Columns:: The idea of change: Science education faculty teach their students how to teach topics that challenge the Bible

since 12/15/98

Columns::September 23, 2002

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Campus News

The idea of change
Science education faculty teach their students how to teach topics that challenge the Bible

By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu

David Jackson and Norman Thomson are members of the science education faculty in UGA’s College of Education. Jackson’s

David Jackson

field is middle school earth science and Thomson’s is secondary school biology, both areas which may be considered a challenge to literal interpretations of the Bible. They spoke with Columns about how they teach their students to, in turn, teach these topics.

Columns: Is evolution controversial in the classes that you teach?

Jackson: People tend to think of this as a high school biology problem, and in general they’re right—but it comes up in middle school earth science as well. And many students in my middle school teacher education courses don’t have a very good science background in general—a few of them have barely heard of evolution. But in eighth-grade earth science it’s right there in the book: the Earth is four and a half billion years old, and all kinds of species were around for hundreds of millions of years before humans.

Columns: So how do you teach your students to deal with this?

Norman Thomson

Thomson: I think we deal with it in different ways. For middle school earth science, there is this issue of how much science they’ve had. In biology, on the other hand, there’s some self-selection before they come to us. If they can’t deal with the issue they don’t major in biology and don’t consider teaching. Although we do get some people in our program who are creationists, for the most part they’re theistic creationists rather than absolute creationists, and they deal with it at a different level.
David does painstaking curriculum development around some of these issues, and we have readings about them. And we have guidelines set by the National Academy of Sciences that give provisions for the teaching of evolution and the nature of science.

Columns: Guidelines for what a student in high school biology or middle school earth science should learn?

Thomson: And also how to teach it. Also, the court cases are reviewed in the guidelines, so the students will learn what is legal around the country. There are also statements about avoiding religion in public schools, signed by many different religious groups.
In science, we make use of models to conceptualize. We’re not really judging whether the models are right or wrong, but how useful they are. When Darwin proposed his model—and Wallace, who came up with a concurrent model—their supporters saw how the model would be useful. Without these frameworks, fossils make no sense—especially extinct fossils. Why dinosaurs? Why is there this continuity of humans and primates? Evolutionary theory allows us to go looking for more fossils. Or to predict where oil may be found.

Jackson: Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist who died recently and whom both of us value a lot, made a powerful distinction about this point. He said people are asking the wrong question, asking whether evolution is a fact or a theory. He said it’s both, because we mean two different things by evolution. One is what he calls the fact of evolution—this pattern over time that seems to have happened. The theory of evolution looks at the fact of evolution and asks how it happened.
Darwin had a coherent answer to the question of how it happened, whereas scientists before Darwin did not. But the idea that it did happen—somehow—was around before Darwin, because they had found the fossils. And that so-called fact of evolution, as Gould puts it, is an issue that comes up in middle-school earth science and life science, even though the specific topic of Darwinian theory is often not there.
Eighth-grade earth science is going to present the idea—without thinking it’s a terribly strange or extraordinary idea—that the Earth is four and a half billion years old, not a few thousand, and that the geological structures we see clearly took millions of years to develop. It’s going to present naturalistic rather than theistic theories of the origin of the solar system. It’s going to talk about these ideas as if they’re not controversial, because among scientists they’re not.

Columns: Do you have students who find that difficult?

Jackson: Sure. Typically students will not raise their hand in class and be confrontational about it, but a lot of my students have a real problem with this conflict in their mind. They’ll tell me—if they’re being honest, and most of them are—“I still don’t find the story of evolution plausible at a gut level.” But they’re at least thinking about it.

Columns: It’s hard to teach something you don’t believe.

Jackson: Yes, but it would be arrogant to think that a 15-week course could change their beliefs of 20 years. It’s just not reasonable to think that’s what’s going to happen. What I think is reasonable as a goal for me is to try to get them to think seriously about the relationship between their personal beliefs and their professional actions. If your personal doubts about evolution are going to lead you not to teach it, or to de-emphasize it, or to present religious ideas on the same plane as scientific ones in a science class then, although that’s your business, it’s also a professional problem.

Thomson: And it’s unconstitutional. I’ve had students who were fundamentalists and creationists, and like David I think it would be arrogant for me to try to change them—that’s not the function of education. An education should open their minds to other ways of thinking about problems, whether or not they believe it. They have to come to this themselves. Most of our students find a place for theism and for Darwinism.

Columns: So basically you recommend that your students, when they get out in the classroom, teach whatever the curriculum is.

Thomson: Yes. The national standards, the Georgia state science teachers’ standards—that’s what they need to teach. It’s not as if these teachers are out there alone in their communities, although they’re very aware of what the community feels.

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Columns is produced by the UGA News Service, a unit of UGA Public Affairs.
Beth Roberts: Columns editor, Juliett Dinkins: Columns managing editor,
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Questions or comments should be directed to columns@uga.edu