Bio 19
may have philosophical underpinnings, but it doesn’t skimp on science.
Subjects range from food and digestion to beaks and claws to courtship and
flocking. The syllabus includes a look at genetic clones and how DNA studies
have revised the taxonomy of birds.
Among the
hands-on opportunities are a dissection lab (it’s a plucked chicken
carcass – try figuring out if this fryer is a male or female) and a field
trip to the Roger Williams Park’s Museum of Natural History. One colorful
lab is devoted to feathers.
“This
kind of class is fun,” said Coleman, professor of molecular, cellular
biology and biochemistry. “There is a scattering of students with
different levels of interest. I especially like the effects of the [dissection]
lab. It blew some of the students away. Some were terribly timid, but they got
involved. All but one or two just delved into it.”
In a
small well-lit room in the basement of J.W. Wilson Lab, scissors in one hand
and cutting tool in the other, Kate Roll led three other students in the
dissection of a chicken carcass. Their assignment included sexing the chicken.
Gently, Roll pulled aside and removed the gastrointestinal tract, placing the
guts into a tray. There, for the first time, was a clear view of the sex
organs. It was a female chicken. “Her pancreas,” exclaimed Roll,
“looks like a feather.” Indeed it did.
“To
some students, this lab is like exploring the new world,” said Coleman,
who has conducted research or taught at Brown since 1964. “It is almost
as good as a treasure hunt.”
Roll is a
freshman, but no stranger to exploration. She spent last year on a boat off the
coast of New Guinea. The previous summer she collected coral data near Grand
Cayman Island, where she also conducted environmental education programs. She
helped teach about northern oceans near Acadia National Park, and has worked
several summers at the Audubon Camp in Maine at Hog Island.
“I
wanted to take as many freshman seminars as possible,” said Roll, who is
also enrolled in Sociology 30, “The Nature of Community,” taught by
Associate Professor Ann Dill. “They’re small classes, for freshman,
and taught by professors. When I saw ‘birds,’ I thought that was
right up my alley.”
Roll may
already be one of the best birdwatchers on the Brown campus. She makes it a
point to prowl campus at sunrise when the migrating warblers, vireos and
sparrows are most active. Roll also likes to work the Seekonk River shore for
sightings.
“I
brought my binoculars on a bike trip to the supermarket, and what do you know,
an hour later I still had not walked down a single aisle,” said Roll via
e-mail. “Warblers! Migrants that I hadn't seen yet this fall: Blackpolls,
Palms and a lone Nashville. They were in the grasses of an undeveloped lot. And
there were Chipping sparrows last Thursday.”
Roll
likes Bio 19 because it takes her inside the world of birds. “As a
birdwatcher, I feel like I have been focusing on the outside of birds.
I’ve done some bird banding and feather study. But in the lab, when I cut
open the chicken and saw the yolk and completely exposed the albumen, it was a
revelation. Bio 19 is complementary for me in so many ways.”
At its
heart, Bio 19 is about how science works, said Coleman. One seemingly simple
exercise involves pigeon observation. “That assignment is actually about
the experimental method,” she said. “It is about how we study
behavior, how to take quantitative data. The students were doing that but they
didn’t know it.”
Coleman
likes to begin class by asking students what birds they might have seen or
heard – birds are pretty quiet in the fall. She’ll ask if anyone
noticed a nest. That will become more likely as leaves drop.
“A
major point of the course is that I want the students to try and put together
things they normally wouldn’t, such as observing a bird and connecting
what they saw to something they heard or read a week ago or a year ago and
coming up with a new idea.”
And
biology, as she reminded the students, is about language. “Although I
want them to get out of the memorization mode, they do need to learn the
vocabulary,” Coleman said. “There is more new vocabulary in a
biology course than in any language course.”
To
reinforce her points, Coleman relies on visual images: skeletons, skins or
through use of an overhead projector.
“I
find the use of the projector very effective,” said Roll. “The pure
visual examples and analogies to human biology – those are the strengths
of the class.”
In fact,
the course is designed to “teach a great deal of human biology,”
said Coleman. Everything presented about birds, from reproduction to color
vision, is compared to people.
“What
the students know most about and care most about is the human self; it keeps
their interest,” she said. “It is easiest to teach, if you already
have a biological system in your head and you can plug new information into
that model.
“I
believe that the more you can expose a person to the information they need to
make intelligent decisions, including about human biology, the better you can
prepare them for the rest of their lives.
“This
class is on birds, but its really about people.”
Number of freshman seminars could double for Class of
’07
The First-Year Seminar
Program is such a hit that pre-registration for the seminars offered second
semester has filled most of them, said Armando Bengochea, dean of freshman
studies and associate dean of the College. Freshmen who did not get into the
seminars this semester were given priority for those offered during the next,
he said.
The program’s
popularity is such that a year from now, “we want to get to the point
where we have upward of 40 freshman seminars,” said Bengochea. This would
double the current number, creating spaces for more than half the incoming
Class of 2007, he said
Aiming to double the number
of freshman seminars is “enormously complicated,” said Bengochea,
because it would involve commitments from some departments that “believe
that they are currently understaffed.”– Scott J. Turner
