Announcing our workshop on origins issues for high school teachers and clergy

Details are below, with lots more on the workshop website. Please forward this information to anyone you know who might want to attend.

Thank you,

Ted

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Evolution, Religion, and Education: A Workshop for Science Teachers

Recent efforts to introduce "intelligent design" in biology classes in the Dover school district have called attention to the relationship between science, religion, and public education. This workshop is designed to help high school science teachers, administrators, and clergy understand more fully the complex issues related to this controversy. Course faculty and participants will discuss questions such as these: What are the historical and cultural roots of this controversy? What points of view do Americans hold concerning the relationship between science and religion? What should science teachers know about this controversy, in order to be better teachers of their subjects and to understand their students better?

The workshop was first offered in June 2004, and with support from the John Templeton Foundation (www.templeton.org) we are pleased to offer it again this summer, during the week of June 27-July 1, 2005. A full syllabus and other details, including comments from participants in last year's workshop, are available at http://www.messiah.edu/godandscience/workshop.html.

The workshop is designed:
* To acquaint teachers with important aspects of the history of the controversy about evolution, creationism, and public education, including the Scopes trial, the "intelligent design" movement, and events in the Dover school district
* To help teachers meet the expectations of the new Science & Technology standards, especially those related to the Nature of Science, Inquiry and Design, Biological Sciences, and Physical Science, Chemistry, and Physics
* To help teachers meet the expectations of the new Environment & Ecology standards, especially those related to Ecosystems and their Interactions
* To provide teachers with a basic understanding of biological evolution and the "big bang" theory
* To help teachers understand the diversity of religious views that Americans hold concerning evolution and the "big bang" theory

The workshop director, Dr. Ted Davis, is Distinguished Professor of the History of Science at Messiah College. Known internationally for his scholarship on the history of religion and science, his recent works include a complete edition of The Works of Robert Boyle, 14 vols. (London, 1999-2000), the entry on "Creationism" in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. John L. Heilbron (Oxford University Press, 2003), and an article on "Science and Religious Fundamentalism in the 1920s" in the latest issue of American Scientist (May-June 2005). With support from the National Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation, he is currently writing a book about the religious beliefs of prominent American scientists from the period of the Scopes trial. A former high school science and mathematics teacher who now teaches the history of science, Dr. Davis is very interested in both secondary science teaching.

Information on all course faculty is found at the course website.
Received on Thu Mar 24 10:38:44 2005