CHE article: A Legendary Scientist Sounds Off on the Trouble with STEM

[polly_mer]

https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Legendary-Scientist-Sounds/246257

I am unhappy about STEM. That is, I'm unhappy about how it's presented as the principal portal for careers in science and technology. Young people — in some cases, young enough to be as far back as grammar school — are presented with this intellectual triathlon in order to go into science and technology.

Thoughts?

[mamselle]

I'm more a fan of steam (the "A" stands for...umm... arts...)

M.

[polly_mer]

I'm more a fan of steam (the "A" stands for...umm... arts...)

M.

Yes, and STEAM has the same problem of having the official classroom curriculum being filled with preparing to think about getting ready to start in several years once students are "ready" after we've put a ton of energy into showing youngsters the fabulous parts of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math.

The outreach for STEAM tends to promise interesting experiences that are not delivered upon in the required curriculum so we lose great people early in the educational process because the required curriculum sucks the joy out of the experience.  Not everything is going to be fun, but we could do more to infuse the interesting parts throughout the curriculum.

[Hibush]

The legendary scientist, for those who didn't click the link, is EO Wilson.

He is a fan of doing the fun stuff first, which provides a motivation for learning the underpinnings. Students to have been trained to learn by rote and regurgitate will find this approach unsettling. But many students will like it. They will also learn about inquiry in a way that is not learned from "you need to memorize this stuff if you want a good job."

He particularly thinks biological collections have great value in teaching about biodiversity. His school has some of the greatest collections in the world, and they are mostly unused by undergraduate courses. It is like having the Louvre on campus and not using its materials for courses in history and art.

Small institutions often have focused collections that can serve the same purpose. You have to teach with examples drawn from that collection, but it doesn't take much imagination to make an effective connection. Even a narrow collection of the osiers of the local watershed can be used not only in the basketweaving courses, but also limnology, botany, environmental science and sculpture.

"Those universities that have large collections of organisms have not come close to providing educational tools for students at the undergraduate and graduate level. Harvard is particularly short. I came there as a graduate student in 1951, and I'm now honorary curator of insects, now that I've retired. Harvard has some of the best collections in the world — plants and animals — and we have a great arboretum. And yet the collections are not being used effectively to train people in biodiversity. They're being neglected.

We should be putting much more emphasis in both undergraduate and graduate biology courses on biodiversity. Right now we have given formal names to a little more than two million species. How many species remain unknown? The answer: an estimated eight million. We're not talking about bacteria; we're talking about eukaryotic animals.

We need more courses about different groups of organisms — courses in ornithology, or invertebrate zoology, or entomology. That's the way you get students hooked."