Making Biology Learning Relevant to Students: Integrating People, History, and Context into College Biology Teaching

Abstract

Biology is front page news, so it is important that we teach students to make connections between what they learn in the classroom and what they see in everyday life. As biology researchers, we recognize the negative implications of doing science in a vacuum as we are increasingly asked to communicate effectively with local and national legislators. As biology instructors, however, we may choose to teach biology devoid of social context, believing that students can make these connections on their own. But students model their instructors’ behaviors, and follow their lead. If we integrate social issues into the biology curriculum, we model social responsibility for biology majors, and we demonstrate the need for biological literacy for nonmajors. With an ever expanding biology curriculum, some instructors may wonder how they will find space to bring in social issues, and what biological content may be omitted in the process. By strategically embedding social context into those topics that are traditionally reviewed in multiple biology courses we sacrifice little time and content, and allow students to reflect on that social context more than once. By extending the Biological Concepts Framework (Khodar et al., 2004) to issues of social relevance, we may improve student learning retention, since each concept has multiple points of entry, and therefore, multiple points of interest that can serve as avenues for the retrieval of information. Using real-world problems to thread a number of biological concepts together encourages students to move away from seeing biology as a collection of disparate concepts, subject areas, or chapters from textbooks that are far removed from society. This cues them to make connections to biology during their study of nonbiological disciplines. This approach leads to reinforcement of the social connection and to the development of a habit of mind that students can carry forward as they progress through a 4-yr curriculum and beyond. Recent reports on science education reform promote this pedagogical approach because it prepares students to grapple with the interdisciplinary nature of twenty-first century problems (National Research Council [NRC], 2005). Integrative learning is listed as one of four essential learning outcomes in the “Learning for the New Global Century report.” The “Integrative Learning Project,” initiated by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU 2007) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, provides practical resources for achieving these goals (AACU Ausubel et al., 1978; Lattuca et al., 2004). With this in mind, this feature first demonstrates the important connection between biology and social issues, and then examines how the history of biology can be used to infuse relevance into the biology curriculum.