DIALOGUES WITH DARWIN: MUSEUM EXHIBITS AND PRIMARY SOURCES IN A GENERAL EDUCATION COURSE

Many non-science majors have a difficult time understanding that science is not simply the accumulation of learned facts, but rather an ongoing process of inquiry, discovery, and debate. Even when the concept of “science as process” is presented in the classroom, there is the risk of students accepting or rejecting historical ideas as static knowledge, rather than recognizing them as a product of the same process of ongoing dialogue that characterizes modern scientific inquiry.

Students in Temple University’s Evolution and Extinctions course, a general education class in Earth history with approximately 300 students, attended the “Dialogues with Darwin” exhibition at the American Philosophical Society (APS) Museum in Philadelphia. The exhibit, which included numerous original documents (published works, personal letters, and illustrations) from Darwin and his contemporaries, allowed the students to view and engage with primary sources in a way that would have been impossible in a classroom or online setting.

Students were given a series of questions prior to the APS field trip. Their objective was to gather information from the displayed documents and exhibit labels, and then use this information to compose thoughtful answers to the posed questions. The questions were designed specifically to highlight the influence of concepts from other disciplines on Darwin’s work (e.g. geological uniformitarianism and deep time, anatomical similarities among vertebrate body plans) and to dispel common misconceptions about Darwin’s ideas (e.g. natural selection is directed and humans are the pinnacle of biological evolution). As they followed the development of Darwin’s ideas in the context of the scientific debates of his time, the students encountered Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection not as a theory in the abstract but as a working example of the scientific process.

In a related follow-up assignment, students later participated in a blogging exercise in which they used the knowledge gained during the museum trip to debate with their classmates the implications of Darwin’s ideas (see Davatzes et al., this session).