I am excited to announce that we are starting a special series of blog posts for the Fall 2014 term. During the recent Graduate TA Orientation, we asked our students to pose some questions about active learning and some of their concerns about teaching. They had fantastic questions!
Now, our ASU community will be posting responses to these questions, and I am sure we will all gain insights! I invite you to post additional comments below, and help us build a faculty learning community.
Our first guest blogger is Michael Angilletta, PhD. He is a SoLS Professor, Senior Sustainability Scholar and the new Director of Undergraduate Programs at the School of Life Sciences in Arizona State University.
What do you do when students come up with aggressive opinions that contradict well-accepted values during teaching? ("I don't believe in evolution" or "global warming is a scam")
Your worst fear as a teacher of biology will eventually come to pass. A student will challenge you to defend an established theory in front of your entire class: most likely evolution. The student and his or her peers may feel empowered by public opinion (which usually doesn't reflect scientific opinion).
Now, our ASU community will be posting responses to these questions, and I am sure we will all gain insights! I invite you to post additional comments below, and help us build a faculty learning community.
Our first guest blogger is Michael Angilletta, PhD. He is a SoLS Professor, Senior Sustainability Scholar and the new Director of Undergraduate Programs at the School of Life Sciences in Arizona State University.
What do you do when students come up with aggressive opinions that contradict well-accepted values during teaching? ("I don't believe in evolution" or "global warming is a scam")
Your worst fear as a teacher of biology will eventually come to pass. A student will challenge you to defend an established theory in front of your entire class: most likely evolution. The student and his or her peers may feel empowered by public opinion (which usually doesn't reflect scientific opinion).
How should you react?
I can only tell you how I reacted in 2006, when one of my
students spoke out strongly against evolution, and many other areas of science
that conflicted with her religious beliefs.
- Don't escalate the emotional level of the exchange. Remain calm and thoughtful in your communication and other people will see that you care about each person's learning experience.
- Don't dismiss the student's concerns. This tactic only makes scientists seem pompous and doesn’t help change society. That said, a time and place exists for everything. I invited my students to an informal discussion, which took place outside of class. If that's not your style, you can speak with a student individually after class.
- Lean on your scientific resources. You don't have to be an expert in an area to help a student understand it better. When a student challenged isotopic data, I referred her to one of my colleagues in the Department of Geology. He was happy to provide the student with a detailed critique of the assertion that Earth is only 6000 years old.
- Don't panic! Unreasonable views will usually be recognized as such by reasonable people. In my case, all but one of my students saw the anti-evolutionary position as ridiculous once we finished our discussion. As we learned in the recent debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, you can't reason with someone who doesn't want to be reasonable.
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