“Those who can’t do”
Over at Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Sandra Porter has a great post about the disconnect between scientists and science educators as exemplified by the frequent lack of access scientists have to pedagogy journals. Frankly, I think most scientists don’t take the education literature seriously, even when they do have access to it. There is a presumption that education research is squishy, anecdotal and not to be trusted. Is it true? Sometimes. Is it a fair generalization? Not in my (admittedly limited) experience. Social science is hard to do well, but that doesn’t mean folks in the hard sciences are justified in dismissing it wholesale.
Beyond methodological questions, I think the inferiority complex science educators feel lives on for another reason: I think the digital divide Sandra describes is emblematic of a more longstanding cultural one, namely, the divide between teaching and research. Teaching is simply not rewarded in most basic science departments the way it is in the humanities, where it is the raison d’etre as much as scholarship is (or at least it is comparable). I mean, anyone can teach, right? (insert irony emoticon here). Has anyone gotten rich doing so? How about your graduate TA and her multiple sections of Bio 101? And will your $20,000 collaborative education project with the local museum ever attract the same attention or please as many administrators as your colleague’s $5 million cancer study? Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not speaking with any bitterness whatsoever–that’s just how life is. Yes, there are funding agencies that have endeavored to reward innovative science teaching at the K-16 levels. Are they are exceptional? I don’t know.
In any case, that teaching scientists don’t have access to science education journals strikes me as shameful but hardly surprising. However much hand wringing we do over the US lag in training the next generation of scientists, if history is any guide I suspect science education will always labor in the shadow of the science itself.
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."