DPL 2020 - Day 2: Content and Care

I was finding myself a little burnt out yesterday afternoon because of so many amazing things passing through my brain. Luckily thought my husband decided to surprise me with a car? Like does that happen to other people? I thought that only happened in car commercials.

To be fair, his car had been in an accident over a year ago and should have been totaled - he had been having issues and a friend told him it would be thousands to fix. We've had an ongoing saga regarding cars, as he's gotten a few new cars to my one 2010 sedan. The next car was supposed to be mine. So he opted to surprise me with it. It's also a finishing my PhD present 1.5 years later, so that's cool too.

I went out and drove it around for a bit. It was a lovely brain break.

Anywho, Day 2. I've read and listened to some amazing work, and has some really wonderful discussions in the past 2 days. In the STEM-H track we focused on Critical Digital Pedagogy yesterday, but I really walked away with some thoughts on content and care.

Karen Cangialosi, of Keene State College was our star for the day. We watched a vidcast interview with her and read her absolutely amazing article But You Can't Do That in a STEM Course. Both of these led to a really interesting discussion about content in STEM courses.

One of the biggest pushbacks to doing critical pedagogy in STEM courses from other faculty is that there is not enough time to "cover" the content that is absolutely necessary for the students to move on to the next course. To me, there a few assumptions here that really need to be addressed:

1. What does it mean to "cover" material?
2. Do we really need to include every bit of traditional content in our classes?

I'm going to preface this and say, as a teacher of non-majors, I don't believe in content-based objectives for non-majors students. There is absolutely no need for a bunch of non-science students to know all the invertebrate phyla represented in marine environments. None. 

Yes. I've had to teach that.

Now to those that teach majors students. What does it mean to "cover" material? This has been an interesting discussion in faculty pedagogy sessions where I work. Our Dean of General Education at RWU, Jason Jacobs, actually pointed out in an informal discussion that linguistically "cover" means to hide. In practice, "covering" content in intro classes means speeding through chapters and chapters of content, requiring students to memorize (and then promptly forget) the content, until they have to relearn it later on. 

Instead, we should work on "uncovering" content, as outlined in this short article from UNT Teaching Commons. Intro classes should definitely have content - the most important content that provides a baseline for later courses. For example, a bio course must include the central dogma - DNA to RNA to Proteins - that's no question. But that bio course should also spend significant time teaching important skills that will allow students to learn science in better ways - not memorizing and cramming. 

So, if we don't cover all the content, how will students succeed in later courses? They will succeed by using the skills we've taught them in the earlier courses. Personal anecdote here: I took college biology as a high school senior - rife with senioritis and the incorrect belief that I didn't need to study biology to succeed. I would cram for my exams the night before and get As and we would move on to new topics. I. Learned. Nothing. I honestly didn't notice my lack of intro bio content knowledge because later courses explained things in much more detail and I learned it then. That is, until I had to teach intro bio as a grad student. I knew nothing about plants. Xylem, Phloem? I never learned this stuff! I went back to those intro bio textbooks and there it was, in black and white, basic plant physiology. I have zero recollection of ever learning it. I never used it, I didn't retain it. 

So do we need to include all the content possible? I argue no because the basics that we spend so much time on are accessible to us in different ways. As Marie van Staveren mentioned in our Hypothes.is chat in Cangialosi's article above, we have the internet now. And even before, we had books at our disposal. There is no need for a biochem student to memorize the chemical structure of all amino acids (this is especially true of other science majors taking intro biochem). They will eventually learn through their practice how each one reacts based on its structure through actually experimenting and working with them in context. There is no such thing as a multiple-choice exam in the middle of a biochemists career!

And even if your argument is that you must understand the basics in order to understand things more complex, even that isn't true, as Cangialosi, argues:

Is it really true that memorizing all the basics must come before tackling more complex questions, such as “What is the nature of a cancerous cell”? Does one need to learn all of the details of atomic structure, bonding, molecules, chemical properties, macromolecules like DNA, RNA, protein structure and function, cell structure and function, DNA replication, transcription, translation, cell cycle, etc., in (or close to) that order? Ask someone who has been diagnosed with cancer (or is close to someone who has) what they know of these foundational topics. The answer might surprise you. You can research quite a bit, starting at the end and working your way back down, or in the middle and jumping around. What is that? How does that work? Yeah, but what does that mean? Yeah, but what does THAT mean? It is all driven by interest, motivation, a passion to learn or even a burning necessity to learn. Our primary role as teacher can be simply to create the best culture chambers for students to flourish. They will find the content. 

My non-majors students understand the impacts of climate change well enough - they see them everyday. But they may not understand the mechanisms - they can still learn them even through understanding the bigger picture.

So where does care come in here?

Have you ever seen content weaponized? I have. "Intro courses must be hard to weed out those that can't hack it."

That's the exact opposite of care. Care would be recognizing that students bring their whole selves to their intro classes. Care is recognizing that students come from such different backgrounds that we cannot equalize them in intro courses. Care is recognizing the variety of supports we must offer to students to help them achieve their goals. Care is helping them develop their identity in science courses, before we can even start thinking about content.