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From the National Center for Science Education
Martin
"THE EVOLUTION OF TEACHING EVOLUTION"
Writing in The Hechinger Report (February 7, 2011), Jennifer Oldham
addresses "The evolution of teaching evolution," explaining that, even
in the face of persistent challenges and obstacles, "scientists and
teachers are pushing to make evolution the backbone of biology
lesson-plans from kindergarten through high school." Alluding to
Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer's recent column, she wrote, "They
have their work cut out for them. A recent article in Science found
that almost three out of four high school students will get no
schooling in evolutionary biology, or a version 'fraught with
misinformation.'"
Louise Mead -- formerly Education Project Director at NCSE, now
Education Director at the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in
Action -- explained, "there's been a realization that we have to
address the misconceptions. There has been a renewed focus on how we
teach evolution and renewed outreach." Cited were the University of
California Museum of Paleontology's Understanding Evolution website,
the BioKIDS curriculum developed at the University of Michigan, and
the Evolution Readiness curriculum developed by the Concord
Consortium.
The hope is that such resources will give teachers the knowledge they
need to have confidence in teaching evolution, Judy Scotchmoor of UCMP
explained. Jeremy Mohn, a biology teacher in Kansas who teaches
evolution, also urged the necessity of addressing the nonscientific
concerns of students in presenting evolution, observing, "You don't
have people in a chemistry classroom who have been raised to believe
that the periodic table comes from the devil and that if they believe
in it they are going to go to hell."
For Oldham's article, visit:
http://hechingerreport.org/content/the-evolution-of-teaching-evolution_5146/
For NCSE's coverage of the Berkman and Plutzer column, visit:
http://ncse.com/news/2011/01/too-many-teachers-ignore-evolution-006454
For the cited resources, visit:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/
http://www.biokids.umich.edu/
http://www.concord.org/projects/evolution-readiness
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 7:22 AM, Stephen Uzzo <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related
> institutions.
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>
> Perhaps parents SHOULD be rallying to force schools to teach evolution, but
> the evil-doers will find some other, more devious way in. But that's only a
> temporary solution. I think this points to a bigger issue: the legitimacy of
> science in general. We don't teach students to think, but just feed them
> facts. The fact that they question evolution could be a healthy thing if it
> got them to question and investigate evolution ideas more deeply. Once they
> were doing that, then Creationism would seem silly and they would ignore it.
> But because people don't really know what science is, it is easy to be
> persuaded by the evil-doers.
>
> As those who teach teachers, I think we have our work cut out for us. We
> need to raise a generation of people who are willing to question and think
> more deeply and then to form a society that values this attribute in people,
> then understand science as a dynamic process rather than a set of facts.
> Then they would be less easily persuaded by cockamamie ideas like
> Creationism.
>
> To your point Jenny, we should be teaching evolution in every course in the
> biology curriculum from molecular biology to macroecology, but we don't,
> because it is complex and is the "air we breathe" in biology. Yet we still
> think of evolution as a separate topic in biology, not the basis of many
> aspects of all of biology including (I'm sure Martin would agree) medicine.
>
>
> Stephen Miles Uzzo, PhD.
> VP, Science & Technology
> New York Hall of Science
> 47-01 111th Street
> Flushing Meadows Corona Park, NY 11368 USA
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> F +1.718.699.5227
>
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--
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Martin Weiss, PhD
Science Interpretation, Consultant
New York Hall of Science
mweiss at nyscience.org
347-460-1858
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For information about the Association of Science-Technology Centers and the Informal Science Education Network please visit www.astc.org.
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