Connected Science

Description

Scientific inquiry in action in the college classroom

Informed by the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL), Connected Science presents a new approach to college science education for the 21st century. This interdisciplinary approach stresses integrative learning and pedagogies that engage students through open-ended inquiry, compelling real-world questions, and data-rich experiences. Faculty from a variety of disciplines and institutions present case studies based on research in the classroom, offering insights into student learning goals and best practices in curriculum design. Synthetic chapters bring together themes from the case studies, present an overview of the connected science approach, and identify strategies and future challenges to help move this work forward.

Foreword: The Scholarship of Integrative Teaching and Learning Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings

Part I. Connected Science: Why Integrative Learning is Vital
1. Fostering Integrative Capacities for the 21st Century Tricia Ferrett
2. From Student Learning to Teaching Foundations Tricia Ferrett

Part II. Courses that Foster Integrative Learning
3. Public Health and Biochemistry:Connecting Content, Issues, and Values for Majors Matt Fisher
4. Designing to Make A Difference: Authentic Integration of Professional Skills in an Engineering Capstone Design Course Gregory Kremer
5. Integrative Learning in a Data-Rich Mathematics Classroom Mike Burke
6. Navigating Wormholes: Integrative Learning in a First-Year Field Course Bettie Higgs

Part III. Structures that Support Integrative Learning
7. Linking Integrated Middle-School Science with Literacy in Australian Teacher Education David R. Geelan
8. SCALE-UP in a Large Introductory Biology Course Robert Brooker, David Matthes, Robin Wright, Deena Wassenberg, Susan Wick, and Brett Couch
9. Reuniting the Arts and Sciences via Interdisciplinary Learning Communities Xian Liu, Kate Maiolatesi, and Jack Mino
10. Pedagogies of Integration Richard Gale

Part IV. Broader Contexts for Integrative Learning
11. Integrative Moves by Novices: Crossing Institutional, Course, and Student Contexts Tricia Ferrett and Joanne Stewart
12. Facilitating and Sustaining Interdisciplinary Curricula: From Theory to Practice Whitney M. Schlegel

Sujets

• EDUCATION
• Higher
• Level
• School
• Higher education

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 10 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253009463
• Langue: English

Extrait

CONNECTED SCIENCE
SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING
Editors
Jennifer Meta Robinson
Whitney M. Schlegel
Mary Taylor Huber
Pat Hutchings
CONNECTED SCIENCE
Strategies for Integrative Learning in College
Edited by Tricia A. Ferrett, David R. Geelan, Whitney M. Schlegel, and Joanne L. Stewart
Foreword by Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
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2013 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Connected science : strategies for integrative learning in college / edited by Tricia A. Ferrett, David R. Geelan, Whitney M. Schlegel, and Joanne L. Stewart ; Foreword by Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings.
pages cm - (Scholarship of teaching and learning)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00927-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-00939-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-00946-3 (ebook)
1. Science-Study and teaching (Higher) 2. Interdisciplinary approach in education. I. Ferrett, Tricia A. II. Geelan, David. III. Schlegel, Whitney M. IV. Stewart, Joanne L.
Q181.C595 2013
507.1 1-dc23
2013000402
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13
Contents
Foreword: The Scholarship of Integrative Teaching and Learning \ Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings
Part I. Connected Science: Why Integrative Learning Is Vital
1 Fostering Integrative Capacities for the 21st Century \ Tricia A. Ferrett
2 From Student Learning to Teaching Foundations \ Tricia A. Ferrett
Part II. Courses That Foster Integrative Learning
3 Public Health and Biochemistry: Connecting Content, Issues, and Values for Majors \ Matthew A. Fisher
4 Designing to Make a Difference: Authentic Integration of Professional Skills in an Engineering Capstone Design Course \ Gregory Kremer
5 Integrative Learning in a Data-Rich Mathematics Classroom \ Mike Burke
6 Navigating Wormholes: Integrative Learning in a First-Year Field Course \ Bettie Higgs
Part III. Structures That Support Integrative Learning
7 Linking Integrated Middle-School Science with Literacy in Australian Teacher Education \ David R. Geelan
8 SCALE-UP in a Large Introductory Biology Course \ Robert Brooker, David Matthes, Robin Wright, Deena Wassenberg, Susan Wick, and Brett Couch
9 Reuniting the Arts and Sciences via Interdisciplinary Learning Communities \ Xian Liu, Kate Maiolatesi, and Jack Mino
10 Pedagogies of Integration \ Richard A. Gale

Part IV. Broader Contexts for Integrative Learning
11 Integrative Moves by Novices: Crossing Institutional, Course, and Student Contexts \ Tricia A. Ferrett and Joanne L. Stewart
12 Facilitating and Sustaining Interdisciplinary Curricula: From Theory to Practice \ Whitney M. Schlegel
Appendix: List of Key Works Used in the Development of the Interdisciplinary Program in Human Biology
Contributors
Index
Foreword
The Scholarship of Integrative Teaching and Learning
Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings
This book emerges from the intersection of two important reform initiatives in higher education. The first involves the growth of a scholarship of teaching and learning among faculty across disciplines, and the second concerns the support of integrative learning among undergraduates across their college careers.
The combination of these two developments can be powerful: faculty look closely and critically at classroom practice and student work in order to better understand and help students develop as integrative learners, able to connect their emerging knowledge, skills, and commitments across diverse settings. By asking questions about their students learning, seeking evidence to answer those questions, using that information to improve instruction, and engaging colleagues with what they are finding, these faculty are not only creating better learning experiences in their classrooms and programs but also contributing to knowledge and field building around what it means to teach with integrative learning in mind.
This focus is timely, because integrative learning has become central to the effort at colleges and universities in the United States and beyond to rethink and redesign liberal education for the 21st century. While educators have long endorsed the value of integration, the burden has traditionally fallen on the learner, with campuses assuming that bright students would be able to pull together the pieces of their education on their own. Recent thinking about liberal education has taken a different stance. What s new is the conviction that institutions should make this a goal for all students, and do what they can through the curriculum, cocurriculum, pedagogy, and assessment to help them realize the importance of integration and to have multiple opportunities to practice and perfect the needed skills (Huber and Hutchings, 2005).
The needs and opportunities are, perhaps, especially great in the science fields. Many of the 21st century s most pressing challenges-climate change, energy policy, food and water sufficiency, public health, medicine, information security-have strong science components that span multiple disciplines. Higher education must attract and graduate a larger and more diverse group of professionals in science; it must develop their capacities for interdisciplinary synthesis and cross-disciplinary collaboration; and-beyond those professional scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians-it must find ways to create a more scientifically literate general populace. The fruits of such efforts go both ways, certainly, to society through better science and more informed civic participation, and to students who, through grappling with meaningful issues, come to a fuller understanding of the underlying science as well as a greater appreciation for the power of integrative thinking in its many varieties and forms.
Indeed, as Tricia Ferrett points out in her introductory chapter, integrative learning has long been key to movements for science education reform. Dismayed by curricular overspecialization, educators have sought to restore science to the liberal arts, linking it to the human domain. Alarmed by low levels of science literacy, professors have called for interdisciplinary approaches to college science focused on public issues rich in science content; hoping to encourage participation by underrepresented groups, reformers have experimented with more active, engaged pedagogies; concerned about the rapid growth of knowledge and information, innovators are foregrounding scientific ways of knowing, seeing content coverage as an ever more elusive goal.
The term connected science picks up the common, integrative thread running through these movements, and adds to it what we might call a theory of pedagogical action-namely that faculty should bring their skills as scientists and scholars to key questions as they arise in their own classrooms and programs. The integration of learning is widely considered to be a relatively sophisticated skill, which develops over time and requires considerable effort and experience to attain. What are its varieties? What are the developmental trajectories for these kinds of thinking? How can faculty help students hone more sophisticated skills for integration? How do students learn to evaluate the connections between concepts, courses, and contexts that they and others make? Structures that transcend, complement, cut across, or link college programs and courses are important, but so too is the pedagogy that lies at the very heart of these programs and courses themselves.
This is territory that calls for the scholarship of teaching and learning. As evidenced by the accounts in this volume, such work emerges from and reflects the thoughtfulness with which faculty construct the learning environments they offer students, the attention they pay to students and their learning, and the engagement they seek with colleagues on all things pertaining to education in their disciplines, programs, and institutions. Scholars of teaching and learning use a variety of pedagogies and pursue a variety of learning goals, but most are open to, indeed seek, new ways to help their students reach more challenging educational goals. This is certainly so for those, like the contributors to Connected Science, who have studied students integrative strategies, designed new learning experiences, and experimented with a variety of teaching approaches, in order to help their students strengthen their integrative learning skills.
First on the agenda, for several authors, is finding out what kinds of moves their students are using to bridge disparate subject matters (like science and philosophy) or contexts (a science topic and a policy issue). In the second of her two introductory essays, Ferrett suggests that part of the difficulty in articulating student learning outcomes for connected science is that as instructors, we naturally start from a position of expertise in our fields -a position that can make one blind to and mute about the moves that novice learners need to master. She notes, too, how little is