Peter Taylor
Teaching & Advising Goals, April 1995
[See also Teaching portfolio table of contents]
Introduction
Three interrelated goals govern my teaching and advising: I aim to employ reciprocal animation, promote critical thinking, and continually develop my pedagogy. This introduction discusses the meaning and significance of these goals.
Let me begin my discussion of goals with the second, promoting critical thinking; I will circle through on-going development of pedagogy and back to reciprocal animation in due course.
In a sense subscribed to by all teachers, critical thinking means that students are bright and engaged, ask questions, and think about the course materials until they understand well established knowledge and competing approaches. This becomes more significant when students develop their own processes of active inquiry, which they can employ in new situations, beyond the bounds of our particular classes, indeed, beyond their time at Cornell. My sense of critical thinking is, however, more specific; it depends on inquiry being informed by a strong sense of how things could be otherwise. I want students to see that they understand things better when they have placed established facts, theories, and practices in tension with alternatives. Critical thinking at this level should not depend on students rejecting conventional accounts, but they do have to move through uncertainty. Their knowledge is, at least for a time, destabilized; what has been established cannot be taken for granted. Students can no longer expect that if they just wait long enough the teacher will provide complete and tidy conclusions; instead they have to take a great deal of responsibility for their own learning. Anxieties inevitably arise for students when they have to respond to new situations knowing that the teacher will not act as the final arbiter of their success. A high level of critical thinking is possible when students explore such anxieties and gain the confidence to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity.
There are few models for teaching critical thinking, especially about science. In any case, teachers of critical thinking cannot learn by following instructions. Just as I expect of my students, I have experimented, taken risks, and through experience am building up a set of tools that work for me. Moreover, I have adapted these teaching tools to cope with the different ways that students in each class respond when I invite them to address alternatives and uncertainty, and when I require them to take more responsibility for learning. An emphasis on critical thinking implies, even in large classes, an individualized model of teacher-student interaction, and students' corresponding raised expectations are difficult to fulfill. Their responses are sometimes emotionally intense, especially in the case of science students, which makes sense when we recall that their success in science has depended on learning what others already have discovered and systematized.
"You are asking me to question what my previous teachers had presented as facts," one student complained. "Why should I accept your authority?" I value such forthrightness -- in fact, I take it as a sign of success that my students generally provide thoughtful and unusually detailed criticisms of my courses. However, I also have to interpret students' criticisms, to learn from them without always taking them at face value. When some students tell me, for example, that I am biased or that I need to be more Americanized, I have to discover how much they are projecting into such comments their resistance to questioning their own views or to departing from the familiar ways of performing as students. I then have to invent and negotiate paths around their defences. In this light, each class requires regular monitoring, not just end-of-semester evaluation. And every class provides an opportunity to learn how to teach both the specific set of students and future classes. This is what I have in mind, not merely designing and implementing new kinds of courses, when I specify on-going development of pedagogy as one of the three overall goals of my teaching.
While critical thinking is important for all fields, teaching for Cornell's Biology and Society major and in Science and Technology Studies has provided me an opportunity to promote critical thinking in special ways. Biology and Society students have specifically chosen their major because they want to complement their training in the life sciences with studies of the social context and social implications of those sciences. Given this, I first encourage these students to see that critical thinking can help them understand science more or less on its own terms. For example, in my Biology and Society core course, "The Social Construction of Life," students come to understand natural selection better by examining why Darwin used the selection metaphor in preference to Spencer's phrase, "the survival of the fittest." Similarly, I encourage them to distinguish genetics from heredity through an assignment in which they invent and then describe an analogy for embryological development. The assignment specifies that the analogous phenomenon should not rely on a central controller, yet it must have the ability to co-ordinate its own differentiation and change and thereby make itself. Students have described, for example, improvisional dance, cheese making, and a casual conversation in an elevator.
Such exercises prepare the students to take critical thinking a significant step further. Students use their images of developmental processes not only to think critically about claims that intelligence is genetically determined, but also to consider the social implications of and social support for the different scientific accounts. The idea here is that close examination of concepts and methods within any given natural or social science can stimulate students' inquiries into the diverse social influences shaping that science. Social contextualization can, in turn, suggest alternative lines of scientific investigation and can expose the diverse kinds of practical interventions, not just conceptual shifts, needed to modify the future development of that science. This two-way interaction between science and social contextualization of science I call reciprocal animation;4 it enlarges significantly the sources of ideas about what else could be or could have been in science and in society.
Reciprocal animation and critical thinking are central to my approach to S&TS. When STSers teach or write about science with the objective of engaging and influencing its practitioners we are implying, more or less, that science could be practiced or applied differently. In this spirit, I teach graduate students from S&TS and the sciences to use historical, philosophical, sociological and political interpretation to engage with science. For example, my "Social Analysis of Ecological Change" seminar examines Hardin's "tragedy of the commons," his idea that any non-privatized resource, such as the rangeland of nomadic pastoralists, will inevitably be degraded. One interpretative angle is to link First World scientists' interest in exotic situations to their concerns about situations much closer to home.5 The popularity of Hardin's thesis becomes an ironic inversion of a "tragedy of atomised individuals" in the West, that is, environments will inevitably be degraded when people have difficulty influencing social arrangements except through isolated individual actions as consumers. (Individually people choose to commute on congested freeways and, although most of them would be better off with efficient public transport, they have few means of bringing about this more sustainable alternative.) This S&TS interpretation6 invites a shift in socio-environmental research. Instead of empirical assessments of the tragedy of the commons in the Third World, a whole new line of investigation and theorization in the First World can be brought into focus.7
While I have found many ways to introduce students to reciprocal animation, it has been harder to draw them into using this approach in their own S&TS or scientific research. I am, however, committed to on-going development of pedagogy for reciprocal animation and critical thinking. This is a difficult project and I cannot point to unanimous student approval. My courses challenge students in unfamiliar ways and they respond with challenging suggestions and criticisms. In fact, I invite this. However, I consider that I am on the right track when students comment that while my courses require harder work than other courses, the educational payoff makes the effort worthwhile.8 And, for me, the effort is definitely worthwhile. Developing these approaches to teaching and advising stimulates and reinforces the other strands of the larger project described in my overview of research, teaching and field building activities, namely, to open up space for reflexive, critical scientific practice in society and, in particular, in the academy.
Notes:
4 In using this term I am borrowing Max Black's idea that a metaphor works in two directions. It not only allows the associations of one field (B) to "animate" our thinking about another (A), but our thinking about B is influenced in turn, or "reciprocally," by being metaphorically associated with A.
5 See Haraway, D. (1989). "Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936," p. 26-58 in Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern sciences. New York: Routledge.
6 Both the method of inversion and the particular interpretation of Hardin's idea are elaborated further in section II of my "Situated ecologies: Re-positioning complexity and change in ecological and evolutionary theory" (work in progress).
7 Linking research on Third world political ecology to First world environmental justice concerns was the theme of the session in which I spoke at the recent meetings of the American Association Geographers and is the topic of my April 1995 talk to the Science & Technology Studies Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic.
8 This is, indeed a frequent comment in my course evaluations. Even more frequently students comment that they should have done the harder work and recommend this to future students.
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