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The
First ABLE Meeting
When
66 of us came to Calgary to
form ABLE in 1979, I was very determined to see that everyone got together
right away and acted as a group. I
didn’t want isolation and competition to develop like it does in many
organizations. It worked well. Loy Crower said, “The spirit
of camaraderie which developed so quickly was incredible.”
The
group wanted a newsletter and Dow Woodward, in a moment
of inspiration, came up with Labstracts. Jim Waddell became editor. Jaume Josa from Barcelona
volunteered to be European editor. He
had spent the last year on sabbatical in Britain
with the editor of The Journal of Biological Education and
said he got a lot more out of the ABLE meeting.
He showed us a beautiful lab manual that he put together with
his students.
Jon
Glase volunteered to put together the first volume of the proceedings
and called it Tested Studies for
Laboratory Teaching. Rosalie
Talbert became treasurer. Dan
Burke put out a series of news releases.
Don Fritsch became the first workshop committee
chairman. And Joe Larsen,
who couldn’t attend, volunteered to host the next meeting at the University
of Illinois. Hans Boerger led trips to the
mountains. We were off to a great start.
Twenty-Five
Years Later
Twenty-five years later, one can only look at those
Proceedings with pride. I’m
in awe every time I read them. As
we all know, the road has not been easy. The camaraderie and value of the meetings have
kept ABLE alive, but there have been some major lifesavers. How can we thank Corey
Goldman enough for rescuing the Proceedings from a near death experience
with Kendall/Hunt and an editor who didn’t finish the task for a couple
of years.
He set a high standard that is now being carried on
by his followers. Corey went from desktop publishing to web publishing
and produced a beautiful website that has connected us to the world.
Like most volunteer organizations, there has been a core of people
that have done much of the work, but as ABLE has grown, new members
have taken on old tasks and built a stable structure of guidelines.
Memories
I
haven’t been able to attend most of the meetings after the 10th
anniversary in Vancouver,
but as I look through the proceedings some special memories come back.
It was great to see that Frank Dye got to do
an update of his wonderful mammalian embryology lab in Boston
in 1996. I met Frank at NSTA in 1983 and asked him to
do a workshop at our upcoming meeting in Newfoundland. He did a lot of work. Checked with all the government
people and filled out all the forms so he could bring his mice into
Canada. It all ended when the pilot of the plane said
“You aren’t taking those mice on my plane!”
Later, he tried to publish a paper in ABT, but they refused the
paper, saying it violated their animal use policies.
Chapter
5 on myosin and actin reminded me of a story about glycerinated muscle. Apparently someone’s glycerinated muscle didn’t
arrive on time and they used fresh meat from the grocery store and it
worked. I think I saw a note
about it in The Journal of Biological
Education. Has anyone in our group tried it?
Boston
There
were lots of great workshops at the Boston
University meeting. Liz Godrick had to overcome
some major obstacles to host those meetings.
When I was in Boston
in 1984 for NSTA, she asked me to come to the new biology building to
talk about hosting a workshop. In the course of our conversation she told me
how rudely Carroll Williams, the famous Harvard insect physiologist,
had treated her when she asked to see the Harvard teaching labs. I’m a big fan of George Wald’s Twenty-Six Afternoons in Biology and I
was also interested in seeing Harvard’s labs.
I
took the MTA to egoland. Looked around the campus. Stopped
in the bookstore, something I do routinely to look at textbooks, lab
manuals, and to discover uncommon books. I discovered The Birder’s Handbook,
the best bird book I know of, in the University
of Saskatchewan
bookstore in Saskatoon. At Harvard I bought the Course Evaluation Guide, which is very interesting reading. It took a while to find the biology teaching
labs, but when I did they looked new and interesting. I asked who ran them and was directed to an
office where I introduced myself to a fellow who behaved like he knew
what ABLE was about and was interested in participating.
Later, David Mayette told me he wasn’t familiar
with anything I talked about. He
joined our group in Las Vegas
the next year. I’m sure I didn’t make Liz’s life any easier.
David talked about hosting a meeting or doing a joint meeting
with Liz, but it didn’t happen. As far as I know, we haven’t seen anyone from
Harvard after David left a few years later.
Famous
Places
I
had wanted ABLE to become involved with some of the places that had
big reputations. One year I invited
Bob Thomson from Marquette
to participate. He and Peter Abramoff had the most
widely used lab exercises with their Freeman Separates and manuals.
He came to our meeting with the idea he would host a workshop
in the near future. When he arrived and saw the scope of our workshops,
he didn’t think he could do it. Later
he told me he shouldn’t have backed out, because he probably could have
hosted a meeting if they had used some of the labs in the chemistry
department. The idea of meeting
at Berkeley or Stanford has always had appeal.
When I visited Marcia Allen at Stanford, I concluded
it was like Northwestern -- it really didn’t have space for a meeting. Berkeley,
on the other hand, clearly has the space, but no one from there has
come to a meeting. Looking back now, we’ve done fine without their
participation. What about UC
Irvine?
Teaching
Chapter
17 on TA training in the Clemson 2000 Proceedings,
especially the section on videotaping, gives some very specific ways
to improve TA student interaction. This
is the kind of concrete feedback teachers and TAs need.
It’s a great resource!
My
ABLE presentations seem to be jinxed. At
the Joseph
R. Larsen Memorial Lecture in Wyoming
it got dark as I started my talk, I didn’t have any light at
the podium, and I put most of the audience to sleep.
I thought I would have trouble with too much light, I guess
because it gets dark so late here in the summer.
I was thrilled to be given the honor to give that first lecture
and worked on it for a long time. I patterned
it after the lecture Joe gave at the 10th anniversary in
Vancouver, where Rick
Peifer, Lee Johnson and several others including myself had
dinner with Joe and discovered what a caring administrator he was.
In the dark, I was no Joe Larsen as I tried to read the speech
I prepared because I expected it to be published with the proceedings.
And I never got to show anyone the beautiful
plaque ABLE gave me. In Stonybrook,
I wanted to fertilize eggs on Sunday so we would have lots of pluteus
larva for the sea urchin development workshop I was doing on Tuesday.
I quit injecting after the 22nd male in a row and
left the rest of the urchins for the Conways,
who were doing the workshop with me. That
lab has been working at the University
of Calgary for 25 years.
Other
Groups
The
origin of the acronym is true; ABLE is blessed to have many truly able
people. We need to work for biology
laboratory education by working with others who have the same goals. I am always surprised that many of the most
active people on Biolab, the most used
listserver on what we do, never go to the ABLE meetings. Jean Dickey has archived much
of the activity that has occurred at her site.
Bravo Jean! I use my University
of Calgary
email address to collect discussions from Biolab, Plant-Ed and HAPP-L,
and try to read them every week or two.
We need to work with people in those other groups to improve
funding for what we do.
Labstracts
Labstracts
editors have all faced the same problem – members don’t seem to have
enough time to write and submit articles.
Here are some ideas for filling those pages.
A section on Hot Topics, for example:
Lou Ignaza,
winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering the role
of nitric oxide, spoke at the University of
Calgary Medical School. Dr. Ignaza is the winner of 10 Golden Apple
Awards for great teaching at UCLA Medical School. He is a wonderful lecturer. If you have the opportunity to hear him, find
a way to do it!
Or
The
Exploratorium maintains a list of the coolest websites; here’s their
list for the life sciences.
How
about a first person section on ABLE members like The Scientist did with Lynn Margulis.
As
we celebrate our Silver Anniversary, it’s a good time for reflection.
I’ve raised issues that have developed in my
fifty years of biology education. I
hope Labstracts and the ABLE
website can be a forum for planning our future.
Best
wishes to all my able friends and good luck Mariëlle!
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