Teaching Critical thinking: Evolution in the Classroom
Until August 1999, science teachers in Augusta, Kan., a middle-of-the-road
community 10 miles east of Wichita, had a clear-cut mandate when it came to
the teaching of evolution: They followed the state curriculum.
"The concept of evolution was given as an objective in science classrooms.
The assumption was made that it would be taught because students needed to
be exposed to it before moving on to higher education," says Ann Garrett,
BS'74, MSEd'77. At that time, Garrett was an assistant superintendent in the
Augusta Public Schools, and her duties included curriculum planning and
implementation.
But on Aug. 11, 1999, the Kansas State Board of Education muddied the waters
for science teachers in Augusta and around the state, rekindling an
emotional nationwide debate on the place of evolution in the classroom. It
voted, by a 6-4 margin, to eliminate from the state curriculum and from
state-wide assessments all mention of the evolution of the species, the Big
Bang theory, and geologic time. The law itself would not prevent teachers
from teaching evolution, but it would give local school boards the authority
to ban the subject.
In Augusta, science teachers worried about how the law would translate to
the classroom. Would they have to stop teaching evolution? On the advice of
attorneys, the Augusta administration decided to keep the current curriculum
and sit tight until after the November election, in which half of the state
board's 10 seats were up for grabs.
"We decided we wouldn't have a reaction to the state board's decision not
to be arbitrary and capricious, but just to be careful," says Garrett, now
assistant superintendent for human resources in Derby, Kan. "Our school
board and our teachers accepted the fact that we were taking a wait-and-see
position."
The Kansas decision is emblematic of a growing movement in the United States
that essentially would do away with the separation between church and state.
The Ten Commandments are appearing in schools and courthouses around the
country; calls for prayer at school athletic events are becoming more
common; and the fight to abolish evolution from school curricula, or at
least to give equal time to creationism, has been gaining strength.
It would be difficult to find any issue that cuts more to the heart of the
American psyche than one involving personal beliefs and freedom of
expression, particularly when it comes to the teaching of children.
"The whole idea of religious liberty assumes that people should be protected
in their beliefs, even if society at large thinks they are erroneous," says
IUB law professor Daniel Conkle, an expert on religion and the law. At the
same time, the Constitution precludes the government from favoring religious
points of view, creating, Conkle says, a fundamental tension between two
constitutional principles.
THE TWO SIDES OF THE DEBATE
The evolution-creation debate plays out this tension on a very open stage:
the public schools. On one side of the debate are fundamentalist
creationists, who believe literally in the sequence of creation as described
in the Book of Genesis. In recent years, the movement has pushed to provide
scientific explanations for the literal creation of the universe, spawning
such terms as "creation science" and "intelligent design."
On the other side of the debate are evolutionists, who list volumes of
evidence in physics, geochemistry, astronomy, geology, biology, and other
scientific disciplines to support the theory first published by Charles
Darwin in 1859. (Darwin himself apparently saw no conflict between evolution
and religion, having earned a degree in divinity at Cambridge University.)
"In science, there is no controversy about evolution," says IUB Professor of
Biology Craig Nelson, an evolutionary ecologist and co-author of The
Creation Controversy and the Science Classroom, a book for teachers from
kindergarten through college published in April by the National Science
Teachers Association. "The evidence for evolution makes it overwhelmingly
probable. It is as good as, or better than, other major theories. It is a
core, incredibly strong piece of science."
The NSTA, the National Academy of Sciences, and a host of other scientific
organizations not to mention numerous major religious denominations
support the theory of evolution. But where do schools and teachers stand in
the midst of this controversy? Their position, as history shows, depends
largely on the law.
A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
In the wake of World War I, a revival of fundamentalist religious beliefs
led to a campaign to erase evolution from the education system.
By the mid-1920s, several Southern states had passed laws prohibiting the
teaching of evolution. One such law, in Tennessee, became the subject of the
infamous Scopes "monkey trial," in which science teacher John Scopes, backed
by the American Civil Liberties Union, challenged the constitutionality of
the law. Scopes was convicted, and although the conviction was later
overturned, the highly publicized trial had brought the evolution debate to
the public's attention.
Over the years, some state laws banning the teaching of evolution remained
on the books until the matter came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968.
The court ruled unconstitutional an Arkansas law prohibiting the teaching of
evolution. In response, some states passed laws mandating "balanced
treatment" of evolution and creationism, increasingly referred to as
"creation science."
The Supreme Court took on that issue, too, invalidating a Louisiana
balanced-treatment law in 1987. Since the Louisiana decision, no further
cases involving the teaching of evolution have come before the Supreme
Court, but the debate crops up frequently in the lower courts.
In the last five years alone, school boards and state legislatures in more
than 10 states, from Arizona to Ohio, have considered such measures as the
removal of evolution from state science standards, the firing of teachers
who have taught evolution as "fact," and the placing of disclaimers on books
dealing with evolution.
THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION
"The reason these controversies keep coming back is that public-opinion
surveys indicate a substantial portion of the American population more
than one-third believes in literal Genesis creation," says law professor
Conkle.
More surprising may be the fact that many future science teachers apparently
do not subscribe to the theory of evolution. A survey of 218 science
education students, published in the May/June 1997 issue of Reports of the
National Center for Science Education, found that only 43 percent of
preservice elementary teachers and 79 percent of preservice secondary
teachers believed in Darwin's theory of evolution. Eighty-eight percent of
students preparing to teach science in elementary school and 63 percent of
students preparing to teach secondary school science agreed that other
views, including "the divine origin of life through special creation,"
should be taught alongside the theory of evolution. That teachers might be
reluctant to broach such a volatile subject in the classroom is not
surprising.
"The truth is that evolution simply is often not taught because the
principal or department head tells the teachers not to teach it, or because
the teacher is afraid to," says Hans Andersen, EdD'66, a professor of
education at IU Bloomington and co-author of the survey. "There is a kind of
avoidance syndrome."
Andersen, who can give numerous examples of former students who have had to
confront the evolution/ creationism controversy in the classroom, says the
School of Education prepares student teachers to deal with the issue the
same way they do any other problem: by teaching them how to think about
teaching science.
TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING
Teaching teachers and students to think critically is key to the approaches
taken by two IU professors with a keen interest in the teaching of
evolution.
In a seminar called "Issues in Human Origins: Creation and Evolution,"
Robert Meier, Chancellors' Professor Emeritus of anthropology at IUB,
challenged his students to examine the two opposing views from a scientific
standpoint. One of the most fundamental differences between creationists and
evolutionists, he explains, is their very approach to scientific discovery.
"Creation science has to conform to the biblical truth," says Meier.
"Hard-liners hold to biblical literalism. It is a belief, and there are no
alternatives. Scientific inquiry, on the other hand, does not begin by
assuming that a law is there and trying to prove it. The foundation of
science is questioning and skepticism."
Meier accordingly devoted several class sessions to the concept of
"ignorance-based education," which he describes as "a learning strategy that
emphasizes uncertainty, critical questioning, and the limits of knowledge."
Meier's own conclusion is this: "If you disallow organic evolution, you may
as well do away with astronomy, physics, and biology. All of the sciences
would crumble if it were to go."
In The Creation Controversy and the Science Classroom, biology profes- sor
Nelson lays out a blueprint for teachers broaching subjects related to
evolution. Nelson's goal is to help educators produce a scientifically
literate society that understands major theories such as evolution.
For his impact on undergraduates, his scholarly approach to teaching, and
his contributions to undergraduate teaching, the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of
Education honored Nelson in November as U.S. Professor of the Year. The only
national award recognizing excellence in teaching, the Carnegie/CASE award
is presented each year to four of the country's most outstanding
undergraduate instructors, chosen from nearly 500 nominees. Nelson was the
winner from a research and doctoral university.
"The interesting paradox is that we live in an era in which most people's
jobs depend to an ever increasing extent on the application of modern
theories of science. Yet the public either does not understand those
theories or rejects them explicitly," he says.
Nelson examines traditional approaches to content, curricula, and teaching
methods and suggests more effective alternatives. Traditional methods, for
instance, have relied heavily upon passive learning; but active learning is
particularly important when students confront controversial topics such as
evolution.
"Science teachers teach conclusions more than processes," Nelson says. "The
process in all higher-order critical thinking is comparison. The first thing
teachers need to do is to get students to understand how scientists decide
which answers are better."
Encouraging students to evaluate the consequences of various viewpoints,
rather than to simply debate the strength of various pieces of evidence,
Nelson believes, can "help students attain a richer understanding of the
alternatives and of the benefits and consequences of accepting and rejecting
them."
Creationists, for instance, believe they have nothing to lose by rejecting
the theory of evolution, but everything to lose their belief system and
even their souls if they accept it. Evolutionists, on the other hand, see
"an immense payoff in the understanding of scientific phenomena," Nelson
says.
Another strategy teachers can use is to help students understand
intermediate positions between what he calls the "false dichotomies" of
extreme views. For example, the creation-evolution argument is often
portrayed as religious creationism vs. atheistic science, when, in fact,
there are many degrees of acceptance of evolution.
In his book, Nelson provides answers, from creationist and evolutionist
standpoints, to 21 common questions about the origin of consciousness,
biological evolution, the origin of life, physical development, and the
origin of the universe. But the Professor of the Year stresses that
scientists don't know all the answers. "How do we get consciousness out of a
molecular reaction? How do we get a genetic code working? We are likely to
make more progress on the latter question than on how the universe got
started," Nelson says. "But simply because no one knows how it got started
doesn't mean it's miraculous."
EPILOGUE: In the Kansas Republican primary, voters rejected three
conservative candidates two incumbents and a newcomer who were running
for the Kansas State Board of Education. The three supported science
standards, adopted just a year before, that removed all mention of
evolution.
The three moderate Republicans who won the primary, along with two
Democrats, took the board's five open seats in the November election. If
their pre-election promises hold true, one of the board's first orders of
business in January will be to drop the new standards and start over, this
time with evolution once again a required subject.
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---- Anne Kibbler, MA'88, is a freelance writer and editor in Bloomington.Last updated: Wednesday, 10-Jan-2001 13:18:28 EST http://www.indiana.edu/~alumni/magtalk/jan-feb01/evolution.html Privacy Policy; Comments: iuaaweb@indiana.edu, iualumni@indiana.edu Copyright 1997-2000, the Trustees of Indiana University
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