Microbial activities pervasively influence our personal lives, sustainable development, economic development and global crises (witness the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise in antimicrobial resistance, and global warming). In order to take appropriate, evidence-based decisions in many spheres at all levels, an understanding of relevant aspects of microbiology is essential. There is an urgent need for microbiology literacy in society (https://doi.org/10.1111/1462-2920.14611).
The International Microbiology Literacy Initiative (IMiLI) was launched with the goal of creating microbiology literacy through the development of a microbiology school curriculum and supporting resources, all of which will be made freely available. The aim of the Initiative is not to create microbiologists, but rather to engender new adult generations that know enough about relevant microbiological processes to be able to take informed evidence-based decisions at personal, family, community, national and international levels. To achieve this, the IMLI seeks to generate curiosity and excitement about microbes and their activities in children, and to inform them how microbes affect us in our everyday lives and how important such activities are for our wellbeing and that of the planet.
The IMiLI concept (https://doi.org/10.1111/1751-7915.14456) is rather unique in that it is learner-centric, places the topics presented in the broader context and reveals the interdependencies of issues, discusses the relationships with and consequences for sustainability and global crises, and stimulates classroom discussions about evidence-based decisioning, critical thinking, and global citzenship. The IMiLI teaches sustainability. The resources are also destined for use by adults (lifelong learning), at university, in the classroom or through web-based study.
The core teaching resources being creating are the class lessons, the Topic Framework (TF) collection, some 350+ knowledge frameworks/outlines of child experience/interest-centric topics, grouped in 20 Sections: Our Plants, Our Animals, Our Food, Ourselves, Our Wellbeing, Our Infections, Our Planet, Global Warming, Our Water, Global Microbiology, Adventures and Discovery, New Frontiers, Microbial Gifts-Biotechnology, Their and Our Future, Their and Our Past, Our Civilization and Culture, Our Microbial Friends, Microbial Wellbeing, How we Study Microbes, and Why We Need To Be Microbiology Literate. These generic TFs, 3-5 pages of text written in non-specialist language, generously illustrated with images, serve as a curriculum of microbiology discovery, interpretable by teachers for all types of teaching aims and age groups, in diverse teaching and cultural settings. More than 300 TFs have been contributed so far, 200 of which are now edited and online, so we are well on the way to our curriculum goal.
To support the TFs, we are creating a number of additional teaching resources, such as short portraits of famous microbes that endow them with personalities.
To translate the teaching resources into regional languages and adapt them to regional cultures, Regional Centres are being established to support educators and learners, and to provide a dynamic interface with resource creators. The websites of the first two Regional Centres, IMiLI-South Asia Centre (http://imili.org) and IMiLI-East Asia Headquarters (http://www.imili-eah.com) are live and posting the teaching resources that have been created so far.
The IMLI is a truly international effort involving hundreds of microbiologists from many countries, a huge international collaboration whose goal is to make society better and fitter for its stewardship of humanity and the planet.