Science and Society: Integrating Historical Science Materials Into an Undergraduate Biology Course

Abstract

Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2011) stresses the importance of fostering an understanding of the relationship between science and society. We describe a library-based activity that enables students in an undergraduate microbiology class to explore this relationship over the course of centuries, with the library functioning as a laboratory. Students are guided by a worksheet as they explore historical materials such as books, newspapers, letters, government publications, articles, scientific treatises, and artifacts. Working in pairs, students answer questions about the content and reflect on how the ideas in the documents relate to the scientific understanding at the time. Exploring authentic materials in a library setting provides a powerful learning experience. This activity was also successful using digitized documents during the COVID-19 pandemic, when remote teaching was required. Student responses to a post-activity questionnaire indicated that the activity sparked a keen interest in the history of science as well as introspection about the relationship between science and society. This approach can be generalized for different biology courses and education levels. Citation: Copley SD, Babbs S, Losoff B. 2021. Science and society: Integrating historical science materials into an undergraduate biology course. CourseSource. https://doi.org/10.24918/ cs.2021.23 Editor: Sue Merkell, Cornell University Received: 10/22/2020; Accepted: 2/16/2021; Published: 6/11/2021 Copyright: © 2021Copley, Babbs, and Losoff. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Conflict of Interest and Funding Statement: This work was supported by the University of Colorado Boulder via salary support for the authors. None of the authors has a financial, personal, or professional conflict of interest related to this work. Supporting Materials: Supporting Files S1. Science and Society – Examples of historical documents, worksheet questions, and student answers; S2. Science and Society – Worksheets for two visits to Special Collections; S3. Science and Society – Bibliography of historical materials; S4. Science and Society – Student responses to assessment questions; S5. Science and Society – Supplemental reading list; and S6. Science and Society – List of digital resources. *Correspondence to: Shelley D. Copley, Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado Boulder, CB347, Boulder, CO 80309. Email: shelley.copley@ colorado.edu. CourseSource | www.coursesource.org 2021 | Volume 08 1 Lesson