,” Banner said. “Each one of those speakers has nudged me toward being a better teacher because I sit there and I analyze, ‘OK, this a great talk. What is it about it that’s making it so great, and how can I use that in my teaching?’”

That’s the thing about great teachers: They always keep learning.

Watch “Hot Science TV” Episodes: hotscience.tv