Aims Of Unified Studies Natural Science

Rationale for the Design of both Natural Sciences Courses:
How Historical Perspectives Contribute to the
Aims of Unified Studies Natural Sciences

Students, we thank you for participating in the ongoing development of these courses, and cordially invite your feedback to help us make them more effective. The following paragraphs provide an explanation of our aims and rationale for the design of these courses. We hope you will find this explanation helpful as you orient your expectations and activities throughout the year.

In many universities, to fulfill their liberal arts science requirement, nonscience majors take introductory freshman-level science courses along with first-year science majors. Other universities recognize that liberal arts students do not have the same educational goals in science as do prospective science majors, and so they offer watered-down versions of the freshman-level science courses designed specifically for nonscience majors. The contrast between these two approaches is that between the "difference between educating undergraduates and initiating them into a profession."* One alternative offers "science for dummies," which remains on too superficial a level to retain any real connection with science as it is actually practiced. With the other approach, liberal arts students find themselves in a course that merely takes them a short first step in a long journey toward expertise in the scientific field. Since liberal arts students are embarking upon their own long journeys to other destinations, however, it makes little sense to train them for a race they have no intention to run. For the brief period in which they attend to science studies, their critical need is to be somehow lifted to the heights where they may survey the lay of the land, so to speak, and obtain an overview of the activity of science (though not in a superficial way).

*Rudolph H. Weingartner, Undergraduate Education: Goals and Means, American Council on Education (New York: Macmillan, 1992), p. 37.

Recognizing the above ambiguities in course design for liberal arts students, one recent analyst has argued for the goal of "conversancy" in science:

The achievement of conversancy with natural science constitutes an enormously important goal of education. The task is intellectually serious, even if it is not technical, and the pedagogy leading to conversancy can be responsible and rigorous.... But the difficulty of the task must be acknowledged as well.... On the one hand, much of what must be taught is quite removed from ordinary experience or commonsense knowledge. On the other, because the topics to be taught are not properly embedded in a discipline, many of the tested ways of teaching them are unavailable for use. Pedagogically, the teacher who thus assists students to become conversant with natural science sails in relatively uncharted seas.*

*Weingartner, Undergraduate Education, pp. 40-41. "With all of its imprecision and range, conversancy implies an understanding that is a sufficient basis for further learning and a perspective sufficiently broad so as to enable a student to see some of the field's relations to other worlds." (p. 35.)

In the OBU Natural Science courses we have set sail full speed ahead, adopting this aim of conversancy in science rather than succumbing to either of the two alternative approaches mentioned above. Our chart for the sea of liberal arts science draws its bearings from the conjunction of laboratory and historical perspectives. We do not sail alone, nor are we the first to explore these lands: Hunter College's "Foundations of Science," and Lehman College's "Introduction to the Natural Sciences" are two-semester science courses in the liberal arts core of other universities that incorporate history of science material.* In the laboratory investigations for these courses, students explore, analyze, and apply natural knowledge in a manner that makes extensive use of the history of science. This is consistent with a recent mandate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):

Science must become a well-integrated part of undergraduate programs in the liberal arts. Teaching it must reflect a pedagogical shift from authoritarian presentations of scientific information to instruction that is more consistent with the methods and values of practicing scientists. Moreover, the content must be expanded to include the philosophical and historical foundations of the sciences as well as their interactions with society and technology.**

*The Liberal Art of Science: Agenda for Action. The Report of the Project on Liberal Education and the Sciences (Washington D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1990). Hunter College is described on p. 91, and Lehman College on p. 77.
**The Liberal Art of Science: Agenda for Action, p. 28.

Project 2061: Science for All Americans, a publication of the AAAS, calls for an increased emphasis on historical perspective in the teaching of science.* The historical dimension of science illustrates the creative and tentative nature of scientific theorizing--an important antidote to mechanical, textbook-driven, encyclopedic presentations of scientific information. Historical approaches facilitate comprehension of abstract and technical concepts, since recreations of the classic experiments or demonstrations are often vividly concrete. Their content, although now obsolete in some particulars, was paradigmatic for subsequent science and remains a permanent part of the heritage of science. Primary sources written at an incipient stage of a discipline for a more general scientific readership often possess unequalled--and unspecialized--clarity (consider the everyday origins of the terms "atom," "gravity," "force," "impetus," "battery," "charge," etc.). The AAAS concluded, in their published recommendations for science education:

Courses whose subject matter is organized around the history of science not only provide students with knowledge of the various intellectual and social contexts surrounding the development of the science, but also help them obtain a better grasp of the arguments and reasoning behind currently accepted, scientific explanations.**

*Project 2061: Science for All Americans (Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1989), p. 148.
**The Liberal Art of Science: Agenda for Action, p. 46. (Italics added.)

The OBU Natural Sciences courses are historically-oriented laboratory-inclusive science survey courses that address the ambivalence associated with science course design for liberal arts students. Our aim is to enable liberal arts students to achieve scientific conversancy with a greater breadth and depth than is possible with traditional approaches.

©1998

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