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When I knew I couldn’t attend ABLE’s 25th Anniversary, I
thought about writing a piece for Labstracts
instead. As I looked back, I
realized my interest in biology began 25 years before ABLE, and I had
50 years of biology education. I thought I could write a short review
of those experiences in a
style like one of my favorite books, Ed Wilson’s
Naturalist. Two weeks later, after I had written 50 pages
of text, much of it with hyperlinks, it was clear that was too much
for Labstracts, especially for a new editor.
What you see here are conclusions that I have written much more
about. If there is interest, I can expand upon them
in the future.
Arthur
Guyton
I want to begin by saying ABLE’s 25th
anniversary year was marked by the death of two of the most important
biology teachers in recent times. Arthur Guyton
died in an automobile accident in April.
His Textbook of Medical Physiology must
rival Modern Biology as one
of the most widely used texts in the history of the biological sciences,
but there is a major difference -- Guyton wrote all the editions himself. He must also hold the record for bad versions
of what he wrote, as other authors changed his words to avoid plagiarism.
William
Harvey
He
received many honors. One held
special meaning: the 1978 invitation from the Royal College of Physicians
in London to
deliver a lecture honoring the 400th anniversary of the birth of William
Harvey, the doctor who first described the circulation of blood.
The RCP made a film showing Harvey’s
experiments called William Harvey and the Circulation
of the Blood. I
saw it in Tom Hall’s History of Biology course at Washington University.
When I was in London obtaining footage for my first laserdisc, I went
to the RCP. They wouldn’t let
me use parts of the film because animal rights groups caused too much
trouble when it was shown. The
person I talked to said one could show procedures routinely done in
humans without difficulty, but when they were shown in animals, the
RCP got harassed.
Chris
Parsons
Chris Parsons,
producer of David Attenborough’s Life
on Earth, also died recently. He
worked with the best people in biological film production, e.g. Peter Parks and Howard Hall,
striving to make sure programs were accurate and educational. One of his most important contributions was
the development of ARKive. More
and more resources that allow us to experience biology like OrcaLive are appearing on the Internet. The Scientist
has to be one of the best ways to keep up with the latest events
in biology.
Funding
The
May 25, 2002
issue of The Scientist contained an article titled
“Biology Laboratories: Are They
Disappearing?” It
confirmed what we all know, but never mentioned ABLE.
That says much about our place in the big picture. As I reviewed our 23 volumes of proceedings,
another fact stood out – there was little or no funding for development
of these activities. It appears
that funding for biology education is owned primarily by the education
part of that union. Consequently,
little funding and respect goes to the biology part of biology education.
Ruth
Von Blum was one of the four members of the Committee to Establish
a Laboratory Teaching Organization and Library.
She had taken a position at NSF when ABLE was founded and told
people at the first meeting that she wanted to work with them.
I spoke with the director of education at NSF at NSTA about ABLE,
emphasizing that our members had a major influence on future teachers
because they took our courses. He
wasn’t interested.
Research
Early
in my career I spent several years trying to make labs work before I
discovered that people in the research community knew what to do. In the ad in Science that described the Biology Laboratory Teaching Workshop at
the University
of Calgary,
it said “The group hopes to increase communication between the research
and laboratory teaching communities to produce better living materials
for instruction.” We’ve never really done that. We need to find a way to give the biology part
of biology education equal footing with the education part. I would have gone back to graduate school if
there were a program that dealt with these issues, but there were only
two choices: educational (cognitive) research and biological research.
Workshops
In the last few years it has been
more difficult to find new people to do new workshops.
I’ve just talked about one reason for that, but there is another
reason. When we put out a call
for workshops, we are mainly asking the people in our own community.
In the 1980s I spent a lot of time reading the Journal
of Biological Education, The
American Biology Teacher, The
Science Teacher, and most importantly, using Current
Contents to find people with new lab activities. Tony Glass’s lab on Chemiosmotic
Principles came from The Journal
of Biological Education, Bill Bell did a lab on
Chemical Communication in Cockroaches because I had seen his book The
Laboratory Cockroach, Rollie
Schafer did four great labs from his and Bruce Oakley’s
wonderful lab manual (Experimental Neurobiology), and Charlie
Carlson did his neat Grasshopper Demonstrations because I had
seen his biology exhibits at the Exploratorium.
In
Canada,
I don’t have access to Current Contents anymore. Are ABLE members looking for people to do workshops?
There are lots of biologists doing interesting things on the
Internet that could be the subject of a workshop.
I would bet that the scientists at a website like Plants-In-Motion have
people and funds to do an ABLE workshop.
Literacy
Biology
teaching is about literacy. Most
courses in biology are designed to teach students to speak biology and
to write proper scientific papers. Students
get very little experience with living things and we produce biologists
and teachers who have never seen or experienced much of what they talk
about. I’m sure much of the pressure to do this comes
from standardized curricula, textbooks, testing and elitist efforts
to promote scholarship. Temple Grandin
argues scientists like Darwin, Mendel and Einstein wouldn’t make it
in today’s academic world, in the chapter called “Einstein’s Second
Cousin” in her recent book Thinking in Pictures.
Page 2 of
Don Igelsrud article
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