Everyone sat on the side opposite to Bwog because we’re too intimidating.

As part of Columbia’s effort to revamp the Core science course, an open forum was held last night allowing for student input.  FroSci Fault-Finder Eric Cohn reports.

Last night, to a surprisingly sparse crowd, the Committee for Science in the Core held an open forum as part of its effort to formulate a new Core science course.  The committee was formed last September upon the recommendation of the Educational Planning and Policy Committee after a comprehensive review of FroSci in 2012.  The committee has been exploring alternatives to FroSci, which were discussed at the forum—albeit somewhat nebulously.

Two co-chairs of the Committee—Earth and Environmental Science Professor Peter deMenocal and Philosophy Professor Philip Kitcher—led the forum alongside two student members, Violet Nieves, CC ’15 and Ari Schuman, CC ’15.  At the beginning of the event, all four expressed their commitment to hearing student input to improve their ideas for a seminar-based course that would likely take one of two forms: the class would either be a chronological survey of the history of the universe, or it would focus on science’s “greatest hits” since the advent of the scientific method.

The “history of the world” version—tentatively known as “Humans in the World”—would consist of weekly topics broken down into very specific phenomena for scientific study to emphasize a particular way of scientific thinking.  Thus, whereas this form of the seminar would bring in the scientific skills along the way with the content, the “greatest hits” version—tentatively called “Scientific Inquiry”—would start with the skills as a foundation and then introduce the content.  Still, Nieves emphasized that the finalized version of the course could be an intermixture of these two proposals.

Nieves began—after a fervid assurance that the “Columbia bureaucracy” would not be staging a “coup” against students on the Core science front—by emphasizing that the committee wants to be in a “quite open” dialogue with students to create “not exactly transparency, but translucence.”  A student later rejected this claim, saying that there was very little transparency until now.  The committee did not revisit this retort, although the holding of a forum seems to be at least a step in the right direction.

Following Nieves, Kitcher—in his dapper purple shirt and beige suit—opened his introductory speech with an apology, anticipating the process to be rather slow.  The audience swooned over his accent and gladly accepted his apology, although I was somewhat disappointed that I may not see the fruits of the committee’s efforts in my tenure.

Midway through the forum, a student proposed that the committee write a list on the Schermerhorn chalkboard of the key components of a new Core science course.  By the end of the forum, the goals (though relatively nonspecific) included:

• Getting students to think scientifically
• Curing the fear of science
• Creating a sense of wonder around the science discussed
• Teaching scientific literacy
• Giving students the opportunity to experience cutting-edge research

A common critique heard at the forum was that, in its current forum, FroSci is rather incoherent.  It includes four relatively disparate units with no real transition periods, leaving students feeling disjointed.  Schuman’s response was that the new Core science seminar would be using themes to cohere the curriculum, using narratives to link the science together, rather than specific elements of the material.  The committee again and again expressed that the goal with a Core science class is to teach scientific methods and scientific thinking—not scientific facts.

Throughout the forum, there seemed to be a fundamental tension that was never overtly addressed.  Whereas some students and the committee seemed to want to model the Core science experience off CC and Lit Hum, others saw this as an unfounded analogy.  For them, comparing science to the humanities is like apples to oranges: for while in CC or Lit Hum students are addressing ideas and coming to conclusions for themselves, in science, there are right and wrong answers.  In a partial response to this concern, the committee hopes to create a class with more peer-to-peer learning and roundtable discussion to facilitate a similar “interrogation” of scientific ideas as occurs in CC or Lit Hum.

Also like CC and Lit Hum, explained the committee, the success of the Core science seminar depends on the success of the instructor.  They hope to create a framework to enable the best section leaders to thrive, but this only goes so far.  They also hope to hold training sessions for instructors to meet privately with leading professors in the fields of science these instructors hope to teach.  Kitcher compared this to the CC and Lit Hum model, where instructors who may not be experts on the writers they are teaching are tutored beforehand by experts.

As for the specifics of the proposed seminar, Schuman explained that a lot of the seminar would be spent going over content in order to understand the broader “narrative” of the course.  Practically speaking, Nieves explained that one goal of the new course would be to contextualize the presently haphazard equations learned in FroSci.  She also told us that back of the envelope calculations would remain on the syllabus, as they are “still valuable.”  DeMenocal also explained that the seminar would include experiential components: from museum visits to field trips to demonstrations.

The committee explained that seminar discussions will be focused around the reading of papers, which will be guided by a series of questions students are expected to answer before they come to seminar.  As the course progresses, the questions will be less structured, and students will try to formulate questions themselves.  Lessons would be designed by Columbia faculty knowledgeable in their field.  As in CC, the committee also hopes instructors will be able to design their own exams.

One thing you might remember from FroSci (although admittedly I do not) is the habits of mind concept.  Students consistently expressed that they never really grasped its value in the context of the course until it was too late.  The students on the committee echoed this sentiment, and this aspect, they said, “will probably disappear.”

In response to a somewhat tangential question, the committee rejected the suggestion of introducing non-scientific texts to the seminars.  That is, there would be no readings of philosophical, sociological, or political debates about science.  Instead, said Kitcher, students should be bringing in these perspectives themselves in discussion.

As Kitcher explained at the beginning of the forum—and as I realized by the end—the process of reforming science in the core will be a slow one.  The ideas brought up at the forum still seem somewhat nascent and are in need of more precision.  Still, the committee seems to be moving in the right direction, and I encourage students to continue to express openly their critiques of science in the Core in its current form.