Active Science for a Modern Age

Safety goggles aren’t enough anymore. Today’s science students will need an explorer’s pack for the adventures they’ll be undertaking. For while learning begins at a desk, the path of discovery leads out of the classroom and into the landscapes and labs of our world. Today, lectures and experiments are only the start of the conversation. From geology to physics to biotechnology, these alumni are pioneering the frontier of science education.

Thinking Outside the Classroom
One of a science teacher’s greatest challenges is relating abstract concepts back to the world around us. For Genevieve Atwood ’64, the solution is clear: send students out to find the connections. A former three-term Utah state legislator, state geologist, and director of the Utah Geological Survey, Genevieve is currently chief education officer of Earth Science Education, a not-for-profit organization that encourages teachers to use local geology in their lesson plans and inspire students to explore their world.

“Earth science is one of the sciences most easily made boring,” says Genevieve. “A box of rocks with labels seems pointless if a teacher doesn’t know how to make it relevant for students. The local resources aren’t always obvious, but teachers need to find ways to get outside and use the landscape to teach their lessons.”

In order to teach excitement, teachers need to experience it themselves. Genevieve practices what she preaches. She recently defended her doctoral research on coastal processes of the Great Salt Lake. “Periodically I’ll be on Antelope Island, watching buffalo grazing on the shoreline, and think, ‘I am so lucky.’ I was lucky not to get discouraged. I could have been derailed a thousand times.”

She also shared her vision with a Utah elementary school, creating seven walkable field trips for kindergarten through sixth-grade classes that tie into the core curriculum. “So many parents tell me about how much their child loved making a science project about minerals and the rock that each child loves the most is the one that he found himself.”

Genevieve believes most children love science, but teachers don’t always encourage that love. “When I go into a classroom, I often start by asking, ‘Who likes science?’ In third grade, everyone’s hands go up. In sixth grade, it’s only half the class. By junior high, it’s uncool to like science. We’re taking the joy of science away from students. Jacques Barzun, the father of a Milton classmate of mine, Isabel Barzun, wrote a book called Science: The Glorious Entertainment. It is glorious.” And that, says Genevieve, is what we need to communicate to students.

On the Cutting Edge
As a Milton student, Dr. Julie Strong ’90 took a similar exploratory approach to her science classes. “I wanted the chance to figure things out on my own, with teachers available as resources.” As a teacher at the Menlo School in Atherton, California, Julie is paying her experience forward, helping her students navigate everything from freshman physics to AP biology. “The classroom teaches you humility,” says Julie. “It reminds you how to learn. It’s important to remember what it feels like, because children are in that state constantly.”

Julie was working on her Ph.D. in immu-nology at the University of California, San Francisco, when she realized that she missed the debates and discussions of the classroom. In her third year of graduate school, she started volunteering as a science advisor for Science and Health Education Partnerships, a collaboration between the University of California, San Francisco, and the San Francisco Unified School District. Back in the classroom, she was hooked on teaching. “You get to do science and see teenagers’ faces light up. That’s what I was looking for, that moment of excitement. Students are doing experiments for the first and second time, not the thousandth.” Scientists of all levels covet such moments of discovery, but getting students to that “aha” moment often means looking beyond the classroom’s four walls.

Julie’s most innovative course is the senior elective, Biotechnology Research, which sends students out into the world to test out what they’ve learned. Students practice cutting-edge lab techniques and then put them to use in independent projects with research mentors at nearby Stanford University and Silicon Valley biotechnology companies. Julie’s students have studied lipid metabolism; polymorphism in strains of mice; and the effect of antibiotics on bacterial ribosomes. At Nektar, a local company working on inhaled drug delivery, students studied how drugs cross from the lungs into the blood stream. “High school is the time to try stuff out,” says Julie. “It’s an opportunity for immersion. One student I had told me that after taking the class, he knew that he didn’t want to go into biology.” Which is okay by Julie, who wants to make sure her students give science a chance.

I Feel a Song Coming On
Walter Smith ’77, associate professor of physics at Haverford College, had no doubt that he would have a career in science, but physics wasn’t his first choice. He thought he’d be a chemist, but after a summer working in a chemistry lab he discovered he didn’t have the hands for it. “It’s ironic because the kind of science I do now requires tweezer-level manual dexterity.” His undergraduate students are heavily involved in his work on nanoscale electronic circuits that self-assemble from molecular components and that can be imaged only with an atomic force microscope. “It’s important to try to bring into the classroom things that are going on in research, such as the way that scientists use their understanding of a simple system like a mass on a spring to design better probes for scanned microscopes,” says Walter. “The students don’t have to fully understand the research, but they can see how science connects to the real world.”

To create a classroom where students feel comfortable asking questions, Walter and his wife, Marian McKenzie, began writing songs about physics. It goes a little like this: After he has introduced a major topic and lectured on it for a few weeks, Walter takes out his ukulele and sings a song. “It’s a capstone experience. [The songs] are only two to three minutes long. I try to do them in the middle of class, but sometimes at the end. Then it’s fun to hear the students talking about it as they leave class.” They may walk to the cafeteria humming “The Photon and the Wave” to the tune of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” by George and Ira Gershwin, or “The Bravais Lattices Song,” to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General,” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.

A member of the Milton Glee Club and the Wesleyan University chorale, Walter found his footing as a solo performer doing children’s musicals while he was a postdoctoral fellow in Austin, Texas. His physics songs have caught on within academia, inspiring his colleagues (a physics professor and a computer science professor) to sing songs in class and his students to pen lyrics of their own. The entire effort is documented on the Web site PhysicsSongs.org, a collection of recordings, lyrics, music and links. Walter also keeps in touch with four or five other professors across the nation who are writing physics songs.

“Most people assume the songs are just a mnemonic device, a memory aid for formulas. But, if you could really boil physics down into a song, physics would be easier to teach and learn than it is,” says Walter. “The songs’ main educational value lies in the way they change the classroom atmosphere and make me more approachable. They get students thinking with a new part of their brain.” By approaching the subject from a new direction, the songs create an atmosphere of discovery, which can hook students better than a catchy tune.

Twenty Questions:
Questions and More Questions
David Rabkin ’79 was last seen speeding down Centre Street on the recumbent tricycle that he and classmate Justin Aborn constructed during their independent study. While he has since hung up the trike in his parents’ garage, he hasn’t forgotten its lesson: having the chance to do it yourself can make the difference between engagement and indifference.

As vice president for technologies at the Museum of Science, Boston, David is spearheading its transformation into a museum of science and technology and creating a new vision for technology education. Now five years into his new role, David has already created interactive exhibits and programs to jump-start children’s and adults’ thinking about the technology around them.

In one exhibit, the museum set up an operating room for a “gummy-worm-ectomy,” which allowed visitors to undertake training for laparoscopic surgery using a full-scale model and handling real surgical tools. “If you just put tools in a display case, people don’t know what to think and probably won’t,” David says. “But let them suture with a real surgical stapler and the questions start to flow. Who thought this up? How did they know it would work? Did things go wrong at first? Is it risky today? When the conversation takes off, you know you’re doing something right. Most days, we’re not in environments designed to help us find questions. But if you’ve been in a place like our museum, you’ll be better equipped to ask questions for yourself about whatever new technology shows up in the news or in your life.”

While visitors are tied up in surgery, David is busy forging partnerships with local companies, universities, labs and hospitals like the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We partnered on a presentation around brain research.

They were using a technology that could image brain activity in millisecond slices. (A functional MRI can be a one- to two-second exposure.) They were studying things like facial recognition. Very interesting to me, perhaps, but what’s the hook? How could we use this to engage visitors? So I asked the researchers, ‘Have you told your subjects any jokes?’ And they cracked up because they had. ‘That’s it!’ I said. ‘There’s our hook.’”

David hopes the conversations about science and technology will reach beyond the museum’s walls and into the city around it. “When visitors come to Boston, they know things are happening at Harvard and MIT, but they have no access to it.

We want the museum to be a place where tourists and locals alike get an understandable, up-to-date window on the science and technology in Boston that will change their lives. We want them to see it, touch it, and meet the people who make it happen. Scientists, business people, government regulators, environmentalists, the media—they all have diverse views, diverse values, and diverse ways of thinking. You can’t understand the implications of technology unless you are open to all of these viewpoints. Education about science means cultivating an attitude toward science. ‘It’s interesting. I can do it.’ We want to create a comfort.”

Like a well-tended culture, that comfort with technology can yield a growing curiosity about science and technology that leads to…more questions. And questions are at the heart of good science.

Caitlin O’Neil ’89

 

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