Strengths of the Interdisciplinary Approach to Natural Science of US 311-312 in View of National Calls for Science Education Reform

We hope to maintain the current trajectory of US 311-312 curriculum development at OBU which incorporates all of the major science education reforms recommended by such agencies as the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS has called for such reforms as:

• Science should be taught as science is practiced at its best. This includes not just transmitting information, but learning how to think scientifically (especially by means of problem-oriented, rather than confirmation-oriented, labs).
• Science should be taught as tentative, approximate knowledge that is subject to constraints and revision (especially as displayed in the history of science)&emdash;a system of inquiry that requires curiosity, skepticism, and openness to new ideas.
• Science courses need to include cross-disciplinary content and methodology (not just single-science surveys). Science teaching should include ethical, social, religious, historical, economic, and political perspectives.

The ACLS "Cosmology and Cultures" grant of $50,000 will greatly help us to implement some of these reforms in the magical space of the planetarium. Kerry Magruder and Mike Keas will direct this grant over the next three years and it will directly involve many OBU faculty and other scholars. The project will develop planetarium programs exploring the history of cosmology through a variety of cross-disciplinary approaches, focusing on the following cultures: Native American, Ancient Nonwestern, Greco-Roman, Medieval and Islamic, Early Modern, & Modern.

Numerous other prestigious national science and scholarship advocacy groups in this country have contributed to the recent "National Science Education Standards (NSES)" which have defined "science content" as "inquiry; the traditional subject areas of physical, life, and earth and space sciences; connections between science and technology; science in personal and social perspectives; and the history and nature of science." The National Science Education Standards are the precollege standards that reflect the same reforms that the AAAS has indicated are need at the college-level. The current structure of US 311-312 appears optimal for future US science improvement within both NSES and AAAS guidelines. For an explanation of why historical perspectives are constitutive of science content, see our "Aims of US Natural Science" document. US 311/312 best captures the fundamental character of the natural sciences by examining selected problems of permanent significance for the development and current status of science. For example, just because US 311 delivers the law of free fall in Galileo's original 17th-century context, does not in any way detract from the status of such knowledge as "hard science."

The "History and Nature of Science" component of the NSES is by far the most sophisticated and also the most susceptible to inadequate treatment at the high school level. One of the principal aims of OBU's US Science component is to extend high school competencies in the history and philosophy of science to more adequate levels. The NSES states: "Scientists are influenced by societal, cultural, and personal beliefs and ways of viewing the world. Science is not separate from society but rather science is a part of society" and "The historical perspective of scientific explanations demonstrates how scientific knowledge changes by evolving over time, almost always building on earlier knowledge." It would be difficult to extend (beyond the high school level) our students' grasp of such critical learning outcomes until after they have had the sophomore-level Western Civilization at OBU--thus the strength of US 311/312 as a junior-level course.

There is important evidence that the replacement of US 311-312 with a cafeteria line-up of discipline-specific science courses would be a mistake. We can more clearly recognize some of the strengths of US 311-312 by viewing this two-semester course sequence against the backdrop of the more traditional discipline-specific scheme. The national science advocacy groups (e.g., AAAS) mentioned in the previous points have recently called for science courses at both the college and precollege levels that incorporate both hands-on laboratory inquiry as well as culturally-historically-contextualized science studies that stress cross-disciplinary science instruction. This is precisely what US 311-312 entails as its central strength. One kind of discipline-specific science course offers "science for dummies," which remains on too superficial a level to retain any real connection with science as it is actually practiced. Another kind of discipline-specific science course offers students a short first step in a long journey toward expertise in a particular scientific field (which is irrelevant to non-science majors). The historical and cross-disciplinary dimensions of science illustrate the creative and tentative nature of scientific theorizing--an important antidote to mechanical, textbook-driven, encyclopedic presentations of discipline-specific scientific information.

The freshman cafeteria-approach to science for non-science majors (the traditional approach) degrades the "common experience" and "unified" character that OBU faculty have so frequently championed in discussions and surveys of the Unified Studies (general education) program. For example, who could possibly sanction a general education program in which some students could choose to avoid learning about "biodiversity, extinction, and endangered habitats" (one of the chapter titles in a text currently used in US 312--but, covered in more ways than in just one chapter)? Such gaps in exposure would occur if we saddled students with the anxious task of choosing two out of list of discipline-specific science courses. If we were to constrain student choice sufficiently to prevent such a critical omission, other vital themes currently addressed in the integrated US 311/312 sequence would pull similar disappearing acts. The recent publication of the AAAS Project 2061 recommended that liberal arts science students investigate the development of Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics, relativity theory, the history of the Earth, continental drift, the discovery of oxygen, nuclear physics, Darwinian evolution, Pasteur and the germ theory of disease, and the industrial revolution. Such a list barely begins to suggest the wealth of historical cases available for hard-science laboratory simulation or investigation. We have incorporated most of these great ideas in science in the US 312/312 course sequence.

©1998

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