<--Introduction || Contents pages for: Personal Statement | Portfolio || Teaching & Advising-->
I. RESEARCH AND WRITING
(9/01)
I.A The Limits of Ecology
The centerpiece of my writing during my three years at UMB has been
completion of a book manuscript, The Limits of Ecology and the
Re/construction of Unruly Complexity, and related papers in critical
thinking about ecological and socio-environmental research in its social
context.[2] The manuscript, which
synthesizes key elements of the research and publication I undertook before
coming to UMB, was prepared under contract with the University of Chicago Press
and submitted for review mid-July.
The case studies in The Limits are intended to stimulate readers'
thinking in three broad areas: the study of complex ecological interactions;
the interpretation of social influences shaping science; and efforts to feed
interpretations of science back into changing scientific practice. In all
three areas I explore the limitations of theories and models that treat complex
situations as well-bounded systems that can be understood or managed from an
outside vantage point. I propose instead that researchers take positions of
engagement within "unruly" complexities that involve diverse components or
agents and span a range of spatial and temporal scales. Knowledge production
needs to be linked with planning for action and action itself in an ongoing
process so that knowledge, plans, and action can be continually reassessed in
response to developments--predicted and surprising alike.
The distinctive contribution I make in The Limits is to integrate
conceptual, contextual, and reflexive angles on the practice of science and to
explore rather than suppress the resulting complexity. I encourage people
interested in various areas of ecology and socio-environmental research (ES),
social studies of science and technology (STS), and critical thinking about
science and ES to:
expand their view of ES and STS research to include the interactions among
researchers and other social agents to establish what counts as knowledge;
locate such interactions as part of a larger endeavor in which ES and STS
researchers pursue social change--however modest--and consequently
address self-consciously the complexities of the situations studied and
the social situations that enable them to do their work; and
appreciate the value of exploratory theorizing that may not solve immediate
problems, but seeks a productive tension between established facts, theories,
and practices and ideas about what else could be.
Many of the expository and conceptual moves I make to reach a
multi-disciplinary audience are grounded in my science-STS classes and
workshops. Although the integrated analysis in The Limits is built up
through the case studies, I also introduce a series of puzzles, heuristic
propositions, "tensions," and open questions. In the spirit of constructivism
(in the educational sense of the term), these provide food for readers from
various fields to chew on--I am not asking them to digest "the main course" in
one sitting. One of the tensions that still animates my science-STS teaching
is as follows.
My favored approach to STS is what I call "heterogeneous constructionism," that
is, exposing the diverse "resources" researchers mobilize to establish
knowledge--from funding opportunities to metaphors, from status hierarchies in
their field to available sources of data. (This is a form of social
constructionism--in the interpretive sense of the term--which is akin to
actor-network theory but does not ascribe agency to non-humans.) In this kind
of analysis, one has to address a wide array of relevant social agents,
resources they mobilize, and possible points of engagement and reconstruction.
Yet simple themes, such as "Population growth will lead to environmental
degradation," are easier to communicate to a general audience than particular
reconstructions of the complexity in environmental situations or in the social
context of researchers. In that sense, such simple themes are resources that
provide the basis for effective social mobilization--whether at the level of
global environmental politics or, more modestly, at the level of teaching
students and influencing colleagues. However, as I show in The Limits,
simpler, more memorable, and adaptable accounts are only apparently
simple. Their impact and importance depends on the ways they are linked to
other resources by scientists and other agents who are negotiating how to
contribute to changing knowledge, society, and ecology.
My response to the tension between developing complex accounts and invoking
simple themes is to present situations or scenarios that are readily
communicated yet, at the same time, point to the complexity is moved to the
background in the attempt to communicate to others. For example, I often run a
classroom simulation involving population growth in two islands--one with equal
distribution of resources; the other with three unequal social classes. The
theme or heuristic that emerges is that the analysis of causes and their
implications can qualitatively change if equal units (of population) are
replaced by unequal units (social classes) interconnected through various
social, political, and economic dynamics. Such critical tensions or heuristics
are intended to have broad application and open up important questions yet not
require everyone to deal with particular cases whose detail only a specialists
could absorb.[3] The need for further work
on this approach and on other pedagogical, practical, and conceptual questions
opened up by The Limits motivates the projects described in the section
that follow.
I.B Concurrent and Prospective Educational Projects
It was important while completing The Limits also to explore the
opportunities, needs, and constraints of my new location in an educational
program and college. I present below the rationale, progress to date, and
future plans for four projects that involve research, writing, and reflective
practice in science-STS education. Deciding which will have priority for the
coming years depends on as-yet-unresolved issues about the future institutional
location, expectations, and workload for CCT and myself at UMB (see sects.
III.D and IV).
I.B.1 Fostering Critically Reflective Practice, especially among Ecologists and
Socio-Environmental Researchers
The Limits describes two pilot workshops from the late 1980s in which I
led scientists to "map" their social context as it affected their study of
ecological and environmental situations.[4]
The goal was that participants would identify multiple potential sites of
engagement and change for themselves, but this was only partially realized.
This experience opened up questions about the kinds of reflection, dialogue,
and workshop interaction that contribute most to scientists modifying the
situations in which they undertake research. I have explored these questions
since the mid-1990s through training in facilitation and group process,
participation in interdisciplinary workshops, and experimentation in my own
teaching and workshop leading (sect. II).[5] Although I am drawing on this experience
in presentations that I will develop into publications,[6] my current plan is to pursue the questions
primarily as applied scholarship, that is, to continue leading
interdisciplinary workshops in ES and CCT/Reflective Practice and consulting on
the development of interdisciplinary ES programs.
In a similar spirit, but with a different audience, I collaborated with CCT
colleagues Nina Greenwald and Arthur Millman last fall to establish a Thinktank
for Community College Critical Thinking Teachers. Subsequently I received a
UMB Public Service Grant to continue the Thinktank and to construct a web-site
of techniques and illustrative cases that CCT faculty and Thinktank members use
to foster critical and creative thinking and reflective practice.[7] Teachers and College faculty will be
encouraged to draw from the web-site for their own curriculum development and
provide feedback towards eventual publication of a Thinking
for Change Fieldbook.
I.B.2 Social Constructions of Life
Through teaching science-STS courses over the last decade I have generated
extensive notes on almost thirty cases that introduce and illustrate: a) the
use of "critical tensions" to promote understanding and critical thinking by
placing established facts, theories, and practices in tension with
alternatives; and b) the analysis of "heterogeneous construction," that is, of
the diverse resources that scientists harness in establishing theories and in
their work more generally. These cases cover selected historical and
contemporary developments in the life and environmental sciences, ranging from
accounts that invoke natural selection to support views about society to
computer modeling of global climate change. The cases explore different
connections between science and four strands of social life: scientists' use of
language; their social/historical location; their political and economic
interests; and their views of causality and responsibility. This "reciprocal
animation" of science and interpretation of science breaks down the barriers
between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.
I plan to produce a text, Social Constructions of Life, and a web-site
of associated pedagogical material to promote critical thinking about the
reciprocal relationships between developments in the life sciences and changes
in society. I intend the text and website combination both to reach a wider
readership in biology and STS and to contribute to bringing STS into science
education and science into liberal arts education. While completing The
Limits I have kept this project moving by delivering presentations at
conferences and workshops, completing publications for less specialized
audiences,[8] and preparing two new
cases.[9] My immediate plan is to complete
a subset of the cases each time I have the opportunity to teach science-STS
courses, revise them with student input, and make them available on a
web-site[10] until I am ready to submit the
text to a publisher.
I.B.3 Action Research on Science-STS teaching
From my experience teaching science-STS courses to college science students I
believe that placing developments in science and technology in their social
context can lead to deeper, more complex understanding and to more active
inquiry not only in college science education, but also in high school
education and in citizen involvement in scientific debates. To persuade other
educators I need to disseminate cases and evaluate the conditions under which
science-STS education can be successfully implemented. A necessary preliminary
step in this project has to be connecting with college faculty and teachers
willing to bring STS into their science and environmental curricula. With this
end in mind, I convened a working group for teacher and faculty development in
spring 1999 and have followed this with workshops each summer since.[11] (A seed grant for this was secured from
STEMTEC, the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics Teacher Education
Collaborative of colleges and universities in Western Massachusetts.)
As it has turned out, college faculty members have been the main participants
and, at that level, I am happy with my progress. I have been invited by the
BioQuest curriculum development consortium to co-organize a biology-in-society
component in BioQuest's annual 9-day faculty development workshop in June 2002.
Last July I consulted with the relevant Program Officer at the Fund for the
Improvement of Post-Secondary Education about submitting a proposal to host and
evaluate further workshops--including, I hope, workshops with UMB science and
general education faculty--and to disseminate in other ways cases, such as
those from Social Constructions of Life. The workshops would also
address methods for science-STS teaching and material on institutional change
needed to support faculty in teaching innovation.
At the level of school education, however, it has been more difficult to
establish a base for science-STS teaching. The number of trainee or in-service
teachers studying in CCT or GCOE who focus on science at the middle or
secondary levels is small and it will be a longterm project to recruit sizable
cohorts (see sect. III). Recent changes in the Massachusetts Curriculum
Frameworks and a heightened emphasis on testing have tended to inhibit
curricular innovation. "Science, Technology and Human Affairs," which was one
of the four dimensions of these Frameworks for Science, now appears only in an
appendix and is not represented in the tests.
Against this background, I jumped at an opportunity to participate this last
school year as co-PI and instructor in a Eisenhower Program course for middle
or secondary-school math and science teachers, which promoted inquiry and
problem-solving using watershed issues. The teachers produced exciting new
units, but were very pragmatic about the changes they could find space and time
for. The experience of this course taught me that I would need a longer-term
and closer involvement with in-service teachers to encourage them to make use
of my framework for critical thinking about the life and environmental
sciences.
I now see a sustainable contribution at the K-12 level along lines similar to
those of STEMTEC. By promoting "student-active" or inquiry-based approaches to
undergraduate science education, STEMTEC hopes to stimulate more students to
stay on science tracks and to see teaching as a worthwhile profession. STEMTEC
efforts at the college level are designed to contribute indirectly to a
much-needed increase in the number of K-12 science teachers. In the same
spirit, although I am open to direct involvement in bringing science-STS into
secondary schools, my current plan is to concentrate on science-STS curricular
and faculty development at the college level.
I.B.4 The Study of Complex Interactions in the area of Environment, Health, and
Society
To reach general audiences I use heuristics and themes for critical
thinking with broad application (see end of sect. I.A above on The
Limits). At the same time, however, I need to keep these in tension with
the real-world complexities of specific scientific practice. To pursue
questions opened up in The Limits I have begun to consider various ways
complex interactions are studied in the area of environment and health. This
shift to epidemiological cases from the research on rural and third-world
situations considered in The Limits should facilitate day-to-day
engagement with scientists and continue to make use of my skills in
quantitative areas of science.
Before coming to UMB, I submitted a STS research proposal to NSF in the area of
environment, health, and society. I was asked to make revisions, which I will
have a chance to do this fall (using UMB Healy grant support) now that the book
manuscript has been submitted. The NSF proposal concerns the intellectual
history, current concerns, and reception of the fields of "gestational
programming" and "life events and difficulties." These two cases allow me to
bring more attention to the complexities of the concept "environment" and
enrich discussion in this "Age of DNA" about environmental contributions to the
development of behavioral and medical conditions over an individual's
lifetime.[12] Through this study I also
hope to find a suitable site and collaborators for specific research on the
"heterogeneous construction" of epidemiological knowledge and policy and for
continuing to link critical thinking with reflective practice in science.
Notes
[2] "Mapping complex social-natural processes" (1999), "What
can agents do?' (1999), "Socio-ecological webs" (2000), "Distributed agency"
(2001), "Whose trees are these?" (in press), "Situatedness and Problematic
Boundaries" (in press), "Non-standard lessons" (in press), "Hidden Complexity"
(under review). Publications and presentations that are abbreviated in these
footnotes are given in full in my curriculum vitae.
cited.
[3] "Non-standard lessons" (in press)
[4] "Mapping workshops" (1989) and "Mapping ecologists' ecologies"
(1990).
[5] Workshop presentations: "Alternating between teacher and
facilitator" (2000), "Critical Incidents in Teaching" (2000), "Building a
Professional development Learning Community" (2000). Workshop facilitation:
"How does nature speak?" (2000), "Helping Each Other..." (2000, 2001).
[6] "Process and product" (presentation, 2000), "Intersecting
Processes and Reflexive Practitioners" (commentary, 2001), "We know more"
(work in progress)
[8] "Natural selection" (1998), "How does the commons become tragic"
(1998) reworked into "Non-standard lessons" (in press). See also the first
sections of "Building on Construction" (1995) excerpted in "Distributed agency"
(2001) and "How do we know?" (1997).
[9] "Genes, gestation" (work in progress)
[11] "Science-in-society, Society-in-science" (1999), "Helping each
other..." (2000, 2001), "Teaching History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of
Biology" (2001).
[12] "Genes, gestation" (work in progress)
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