Citizen Science Hits Bard
By J.p. Lawrence
It’s eight a.m., and Bard’s freshman class is up, waken from their winter slumber. Perhaps in the course of the night’s dreaming, they relived some New Year’s bacchanalia or revisited old friends they met on break. But on the morning of Jan. 4, reality is being back at Bard College, getting ready for the first day of the first iteration of Citizen Science, a winter workshop designed to promote scientific thinking among the students, no matter the major.
It all started with the idea is that the Americans are scientifically illiterate, and that action must be taken to bring Bard freshmen up to speed. From this idea came the Citizen Science program, with program director Brooke Jude bringing in faculty from the fields of medicine, physics and chemistry, from institutions like the National Institute of Health, the Navy’s bio-warfare division, and the Society of Microbiology.
For these teachers, the program offered a chance to participate in what they saw as an essential mission. “This was exactly the kind of program that I wanted to be involved with. It sounded super exciting, super new and innovative, and a great way to get students interested in science,” said Alix Purdy, who studies infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital Boston. “And right when I heard about it, I was super excited to be involved.
“I thought the concept was exciting,” another teacher, Derek Fisher, a microbiologist at the Uniformed Services University, said. “I think what it’s trying to do needs to be done at more places. We need to reach students who might not take science courses until their junior or senior year, we need to reach those kids early, because I think a lot of students are really afraid of science and don’t understand what science is.
“I also think,” Fisher adds, “that we as scientists have a responsibility to reach out to people.”
Some students, however, perceive the program as an unnecessary crash course in a subject in which they held little interest, and many students object to having their winter break shaved in half. “I think, at first I was biased against it, because I didn’t hear about it until after I got accepted and matriculated. And I learned I wasn’t going to have a January break, which I had been looking forward to,” says freshman Justin Kegley, a native of Lyme, Conn. “But after that, I had kinda a wait and see attitude.”
Other students, more vocal in their discontent, had made up their minds long before the program started. “Honestly, I thought it was going to be a clusterfuck,” one freshman, Reed Cartzas, of New York, N.Y., says. “I thought it was going to be a total debacle, a train wreck, just like, a 20-car pile-up.”
While angry sentiments seem to reign loudest on campus, not all freshmen stand against the idea. “I thought it was an interesting concept. Botstein seemed to reason well, and he presented a good rationale for it,” says Pleasanton, Calif., native Alex Fager. “I guess I was getting some negative vibes, but I still had a wait-and-see attitude.” It is with these views Bard’s freshmen trundle off to their first day of class.
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It’s the second day of the first iteration of Citizen Science, and already, many students are discouraged. Students separate into three groups, one conducting lab experiments, one conducting computer simulations, and one learning about scientific issues in a classroom setting.
In particular, students chafe at the six hours a day allotted to using a computer simulation program, meant to teach students about sick fish and cleaning oil spills. “It’s an outrageous amount of time,” says Caratzas, who played enough online games in class to become a ranked Facebook Tetris player. “Six hours. I could have learned this myself from a flash game in like, two minutes.”
“It was kinda disappointing because my first module was in the computer lab, so a lot of time was spent just sitting around just waiting for other groups to finish or for the class to reach one common point,” Kegley says. “Just because of all that waiting around, I kinda made up my opinion of the program right then.”
“The first day, I think they underestimated the students,” adds Fager. “I got the impression that they thought we were stupid and didn’t know anything. They just assumed that we didn’t know very basic things and that we couldn’t reason.”
Fager still remembers what he thought when his teacher told the class their assignment involved using colored pencils to color a picture of a cell. “I thought, is this elementary school?”
Such sentiments do not go unheard. In the mornings before class, during lunch and in the after hours, Citizen Science teachers talk ceaselessly of how to improve the class. “We discuss it a lot, because we’re all trying our very best to respond to the students here to find what interests them and what they’re interested in thinking about,” said Purdy. “We spend a lot of time, in our mealtimes and our off times, comparing notes about what worked and what didn’t work. Which discussions worked well in your class? Maybe I’ll give that a try in my class. Which things don’t work as well?”
This refinement has its precedents. The faculty had been brainstorming lesson plans and ideas ever since a four-day “citizen science boot camp” during the summer. “A lot of nights and weekends were spent looking though material, creating lesson plans, finding articles that would be of interest to the students,” says Fisher, who designed his own laboratory experiment.
“One faculty member described it as we’re basically enacting the scientific method every day,” Purdy says. “We’re making observations about what’s happening in class, we’re making hypotheses about what would work better and the next day we’re going to class and trying new things to make them work better. We’re doing our very best to do whatever we can to make this program the best it can be.”
Purdy says the changes she made involved moving her class toward subjects the students could discuss. In Fisher’s class, as well, it was in controversial issues that the students of Fisher’s class took the most interest. In the problem-based learning module, students learned about an issue and then discuss the problem and possible solutions. Between documentaries on subjects like the Spanish flu, the quarantine of Typhoid Mary, and the alleged links between autism and vaccines, students debated over the pros and cons of teaching hospitals and HPV vaccines.
“There was a variety of subject matters in a lot of different disciplines: talking about health policies, a little bit of politics, history,” Kegley said. “So they weren’t just talking about being in the lab, I think they did a good job of teaching citizen science, like the name is.”
Even throughout problem-based learning, however, students grumble. The cafeteria, once clogged at breakfast time, becomes barren, as students no longer wake up for morning class. Rumors spread that the e. coli used in a lab experiment has infected a student, despite the fact, confirmed by Jude, that the strains used by the school are genetically modified to be as harmless as the e. coli naturally present in the human body. Students talk of a cover-up, but the only rumors confirmed are that of a scientifically illiterate student body; above all, a persistent strain of negativity infects the campus.
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It’s the third to the last day of Citizen Science, and Derek Fisher stands in front of an audience of ragged survivors, receiving feedback on the program, wincing with each barbed criticism lobbed at the program. “Again, this is the first year of the program, it’s going to get better,” he repeats, for the audience, silent as if witness to a crucifixion. “We had some momentum coming out of problem-based learning, and I think we lost some of that going into the lab. That’s on me.”
In the crowd, even the students critical of the program are moved to sympathy. “I thought he was a really cool guy. He seemed really engaged. He really tried hard,” says Caratzas.
“I honestly feel sorry for them,” Caratzas says of the teachers. “I feel they were fighting a losing battle from the start. I mean, their opposition was a bunch of angsty, whiny teenagers. No tool that exists is going to change that.”
“The college is definitely trying hard,” says Kegley. “I’m going to give the college credit for trying to put together a good program, especially for this first time. So I don’t think I’m as critical of it as most people are. But at the same time, I think there are things to be improved.”
As for results, some students, at least, believe their time was not wholly wasted. “I think I’m more aware,” Kegley says. “The goal - I think - was to make us more aware of science and how we need to be more aware of what’s going on in our government and in our country. So I think, walking out of it, that I’m more able to ask questions on these issues.”
Many students, however, remain baffled of the program’s purpose to the very end. “Honestly, I don’t get it,” Caratzas says. “I don’t. I mean, I understand the idea behind it, but in practice, I don’t think it was executed well enough that I have experience to be a politically savvy scientist citizen person. I mean, what did we do that was going to affect me? I’m not going to clean up an oil spill. I’m not going to own an aquarium filled with sick fish. I’m not going to catch the Spanish flu. I mean, if I had children, I was already going to get them vaccinated, because I’m not insane. So, what was I supposed to get out of it? I don’t understand.”
As for the teachers, they remain confident that the program will soon prove its worth, provided there are changes. “It’s a fantastic idea,” Purdy says, “some things just have to be changed, and I think everybody knows that. And I think with some changes, it could be a very valuable experience. But this year, it was a bit of a challenge.
“If I were to teach the course again, I think I would approach it a little bit differently,” Purdy adds, “I would spend a long time preparing discussion points and topics that interest a broader range of students; for instance, more humanities topics, science and human rights. There’s all kinds of things that could be integrated that I think could pull in some of the students who might have been lost along the way by what seemed at some points like, quote, rote learning.”
Perhaps a more issues-based Citizen Science would serve the students of Bard better. Bard’s other freshman program, Language and Thinking, offers students with an introduction to critical and creative thinking. Perhaps a program that presents students with scientific controversies and left them to research possible solutions would lead to thought-provoking conversation in the manner of L&T. Perhaps such changes are already in the works.
Language and Thinking, too, was derided in its time. But if the caretakers of Citizen Science can bring improvement each year to the program, no one will remember its rocky start 20 years from now. For now, however, the freshmen class of 2014 will have to make due with being the initial experiment.
“I’d say, not all hope is lost for Citizen Science,” says Fager. “It’s a starting project, but I would like to make it clear that it was not an enjoyable experience.