A couple of years ago, we undertook a grand revision of our General Education curriculum, the set of core liberal arts courses that all students are required to take in order to graduate. The old system was very specific, requiring a large-ish number of courses in very specific areas, and was biased toward Western culture in a way that really doesn’t reflect the modern realities of academia– students were required to take four courses in either American or European history and culture, or four courses in Classics, and that was it. Nobody was happy with this, so it needed changing.
In the course of the overhaul, the idea of a “Sophomore Research Seminar” was invented. This is intended as a course that all students will be required to take in the sophomore year, that will serve as an introduction to research methods and scholarly writing.
The original discussions of this were a real “Two Cultures” sort of moment for me, as it was clear that people in humanities and social sciences assumed that everybody on campus does research in exactly the same way, and that the skills they find important are transferable between disciplines. They’re really not– I set foot in the library for research purposes maybe twice a year, the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” sources is basically meaningless (nothing written down is a “primary source” in science), and the citation practices and writing style favored in science are completely different than what they teach in the humanities. I was a little skeptical, bordering on cynical about the whole thing.
There was a panel discussion yesterday that provided a sort of progress report on the implementation (this is the first year of the new system), though, that improved my opinion of things quite a bit.
There were two faculty from the engineering division on the panel, though (one computer scientist and one mechanical engineer), who described project-based classes that sounded really interesting, and even useful. The CS class was team-taught (including at least one person who reads this blog), and looked at questions of product design– how do you design things so that they’re usable by random people, where do designs go wrong, and that sort of thing. The mechanical engineering class asked students to find solutions to various tricky problems, and the final research project was to look up a toy design from 1900 or earlier, and re-design it to appeal to modern third graders.
Those sounded really great to me– the students were doing real problem-solving sorts of tasks, that would actually let them learn some useful things about how to approach scientific research. It sounded a whole lot cooler than the library-based image I had of the whole thing– mostly because it went for real “primary” sources, namely experiments and field work (interviewing actual third graders, for example).
It also got me wondering whether there isn’t something that could be done with the biomechanics stuff that last week’s speaker talked about. And, of course, you could probably do some fun things with Fermi problems. When I was talking about it at dinner, Kate suggested mythbusting, and that sounds like an idea with possibilities as well, and…
Dammit, I don’t have time for this.