A Half Century of Biology Education ... part 2

Don Igelsrud

Living Things

I got interested in biology in the fifth grade in 1952, twenty-five years before I began work to form ABLE.  I spent a lot of time at the University of Minnesota, meeting scientists, joining profession organizations, and doing biology.  When I decided to teach biology, I took lots of courses, but I only saw a few living things.  When I taught at a small college, we adopted Keeton as a text, and I was given the job of making the exercises in the Keeton lab manual work.  When I read that lab manual, I saw the huge gap between what could be done and what was done in the courses I took as a student.  I felt cheated and have tried to help students get that kind of experience ever since.  I’m appalled at the lack of exposure to living things students get now, especially with the rise of molecular biology.  I love molecular biology, but students also need experience with the other biological phenomena they will encounter.  They need to understand life and death, how birds fly and hearts work, and what ecosystems need by becoming involved with living things.  Biology is exciting because of its ideas, but it’s even more amazing to experience its sophistication and realize how little we really know.  Students develop the most enthusiasm for biology by experiencing it.  That’s what ABLE is about.

A.B.L.E.

The acronym ABLE originated when Mary Jane Turtle, now Turnell, from the University of Alberta said the group at her table in the University of Calgary Faculty Club were an able group, as they tried to come up with a name for the organization in 1979. They liked ABLE and decided it meant Association of Biology Laboratory Educators.  I’ve never liked the word educators, and came up with The Association for Biology Laboratory Education.  I felt that name had a higher purpose and was more indicative of the future.  The next day we voted on the two names and my choice won.  However, the other name has a life of its own and appears now and then.  The name we chose has never been more appropriate.

Jobs

One of the areas I thought ABLE could do something about was the large variation in kinds of positions people have that do our type of work.  When I left a tenured position at a small college to go to Northwestern to run the core biology labs, I discovered a big change I hadn’t anticipated.  I went from being a colleague to being a subordinate.  It made me very angry to have a professor who wasn’t interested in labs, and who knew little about what could be done, feel he could dictate what happened in the few minutes he wanted to think about it.  I’m always amazed at the amount of work prestigious universities want applicants to do when I read ads for lab positions.  As much as I think things should be improved, I doubt that we can do much about it.

Vulnerability

I lost my positions at Northwestern and Calgary primarily because of a full professor whose research program had died and who was now enjoying the power of politics.  I’m not saying I didn’t make any mistakes.  I learned rather quickly that most grad students didn’t have the interest or the time to be very concerned about teaching.  They knew something about the area they were working in, but often had a poor understanding of other areas of biology.  I tried to minimize their role and put most of the information in the lab manual.  Grad students preferred courses with short lab manuals and short exercises.  So, of course, they didn’t like my course because the students always stayed the full three hours and I had a big lab manual.  At Northwestern the year before I lost my job, I was reappointed with the strong support of the department.  A year later I was told I wasn’t reappointed with no warning or discussion because an elitist professor, who didn’t know me very well, thought they could find a better person. 

At the University of Calgary, I lost my job after eight years.  A full professor’s friend had applied for the same job I had, but didn’t get it.  He wanted me fired almost as soon as I got there, after we talked and didn’t have the same ideas about teaching.  He forced one review, which I passed and then got another review.  In the second review they collected every negative comment they could get and never gave me an opportunity to refute what they said.  He got the support of a new department chairman, who happened to be his next door neighbor.  He disliked me, but never said anything, so I didn’t know why.

Listening

A few years after I left the department, I met a biologist who studied spiders who sued his department and didn’t get fired.  He told me how difficult it was to be in that situation.  I guess these are no-win situations.  He also told me an interesting thing about spiders.  He said he could see fear in spiders when they encountered a horsehair or gordiacean worm.

Business management people say these kinds of actions are wrong.  Organizations work best when they take the time to talk about differences. At the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival I met a person who produced nature programs for Disney.  He told me he would never hire the person who tried to show him he was the best person for the job, as happens in academia.  He was more interested in finding team players.  The best way to understand these things may be to watch Survivor.  My wife and I celebrated our 20^th wedding anniversary by buying a park bench along the Elbow River.  Our Listening Bench is my idea of a solution.

Other Biology Teachers

I had done about as much as I could do with living materials at the University of Calgary and was just beginning to discover how video could improve biological understanding.  My career after teaching began about the right time.  I met many wonderful biologists who didn’t have the salary and security of teachers, but were doing amazing things.  The International Wildlife Film Festival introduced me to great filmmakers who wanted people to better appreciate nature.  I wanted people to use laserdiscs, not because I was trying to sell a technology, but because it offered people a way to investigate how biological phenomena worked that was not possible before.  Unfortunately, what I learned was teachers are driven by a curriculum that focuses on literary and how things work isn’t part of it.  For the past two years I’ve been working with DVD Studio Pro, trying to do the same kind of things, but DVDs are not laserdiscs.  Menus work differently and playback speeds are very limited.

What We Know

I also did some writing, investigative labs and exercises for Modern Biology, and a Labs Column for The American Biology Teacher.  In 1983, at the University of Calgary, I met with the local animal rights leader for about an hour every week for a year.  She didn’t seem to want to understand biology. Maybe she didn’t want to give up a cause that made her feel good.  With NABT, I discovered how deeply biology teaching had become involved with animal rights.  NABT had to serve all its members and many were interested in animal rights and creationism.  Controversial issues are controversial because evidence isn’t black and white.  Understanding can only occur if open and honest dialog occur.  People seem to be anchored in a point of view that has meaning for them at an early age and it’s difficult for them to move.  My technician at the University of Calgary didn’t believe in evolution, even though he had a degree in biology.  Five years of discussion didn’t change his view a bit. For many years my point of view has been that biological phenomena are so much more sophisticated than any philosophical explanations I’ve heard, that I have to take the position we don’t know very much. Ursula Goodenough does the best job I’ve seen of explaining biology from molecules to the biosphere in The Sacred Depths of Nature.  She says this is enough for her, but some people want more.

Animal Rights

Unfortunately, many people want to take a strong position on controversial issues, and things get very politicized.  Truth is hard to find.  When powerful animal rights groups produce websites like the Animal Liberation Front on School Labs that attack lab teaching with information that contains a few truths, but mostly erroneous information, less powerful groups can’t compete.  It’s about political power, which comes from popular appeal.  I’m saddened by the abuse honest, hard working people in agriculture, medicine and education take from these groups.  I think people in agriculture have a lot of lab activities that would make great ABLE workshops!

Page 3 of Don Igelsrud article