“I’M A SCIENTIST, NOT A POLITICIAN!”: HOW TO INTEGRATE CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT VALUES INTO A GENERAL EDUCATION GEOLOGY COURSE (& WHY YOU SHOULD)

Bowling Green State University is implementing a program to make critical thinking about values a central, unifying theme of our undergraduate students’ experience. A centerpiece of the BGeXperience is a general education course for first-semester freshmen, taught in small sections, stressing discussion, and focusing on the recognition of values and how they shape academic and public discourse within the course’s subject area. To emphasize the cross-disciplinary nature of the values initiative, courses from a broad range of fields have been included in the BGeXperience. There was initial hesitation, however, to including science courses, as some perceived the sciences to be value-neutral and therefore not a good fit to the BGeXperience goals.

Fortunately, this initial resistance was overcome. Indeed, science provides rich material for discussing values in the classroom. Science is performed by human beings who make research decisions based in part on their own value preferences. Scientific discoveries have human consequences that every citizen must confront. The scientific process itself is grounded in the ethics of its participants. I would argue that a critical exploration of values within scientific disciplines should be considered part of a science course’s core content, not an “extra” or “gimmick.”

In my historical geology course, we focused on several values-laden issues, including global climate change, evolution-creationism, Mars exploration, gradualism versus catastrophism, the commercialization of vertebrate fossils, and the cloning of extinct animals. At the end of the course, students indicated that the discussions and assignments about these real-world controversies greatly increased their interest in the geological topics we covered. Students left the class with a better sense of how scientists actually do their work, and of the non-scientific factors that affect scientific inquiry. They appreciated the way the course put a human face on science. Students also gained practice in how to critically evaluate and defend a position, distinguish between opinions and supported arguments, provide justifications for their own value choices, and make informed decisions based both on scientific information and consideration of the social consequences of their actions.