Inquiring Minds Want to Know:

A look at science education at the university

by Jack Rusley ‘03

“Today we are going to talk about the role of flagella in bacterial motility and the physics of their movement,” you hear as you rush into your 9 ‘o clock class – 10 minutes late as usual.  The professor doesn’t notice because he is staring down at his computer, absorbed in his carefully constructed Power Point presentation. You take a seat next to one of the 200 members of your class, many who are scribbling madly in their notebooks, others who printed out the slides and are taking notes here and there.  The student next to you wakes up with a start as you sit down and looks annoyed, as if you were disturbing his mid-morning nap.  The professor drones on for a good hour and a half, maybe pausing for a short break to catch his breath or take a drink of water.  At one point, he looks up and says, “Any questions?”  He waits a beat and continues on his mission, to make it through all the material on the slides before the end of class.  Fortunately, the end finally comes, and you pack up your things and file out of the lecture hall along with the crowd of faceless, nameless students who you never actually recognize.

Sound familiar?  What is wrong with this picture?  Is this scene the exception or the rule in college science courses?  Why is science taught this way in the university?  In what other ways can science be taught and learned?  Who “makes it” in science courses and who is “turned off”?  And how are all these issues related to science education in primary and secondary schools?

If the above scene sounded at all familiar, chances are good that you have suffered through a science course here at Brown or another institution (or have memories from high school and before).  Now think back to that course and try to recall three specific pieces of information that you learned.  Now try to remember three main themes that would help you understand the topic you studied.  Is it easy or difficult to remember?  If you had to take the final exam right this second, how would you do?  These are imperfect measures of learning, but the question remains, did you “learn” anything in this course or were you just “holding onto” it?

Think back to that course and try to recall three specific pieces of information that you learned. Is it easy or difficult to remember?

Why do we take science courses?  What is the point of science education anyway?  Is it merely to identify and train scientists?  Certainly, one goal of science education at any level should be to inspire and train people to become scientists.  However, in a world where scientific literacy is essential for full and active engagement in society, science education must strive to reach a wider audience.  In their “National Science Education Standards,” the National Research Council defines scientific literacy as “the knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes required for personal decision making, participation in civic and cultural affairs, and economic productivity.”  The Council also strongly believes that “all students…should have the opportunity to attain high levels of scientific literacy.”

One does not have to look too far into the public school system at the primary and secondary levels in this country to realize that the wider audience of all students is not being reached.  Through a program called the Urban Education Semester, I was able to spend three days a week for a semester in a public charter school in Queens working with 8^th grade students.  What I learned from talking with my students about science supported my own experience in middle school.  Commonly, it is around this time in the schooling continuum that students who were once fascinated by their science courses begin to get turned off.  “I hate science” or “I am bad at science” are words my own students, a majority of them female, have said to me. These words make me cringe. They make me angry.  This anger is not directed at my students, but at a system that has failed them.

These are failures of a system of science education that has institutionalized dull, stagnant, and outdated methods of teaching and learning.  It is no wonder that so many students arrive here at Brown – liberated by the lack of core requirements – declaring, “Thank goodness I never have to take a science class ever again!”  What’s more, many of those who do choose to venture into the huge lecture halls of introductory science courses here at Brown are quickly disillusioned and justifiably dissuaded from concentrating in a science-related field or even from taking another science course.

These are failures of a system of science education that has institutionalized dull, stagnant, and outdated methods of teaching and learning.

Nonetheless, some people do concentrate in science, and many of them will go on to be the science teachers in this nation’s schools.  John Dewey, commonly held to be the father of progressive education, saw those who succeed in science as those who “by their own power manage to avoid the pitfalls of a traditional scholastic introduction into it.”  If these “pitfalls” have been purposely established to make entrance into the establishment of science more difficult (think “weed-out” courses), then the gatekeepers to this establishment have some questions to consider.  Should science be practiced by a small number of people—self-proclaimed “experts”—who then present their findings to the unwashed masses in easily digestible form?  What perspectives are being ignored or overlooked in this hierarchical, gated structure?  Whose interests will be served by this practice of science?  Whose will be ignored?

One man who considered these questions in relation to literacy education and political power was the radical educator and theorist Paulo Freire.  Freire was one of the founders of “critical pedagogy,” a movement and a way of thinking about education as a practice of freedom in which people learn to “read the world” in order to change it.  I argue that the idea of scientific literacy is not so different than Freire’s conception of literacy as “reading the word and the world.”  In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire says that education— and I would argue science education in particular—

“…is suffering from narration sickness.  The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable.  Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students.  His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration—contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance.”

Most science professors at Brown ascribe to what Freire calls “the banking concept of education,” in which “students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”  This conceptual model is so ingrained in the fabric of thought that it is usually taken for granted by most students and teachers.  “Teaching” becomes a series of fifty minute or hour and a half monologues, illustrated by PowerPoint presentations, and punctuated by obligatory calls for questions (or often not).  “Learning” becomes memorization, decontextualization, regurgitation, and superficial familiarity.  It almost seems as though certain science professors take pride in their own insensitivity to the difficulty students in their courses face.  It becomes a game to see who can jam the most information in a single lecture.  As Freire says, “The more completely he [the teacher] fills the receptacles [the students], the better a teacher he is.”  Similarly, “the more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.” 

Who says science can't be stimulating, enlightening, and enjoyable? Who says the ways its been taught in the past are the only ways?

In order to break out of this banking model and in order for a revolution in the way science is taught and learned, educators of science in the academy must ask themselves some essential questions. 

Who says science can’t be stimulating, enlightening, and enjoyable? 

Who says the ways its been taught in the past are the only ways?  Faulty and ineffective methods have been passed down from generation to generation because teachers tend to teach the way they learned themselves. 

Who says professors hold all the important knowledge?  Both Freire and Dewey critique the idea that the teacher is the supreme holder of knowledge because they realize that students come into classrooms with their own knowledge.  That is not to say students have nothing to learn from professors, but to ignore the prior knowledge and experience of students is to dehumanize and insult them.

Who says introductory science courses have to be huge lectures of 200 students?  This question is complicated to answer because it requires a rethinking of virtually every aspect of a science course, but I believe that huge lectures are one of the largest barriers to meaningful learning.  There is potential for learning in the discussion sections and conferences offered as a part of many courses, but currently, too many of them serve as mini-lectures, reproducing the banking model in a smaller room with a teaching assistant instead of a professor.

If I had all the science professors at Brown around a table and they were all willing to change their practices (two things that will undoubtedly never happen for a multitude of reasons) I would propose three ideas.

Make science courses about inquiry (which is, of course, what the real practice of science is all about).

To begin with, I would say: Make your course a place where students answering questions is at the center of everything.  In other words, make science courses about inquiry (which is, of course, what the real practice of science is all about). Lecturing can still have a place, but for a course to be truly student-centered, they must be shorter and geared toward helping students answer questions for themselves through a process of active learning.  Next, make the structure of the curriculum such that it is less important to “make it through” everything and more important for students to learn and understand the material.  As educator David Hawkins says about curriculum, “You don’t want to cover a subject; you want to uncover it.”  Lastly, make laboratories places where students can practice science.  This does not mean giving them a step-by-step set of directions to follow in order to get the right answer, but instead let them explore the topics, guided by a problem they must solve in the form of a question.  There are more changes to be made, but until these fundamental reforms are considered, the status quo will rule.

Science education at the primary and secondary levels has recently been scrutinized, criticized, and reconceptualized with varying degrees of success, but the university has, for the most part, escaped critique.  It certainly has at this university, as far as I know.  This oversight must continue no longer.  There are too many innovative and successful models of teaching science for university professors to ignore, instead clinging to the dusty, outdated models in which they were taught.  There is too much potential for real, meaningful, and important learning to take place, the result of which would be a more scientifically literate citizenry and a richer, more lively academic science community.

Granted, my experience with science courses here at Brown has been limited.  There are good science courses out there and good professors using innovative teaching methods that resist the banking model, but they are the exception, not the rule.  I have, however, taken enough science courses to know that what I learn, I quickly forget.  I know that I would have been a science concentrator except that I could not find a single course that got me excited about learning.  I have also spoken with too many of my fellow students who share my frustrations.

To the professors in the sciences, to all professors, to the administration, and to a President who says she values teaching, I would say: we are not receptacles.  We are not machines.  We are not faces or numbers or remote control responders.  We are students.  We are people.  We want to learn and we want to be inspired to learn.  Otherwise, we would not be here.  

The author would like to thank Professor Larry Wakeford for his guidance and inspiration for this piece.

To find out more about the state of biology education in the university and some ideas on how to change it, visit the online report of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, “Beyond Bio 101: The Transforming of Undergraduate Biology Education” at http://www.hhmi.org/BeyondBio101/.

To read the National Research Council’s “National Science Education Standards,” why they were written and who they were written for, check out http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/nses/html/.

To find out more about the Urban Education Semester, see http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Venture/UES.html.

To find out more about the role of flagella in bacterial motility, see http://www.bact.wisc.edu/microtextbook/BacterialStructure/Flagella.html.