New England Workshop on Science and Social Change
The New England Workshop on Science and Social Change (NewSSC) organizes innovative, interaction-intensive workshops designed to facilitate discussion, teaching innovation, and longer-term collaboration among faculty and graduate students who teach and write about interactions between scientific developments and social change.
Specific objectives of NewSSC
1. Promote Social Contextualization of ScienceTo promote the social contextualization of science in education and other activities beyond the participants' current disciplinary and academic boundaries.
2. Innovative workshop processes To facilitate participants connecting theoretical, pedagogical, practical, political, and personal aspects of the issue at hand in constructive ways.
3. Training and capacity-buildingTo train novice and experienced scholars in process / participation skills valuable in activity-centered teaching, workshops, and collaboration.
4. Repeatable, evolving workshops To provide a workshop model that can be repeated, evolve in response to evaluations, and adapted by participants.
See Background and Rationale for each objective, including how it will be achieved and evaluated.
Spring 2010 Workshop II
"Problem- and case-based learning about biology-in-society"
The topic and the processes of this workshop are designed to attract a diverse group of scientists, science educators, and scholars from the various areas of science and technology studies interested in the life sciences and pedagogical innovation. With an eye to training "interdisciplinarians" the workshop will include graduate students (who can get course credit) as well as more experienced scholars.
Applicants should: a) submit by 15 January 2010 a written account of your innovations (or planned innovations) in research, teaching, and wider outreach in response to the thought-piece below; b) be prepared to lead an activity during the workshop that helps other participants develop knowledge, skills, and interest in these innovations. (The organizer will consult with participants in February or March to help plan such activities.)
Both the products and the processes of the workshop will be documented on the web. The pre-submitted innovations in research, teaching, and wider outreach, supplemented by a record of the accompanying activities at the workshop made by a participant-evaluator, will be assembled for a special edition of a journal.
There is no charge for the workshop*, but applicants are expected to make every effort to secure support for travel to Woods Hole and accommodation. Limited funds are available to support participants who are unable to find others sources of funding, with priority to students and independent scholars. (*A deposit will be required to secure your accommodation.)
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Draft Thought-piece, 8 October '09:"Speaking to skeptics of Problem-based learning"
Problem-based learning (PBL) aims to engage students in self-directed inquiry on real world scenarios, which elicit students' curiosity and require them to find and use appropriate learning resources. PBL takes a variety of forms; working cooperatively in groups is often, but not always, involved.
Proponents of PBL encounter skeptics, who raise a range of concerns: How can instructors be sure to cover the required subject matter when students decide their own focus of inquiry? How can it be shown that PBL students have developed critical thinking and hypothesis-generating skills that scientists need? What evidence is there that shows that the wider social and historical context brought into many PBL scenarios is conducive of subsequent discipline-based studies and scientific inquiry? How can instructors be moved to invest time and take risks to shift from teaching approaches that are familiar and comfortable? How can senior colleagues who do not use PBL understand how to evaluate PBL teachers in promotion reviews?
Imagine then that you are invited to join a panel to counteract skepticism about PBL using materials related to the life and environmental sciences. You might have strategies, forms of evaluation and evidence-keeping, exemplars, and so on to contribute, or experiments that invite input from other panel members before being exposed to PBL skeptics. How the panel presents the materials it assembles remains to be determined when the panel meets at Woods Hole in April.
Location: Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole MA, USA
Dates (to be confirmed) April 22 (Thurs, 9am)-25 (Sun, 2pm), 2010 (arriving Wednesday evening)
Organizer & Lead Facilitator: Peter J. Taylor, University of Massachusetts Boston, Programs in Science, Technology and Values and Critical and Creative Thinking.
(applications details & arrangements)
Sections to follow (or to be added in due course) and associated links
(Much of the working, "in progress" material is developed on a wiki, and only the final products and reports are posted here. Thus some of these links are placeholders for material not yet available.)
Adjustments relative to previous workshops
List of participants, short profiles, and webpages
wiki version of program
Last update 4 August '09