October 2007 Newsletter Vol. 36 No. 4
First Person: Anthony Millevolte
History of science is a rare creature in much of the liberal arts curriculum in the United States. Chemistry professor Anthony Millevolte says it is up to the history of science community to transform the intellectual and cultural features of science into a vital part of the liberal arts mission.
As an HSS member and an enthusiastic non-historian of science from another discipline (chemistry), I answered the online survey sent out to members last year. Apparently, I had admonished the entire discipline for not filling a larger role in the liberal arts tradition – or something to that effect. The HSS Newsletter staff asked me to elaborate.
As a science educator I believe there is tremendous room for history of science to grow in liberal arts curricula. The opportunity exists due to both a need for history of science courses and the fact that the discipline is rarely represented in undergraduate programs. In writing this piece, I conducted an informal survey of 22 of the non-Ph.D. granting institutions in Wisconsin (all 12 public and 10 of the private colleges and universities). Of these 22 bachelors and master’s degree granting institutions (with total enrolments well beyond 100,000 students), I found only two classes in the history of science scheduled for the Fall 2007 semester – one in a department of history, another in a department of physics. A cursory look at other non-Ph.D. granting public and private universities across the U.S. suggests that the Wisconsin situation is not at all unusual (though I may have detected an exception to this pattern at the more exclusive private liberal arts colleges). A more thorough survey may be beneficial for this discussion and for the HSS.
The absence of the history of science in university curricula is striking for a country whose physical and cultural features have been defined by its science and technology. In the last 15 years the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) have put forth recommendations for including the history and nature of science in K-12 science instruction.
There has been no large-scale, systematic response to these recommendations by the universities who are charged with training teachers.
In higher education, the best sustained effort to incorporate the history and nature of science into the liberal arts curriculum appears to have been the Harvard Project Physics, which published an entire curriculum with course materials in the 1960s. I am unaware of a similar effort that has been undertaken since then. Given the increasing specialization of academic scientists and the pressures of their reward systems, prospects for such a large curricular change in science pedagogy now seem quite dim. This isn’t to say scientists are opposed to including the history of science in the curriculum. On the contrary – most scientists I’ve interacted with get quite animated when discussing the subject. The problem is that scientists are too busy doing science to begin grappling with the subject knowledgeably. Most don’t have the resources or working environment to retool.
I came to these opinions after teaching a liberal arts chemistry course for the first time. Until then, my role as a teacher was well defined: I taught classical modern chemistry to students who aspired to become chemists, biologist, pharmacists, doctors, and engineers. But in my liberal arts chemistry course, the students had no interest or need to develop that kind of technical proficiency – they were taking the course because it would count towards a general degree requirement. So, I adopted the straightforward and by now well-worn path for these kinds of courses: to render the fundamentals of modern chemical theory into an easily accessible form and to then show the students how well it works by wielding it successfully in a variety of relevant or interesting situations. For example, we offer theoretical explanations for commonly experienced phenomena such as floating ice and six-sided snowflakes and relate daily-living sorts of issues (drugs, nutrition, and the environment) to chemical and biological theory. This pedagogy was somewhat satisfying to me at first – the students were learning some fundamental aspects of chemistry and were presumably leaving with some broader take-home message about science.
After a few years of teaching the course, I had growing misgivings about its adequacy. I began to reflect on the nature of my task – not as a chemistry instructor, but as a science educator whose allegiance to his home discipline was beginning to weaken with the challenge. I eventually came to believe that my students were learning chemistry not because the chemistry I was teaching them was part of a rationally-designed liberal arts science curriculum, but simply because I was a chemist who had a liberal arts course added to my teaching load. But if I didn’t begin with the assumption that chemistry should be central to the liberal arts science curriculum, what should the students be learning instead? Biology? Physics? Geology? I eventually and confidently concluded that – whatever the curricular venue – the “nature of scientific knowledge” needed to be a central focus for these students. It seemed undeniable that the liberal arts mission required some reflection on the intellectual and cultural features of science and must offer insight into the knowledge claims scientists make.
It was difficult for me to pursue this new goal, because I lacked a sound appreciation for the nature of scientific knowledge myself. I first became aware of this deficiency as a graduate student when I periodically suffered from episodes of epistemological doubt over the nature of my own understanding. The continued successes of chemical theory notwithstanding, the more competent I became as a chemist the more perplexing and mysterious it seemed to me that modern chemical theory could ever have arisen in the first place. Far too much of it seemed counterintuitive.
Could I consider myself to be knowledgeable about science without knowing something about its origins? Or does the practice of science trump a meta-understanding of it? Did my ignorance even matter? So I began to read, and started with a fellow chemist – A Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi’s honest reflection on epistemological ambiguity. I followed this with Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution. A dozen books later I was designing and teaching a history of science course in partnership with two historians and with the encouragement of our History Department. After a time, reading books was not sufficient – I needed to learn how historians of science thought about their discipline and did their work. The faculty at the History of Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota graciously met this need by inviting me into their department for a sabbatical leave. There, I sat in on courses and seminars and learned more about the subject and its pedagogy from its faculty and graduate students. The outcome of this experience is found in one of the two history of science courses that are offered at the University of Wisconsin Colleges (the junior college network of the University of Wisconsin System). These courses have been well received by students and continue to generate interest both within and beyond our institution.
The history-of-science community can seize opportunities for growth if it has the inclination to do so. The short-term payoffs may not be attractive, but in the long run, a sustained effort offers history of science a more important and visible position within the greater culture of higher education. If a critical number of bachelor and master’s granting institutions begin to offer history-of-science courses, then additional growth could take on a life of its own as a “keeping up with the Jones’s” effect takes hold.
The difficulty is, of course, how the discipline “gets its foot in the door.” Given the variety of institutional goals and curricular and staffing idiosyncrasies from one institution to the next, it is unlikely that a single model would be successful. There is a need for a variety of imaginative solutions much like the kind that historians of science employed when they first gained footholds in the universities. The discipline now has the opportunity to leverage the great scholarship it has produced since that beginning by embarking on a second expansion – one which would inevitably benefit existing history-of-science programs.
Here are some possible approaches:
Get out more. Design targeted presentations for scientists and historians at institutions that have few or no history-of-science courses. These talks could also be given at scientific society meetings (most of which have education or history division sessions). Advanced graduate students, fellows, and faculty could all be encouraged to contribute in some way.
Find a way to share and value pedagogical and curricular accomplishments professionally. If your society or program doesn’t value these activities, no one else will. Most scientific societies have pedagogy sessions built into their meeting programs. In the HSS, this would have the added benefit of creating a social space for some non-historians of science (like me) who are poised to make curricular advances on your behalf. I found it ironic that the Preliminary Program for the 2007 HSS Conference includes several sessions dedicated to the pedagogy and dissemination of science, but only one session clearly communicated its own pedagogy.
Create pathways for interested mid-career science or history faculty to teach introductory or capstone history of science courses at their institutions. These people are valuable internal advocates for your discipline, and they have the potential to expand the history of science curriculum, which could lead to the eventual hiring of a bona fide historian of science. A consortium of history of science programs could co-design and develop a series of short courses and seminars for science or history faculty. Consider Web-based instruction and/or summer residency programs.
Create accessible history-of-science minors for Ph.D. candidates in the sciences.
Recruit history of science graduate students who hold a master’s degree in a scientific discipline and give them encouragement to remain active in the pedagogy of that discipline. Encourage them to secure occasional teaching assistantships or temporary teaching appointments in other departments or colleges. This experience may keep the door open for them to remain candidates for employment in liberal arts college science departments after they earn their history of science Ph.D.
Be prepared to collaborate with Schools of Education. The NAS and AAAS recommendations, which are very visible, have been included in many state education standards.*
These suggestions are neither exclusive nor exhaustive (and some are better than others). Certainly, identifying fruitful strategies for getting one’s foot in the door is important for growth. So is tenacity. But in the end your discipline will sell itself – it simply promises too many benefits to the wider education community to be ignored for much longer.
– By Anthony Millevolte
Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry
University of Wisconsin Colleges
* AAAS’s Project 2061 published “Benchmarks for Science Literacy” in 1993. It is available online at http://www.project2061.org/.
NAS’s National Research Council published “National Science Education Standards” in 1996. It is available online at http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/nses/html/.