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For 20 years, he taught “Introductory Astronomy” at Boulder as a way to provide the foundation for how college students outside of science understand the field. That matters because, whatever they do for a living, graduates’ science literacy will inform the way they vote, parent, and make a host of lifestyle choices — affecting the quality of not only their own lives but of others in their orbit.
Students feel pressured to spend their energy on majors, career preparation, and getting to graduation efficiently. But their wariness about gen ed isn’t often helped by the way such courses are framed, Duncan says.
Professors teaching gen-ed courses don’t always take a step back to ask why their institution offers such courses, Duncan says. He’s come to see that the courses are not really about the content, or in his case that “black holes are really important for everyone to know about.” Rather, colleges “want students who are not science majors to see how science works. To perhaps even learn to think scientifically. And to distinguish between things that have facts to support them and things that are just opinion.”
When professors understand these broader goals, he says, it changes their whole approach. “The easiest mistake for faculty to make is to look at students and think, well, those are kind of like me 30 years ago,” he says. “No, they’re not like you. You became a professor.”
Professors can explain what they, themselves, find so compelling in their own discipline — which may not be obvious to students in other majors.
It helps to make clear to students why a gen-ed course is relevant to them, however broadly that’s defined. When Duncan looks back at his own education, the most memorable courses he took were in science and poetry. “My life has been enriched by poetry,” he says. “I don’t think people should be shy about communicating what they see as the value.”
As Duncan has described to other professors in workshops, his approach in the classroom would often start with an effort to grab students’ attention on the first day of the course. He would open by acknowledging that many students were there to meet a requirement and didn’t consider math to be their strong suit. But then he would remind his students that many of them probably found space inherently interesting as children — and he’d assure them that there is no such thing as a “math person” and they’d be able to do the limited math needed to succeed in the course if they practiced. One of his favorite techniques: leaning on humor to help put students at ease. He’d lead off class with an image of a mad scientist working on a brain to ask: How many of you are taking this class just because you love science?
Then, Duncan would give a quick overview of what students would learn: both the questions about space they’d be able to answer, and the transferable critical-thinking skills they would develop.
The pitch wasn’t just about “Introductory Astronomy.” Duncan also felt compelled to make the case for science itself, because it could help students answer questions that would affect their lives: What medicine should they take? Would there still be enough snow in Colorado to ski as they grew older? Which sources of energy are the best to use? And did they want to leave matters of their health and the environment to scientists? To politicians? Didn’t they want some say in their own future?
In his course, Duncan would give his students examples that extended beyond astronomy. For example, even before the pandemic put vaccines front and center, Duncan talked about their importance, showing a picture of a polio ward and mentioning that Roald Dahl lost a young child to measles. Stories, he says, stay with them longer than statistics.
About 20 years ago, Duncan added material on conspiracy theories and misinformation and began helping students learn how to find valid information online. He designed assignments to help students become savvier about evaluating the quality of information about science, like comparing news coverage of climate change to what scientists actually said.
These efforts meant he had less time to get into as much content about astronomy. But Duncan saw as more important the broader goal of helping students understand how science works.
To gauge whether his approach was successful, Duncan included a bonus question on his final exam asking students whether the course had affected their view of science, and if so, how? Students only rarely said “no,” Duncan says.
Duncan analyzed the responses students wrote in the fall of 2019 and found that about a third of students said they were less likely to be fooled by bad science or pseudoscience. Nearly as many said they had improved their critical thinking or scientific thinking skills.
One student wrote, “This class has given me a cosmic perspective of our size in the universe, but also practice [in the] skills of thinking critically of claims and assertions needed to make good decisions.”
This, indeed, is part of the case for having general-education requirements. When students take a mix of courses, they are exposed to thinking and learning through different disciplinary lenses. “We want them to leave with the awareness,” she says, that “they have many ways to learn, they have many ways to think. And all of those ways that they’ve experienced in college are going to make them more effective thinkers and learners.”
Teaching students to think and learn, she adds, is the best way that professors can prepare them for a future in which they’ll have to think and learn about things none of us can predict.
