I have just begun my position as an assistant professor at University College Dublin. For now, I'm only teaching a small tutorial-style course, but in a few month's time, I'll be teaching statistical mechanics to chemistry undergraduates and (hopefully) scientific writing and research ethics to graduate students. Even before I knew what I'd be teaching, though, I had been at work planning, thinking about the philosophy and practices that I'll bring to the classroom. What will assignments look like? How do I want students to interact with each other? With me? How can my course, including class time and office hours, best serve my students? And so on. As with my previous post on chemical ethics, I'm thinking out loud here, providing opportunities both for feedback and for my process to stimulate others to question their pedagogical practices. I'm sure I'll write more posts about course design, teaching, and pedagogy in the future, but for now, we're focusing on a high-level, basic, but perhaps under-explored question: how can you make a STEM class positive?
To motivate this question, I want to provide some examples from my own undergraduate education.[1] I cannot succinctly explain how much I learned in these courses, but I can express how these classes operated and how they felt, i.e., what my subjective experience in these different classes was and how those experiences were affected by course structure and teaching philosophy.
Even as an engineering student, at Columbia University, I had many opportunities to take courses outside of my area of specialization. One of those courses was "Mistake, Misconduct, Disaster: How Organizations Fail". This was an organizational sociology course taught by Diane Vaughan, who literally wrote the book on the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger[2] and explained how the disaster was in large part caused by changes in the institutional culture of NASA.[3] Though the course was rooted in sociology, we read broadly, from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem to articles about nuclear power plants and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and we were encouraged to bring our experiences and understandings outside of sociology to bear. One day in class, we were discussing police misconduct,[4] and Prof. Vaughan asked the class what changes could be made to limit such negative behavior. I had recently taken several economics courses, and incentives were at the front of my mind. I offered the idea that we could expect no improvement in police misconduct unless their incentives shift, encouraging community well-being instead of high arrest rates and traffic fine revenue. Though I don't think Prof. Vaughan expected this answer, she appreciated it and gave it space, opening the class to a broader discussion about incentives in policing.
The openness of "Mistake, Misconduct, Disaster" made it an intellectual playground where I could experiment and explore. Through the class design and the professor's open-minded approach, I recognized the connections within my knowledge, that what I learned in Prof. Vaughan's class could be applied to just about any organization that I was a part of and that my knowledge in areas like engineering and economics could provide useful insights in an area like sociology that I had previously considered intellectually distant and disconnected.
My crystallography course, a core undergraduate/graduate hybrid course, was taught by a no-nonsense materials scientist. She told us from the beginning that we were all on our own. There would be no curve, and she was very willing to fail us all if we did not meet her standards.
I was the rare student who actually enjoyed the subject of crystallography. Though some of the math (particularly group theory) was difficult to understand, I found a sense of beauty in crystal structures and their symmetries. I enjoyed making and analyzing crystallographic projections, visualizing symmetrically equivalent points and crystal motifs. But I could not enjoy my crystallography class. Under intense pressure, I was too stressed about finishing the long problem sets and surviving the exams to spend much time on aesthetics, on fun.
I walked out of the final exam room laughing, fully believeing that I did not know enough and choosing to lean into humor rather than despair. I ended up passing and moving on to other grueling courses, but I can imagine how it must feel for the folks that failed, who suffered and stressed only to find that they weren't good enough. To do all that and have to do it all again, knowing what you'll be put through, would be (and must have been) soul-crushing.
Columbia required that all students (except student athletes) take two physical education courses. One of these was allowed to be a dance course, and I took advantage of that allowance by enrolling in the Barnard College course "Contact Improvisation".
Contact improv is mostly self-explanatory. It's a type of improvised partner or group dance where you (mainly) respond to each other's touch. I entered the class with little background in dance (I had done a splash of modern dance as a teenager), and I walked into the class somewhat nervous. Most of the other students were long-time dancers, including dance majors, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to keep up.
To my surprise, the class started with us barely "dancing" at all. For the first couple of weeks, we instead did exercises that taught us to give and take touch, to speak, listen, and respond through movement. I came to understand that, with no steps to follow, contact improv requires intimacy, trust, and subtle but consistent communication. I remember one day, a few weeks into the course, seeing pairs of dancers experimenting with some lifts. I was one of the larger and physically stronger students, and so I thought that I should be able to lift my partner, too. We started dancing across the room, and when I moved in for her waist, she lowered her center, preventing my lift. I immediately recognized a boundary, and we continued dancing on the ground without a pause. In the moment, I was terrified that I had somehow done something wrong, but our professor (thankfully) made it clear that I had done nothing of the sort. The class was a space where I could safely reach out to try a lift, and it was also a place where my partner, lacking the necessary foundation of trust, could through her body language say "no".
Closing out the course, we were placed into groups and tasked with choreographing an improv dance. That might sound contradictory, but it's not outside of the norm. The choreographer(s) give a general outline of what they want the dancers to try or explore, and then the dancers improvise around the provided prompts and themes. I've always been a fan of pushing the envelope, and so I suggested to my group that we take our dance outside of the studio that served as our classroom. I knew that there was a farmer's market during our class time, just a few blocks away. What if we danced among the apples and pears? At this point, with many moments of laughter, mis-steps, and beauty shared, the whole class had established intimacy. My group believed that our dancers would follow us, trust us, and launch themselves into our field trip dance adventure. And we were right. I still cherish the memory of dancing wildly on the side of a busy Manhattan street. We took a leap of faith, landed on our feet, and found joy in it.
Finally, I'll give the example of a good STEM course – in fact, the most impactful engineering course I've taken. It was "Engineering for Sustainable Development", which I took as part of my Sustainable Engineering minor. It was led by a licensed Professional Engineer who taught as an adjunct in his spare time. To accommodate the professor's schedule, the class was held 7:00-9:30 PM once a week, by which time I was often ready to sleep. It wasn't a required course for any major, meaning that everyone in the class had higher priorities. On paper, it looked like the class would be a disaster, filled with empty chairs and empty stares.
It wasn't. While some of the subject matter was dry, I entered and left every class feeling that the material mattered, that it was essential to me. I suspect I wasn't alone, as the class was filled with students who were passionate about sustainability and wanted to use their degrees to help communities in need. The professor was stretched thin, but he was communicative, he was kind, and he knew and cared about the course content deeply. And there was no busy work. Most of our grade for the course was wrapped up in a real-world project that brought us in contact with communities and the organizations serving them. My team designed low-cost, earthquake- and storm-resistant temporary housing for displaced communities in Haiti. Other teams worked on medical devices for low-income countries, water purification systems, and other urgent challenges. In an academic system where "When am I going to use this?" is a frequent refrain, I never wondered if what I was learning in "Engineering for Sustainable Development" was useful or important.
First of all, what do I mean by "positive"? This is an admittedly ambiguous term, and what one person views as positive might be negative to another person. In the context of formal education, a positive learning environment can refer to one where students are able to actively engage in their learning, where students are able to achieve work-life balance, where students feel welcome, comfortable, and safe in the environment, where students have opportunities to interact with one another and cooperate, where students are able to cultivate personal relationships with each other and with the instructor(s), and where there is a sense of a learning community.[5]
So, do students need a positive learning environment, by this definition? Don't students learn best under pressure? I will not (and cannot) speak for each individual's experience with learning. Surely there are some individuals who cannot learn without demanding instructors, difficult, dry assignments, and all-important, make-or-break exams. But I do not believe that those students are the majority, and this belief is supported by the literature. Rather, students tend to perform better and have improved well-being when they're in what they view as a positive learning environment.[6] [7] [8] If I want to be an effective educator, then fostering positivity should be a major goal. But even if positivity did nothing to improve student learning, it would still be worthwhile. As illustrated by the example of my crystallography course above, a negative educational experience can cause students to suffer. To the extent that I can, I would like to limit the suffering in the world, and I would certainly like to avoid adding to it.
As a scientist, I am informed by the data, which tell me (see above) that the courses that I develop and instruct should be community-centered and collaborative, sites of active learning with direct student engagement, and educational experiences that do not excessively tax student time and energy, among other elements. I am also guided by my reflections on my educational experience, as represented by the preceding stories and examples. These reflections lead me to some obvious conclusions. As an instructor, I should be kind and understanding. I should be open and responsive to my students' needs and ideas. Nothing earth-shattering there.
There were also some less obvious themes that seemed to keep popping up:
Fun: I kept thinking about fun. "Mistake, Misconduct, Disaster" was fun. Improvised dancing was fun. I wanted crystallography to be fun (and probably it would have been, if the course had been less stressful). A positive learning experience was one in which, even if the content was challenging, students could find enjoyment. If they enjoy the material, students might actually want to put work into the course!
Relevance: Several of my classes made an impact on me because they were obviously connected to my interests and the world around me. I truly didn't care about structural engineering (sorry, my civil engineer friends), but I was engaged in "Engineering for Sustainable Development" because I wanted to use my engineering skills to help developing communities. So, perhaps I have to make my lessons feel relevant, to meet what students believe they need.
Freedom: The assignments that made a lasting impact, the ones I've specifically described here, involved creativity and freedom. Yes, I enjoyed dancing and choreographing in general, but I remember the farmer's market dance because it was borne out of a wild, outside-the-box (or, perhaps, outside-the-classroom) idea. I still think about and talk about my design for displaced Haitians, not because of all of the long meetings and intense deliberations it required, but because I was given a hard, open-ended problem with no obvious solution and developed an elegant design (I think) to address it. These experiences were powerful, significant, and positive because they were experiences that I had a major role in crafting.
Together, these will be my guiding principles for teaching. I believe that if I can create an educational community that is kind, fun, relevant to my students' needs and interests, and which provides ample freedom and room for creativity, the result will be a positive educational experience.
Having these principles does not mean I'll get where I'm going. How can one integrate ideas like fun, relevance, and freedom in the classroom, and in the science classroom specifically? I aim to build off of this post in the near future as I'm working to develop my future course in Dublin, describing challenges to the work of positivity and practical implementations of some of the ideas that I've discussed here.
| [1] | I could draw from my graduate career, but I've decided against it. My graduate courses were far less diverse than the classes I took in undergrad, and they were also less important to me, as my main focus as a PhD student was on research. |
| [2] | DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226346960.001.0001 |
| [3] | Vaughan has since written another book, Dead Reckoning, that explores air traffic control to understand organizational resilience. I fear that this book will be seen in the near future as prescient, just as The Challenger Launch Decision in some sense predicted the later Columbia disaster. |
| [4] | I admit that I've forgotten the specific examples. |
| [5] | DOI: 10.1007/s10984-022-09410-4 |
| [6] | DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2923.2008.03282.x |
| [7] | DOI: 10.1080/03075070802211810 |
| [8] | DOI: 10.1080/03075070120099359 |