WHY CITIZEN SCIENCE?
Bard’s push towards math and science
by J.p. Lawrence
Mark Halsey has a corner office at Bard College’s new science center. As the associate dean of the college, the office is a little reward for his work years toiling in support of Bard’s hard sciences. The associate professor of mathematics has worked at Bard since 1989, longer than many of his students have been alive, and during his tenure, he has seen the math and science program grow exponentially.
“We’ve come a long way,” Halsey says. “We’ve about doubled the percentage of math and science majors now-- and I think that’s even increased. But one thing that I think that has been left unresolved, and I think the president feels very strongly about this, is science general education.”
In order to fill this gap, Bard College is introducing a new program, the Citizen Science Program, in January of 2011. Modeled after Bard’s other freshman session, the Language and Thinking Program, the program will take place over the course of two and a half weeks, with students rotating through laboratory, computer modeling, and classroom-based sessions.
Classes, which will consists of two sessions a day, will be held all over campus, with the lab work occurring in the Center for Science and Computation. Each section will consist of approximately 20 students and a faculty mentor that will stay with them the entire arc of the course, which will culminate in a final group project.
The course will focus on infectious diseases-- both in the biological aspects of how they grow and spread and in the policy aspects of modeling and controlling the spread of disease.
The goal of the course, says program director Brooke Jude, is to teach all students, even the artsy ones, to be comfortable with scientific terms and thinking.
“Sometimes, individuals will have the tendency to turn their ears off when they hear something even remotely related to science, because maybe they’re not interested or maybe they’ve had a bad experience somewhere along the line,” Jude says, “so what I’m hoping to do is break down that barrier.”
Jude has selected faculty from the fields of medicine, physics and chemistry, from the National Institute of Health, from the Navy’s bio-warfare division, and from the Society of Microbiology. Each faculty member will have the discretion to modify their two prescribed lab assignments to fit their own expertise.
Because the program is ungraded, tuned-out students are a definite possibility, but Jude hopes that the faculty will be engaging enough to encourage participation. “There are going to be individuals who may not participate,” Jude says, adding that she is looking into the possibilities of academic sanctions. “We’re hoping that just by being in the room, you learn enough to break that barrier.”
While many freshmen grumble at the addition of a second L&T, Jude says the program needs to take place during the freshman year. If students wait find out they enjoy science during their sophomore year, she reasons, it would already be too late to ever moderate into it.
“My fears are the same as everyone else’s,” Jude says. “It’s a change in the curriculum; it’s a change in the schedule; and I think it takes time for everyone to get used to that and get used to what is perceived as a change in the normal. But I think that we’re going about this the right way, and we’re gonna do our best to make this a meaningful experience.”
“We’ve done this type of thing before,” says Halsey, who served in an advisory role during the planning process for Citizen-Science. “We put L&T in place. We run a first year seminar program. We started high schools in New York City. This isn’t our first rodeo, and I think we can do this.”
For Halsey, sitting in the corner office of the science center he helped create, the program is just another step in the revival of left-minded thinking at the traditionally left-leaning Bard College.
Since a science initiative in the late 90’s, Bard College now has more math and science teachers, a new computer sciences department, and a new 70,000-square-foot Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation.
“It’s more of a long-term process in the thinking that went into the program,” he says. “I think how I would describe it is this is how the idea crystallized, into something that’s innovative and groundbreaking.
“This building is going to be the centerpiece for the pedagogy here. Most of the lab work will be done here,” Halsey says. “My reaction is what people on the outside have been telling us: finally, something interesting is happening.”