This article is based on the opening plenary address at the tenth annual SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities) Summer Institute delivered by SENCER's co-founder, the article's author. SENCER, supported by the National Science Foundation, works to improve learning and strengthen civic engagement in undergraduate courses that teach through complex, capacious, unsolved civic issues to canonical knowledge and practice in STEM and other fields. Part one appears in this issue.

Introduction

At the SENCER Summer Institutes, I always acknowledge the sacrifices that our participants are making to take time away from their families to think about STEM education and civic engagement. Then I reference my own family and give an update on my twin daughters, Caroline and Helena, who are now fifteen years old.

Last summer, I reported some good news to those gathered for our Institute at the University of North Carolina in Asheville (UNCA). Our daughters had moved from thinking that science is "just definitions, Daddy," to something much more encouraging, something closer to "science as practice."

This happened after Helena got a chance, as an eighth grader, to "teach" basic geology to fourth graders. Both girls finally began doing some rudimentary labs, and they started getting better at math. Much of the shift in their thinking can be credited to good teaching, made possible in Caroline's case after we got her moved from a class whose instructor she had described as having been "deceased."

Things were going so well, indeed, that our girls were among a handful of ninth graders invited to take the junior-level honors chemistry course. I found this prospect terrifying. They, however, were excited. As I write this they are about to finish their freshman year in high school. They've studied really hard with a terrific teacher, done countless Moodle-based homework assignment and exercises, and completed many labs. Miraculously, they still seem to love chemistry, even if they wish their grades were a tad higher.

Our daughters were only eight months old the last time our family visited Asheville. (That was a trip!) We were there to participate in the Asheville Institute on General Education, a remarkable program then co-sponsored by UNCA and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU). I was working at AACU at the time establishing the Program for Health and Higher Education (PHHE).

The book we eventually wrote on PHHE, Learning for Our Common Health, summarized our program as follows:

[PHHE] centers on a complex social problem, framed within a simple, powerful approach. We ask: if higher education would place a strong, academic focus on a problem — such as HIV and health — would the end result advance our greater expectations for student learning, academic rigor, faculty authority, collaborative leadership, social responsibility and civic engagement? Moreover, would such a strong academic focus lead to solutions to the complex problem itself? In a word, we think the answer is yes (Burns, 1999).

That was the notion we were working on fifteen years ago. At the time the idea seemed a bit odd to most people. What did HIV have to do with liberal education? In the mid-1990s, a few scholars saw the enormous potential in "materializing" otherwise abstract notions like liberal education, critical thinking, interdisciplinarity, and civic engagement in real world problems requiring urgent attention. Now, nearly everybody talks about making learning, especially STEM learning, real and relevant. The first part of this two-part article will attempt to consider this shift in thinking and to suggest where we may be going. I will introduce newcomers to the SENCER approach and suggest how SENCER helps occupy a critical intersection between science education and practice and democratic education and practice. In part two, to be published in the next issue of SECEIJ, I will summarize of some of the lessons we have learned from this work and I will outline four promises that those embarking on SENCER-inflected STEM education reform ought to consider making to one another.

Origins

Back in the late 1980s, I was an administrator at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. I had responsibilities for student health among other things. Our health educator, Peggy Clark, who lived in New York City, brought us early and alarming news. She told us about something called GRID (Gay-Related Immune Disorder) that was taking the lives of young people in the city. We now call GRID HIV disease.

The more we learned about AIDS¹ in the 1980s the more alarmed we became, especially because we knew so much else about patterns in our students' private lives. Students' sexual activities (and their alcohol and drug use) exposed them to particular risks if, in the course of these activities, the intracellular parasite of HIV was also present.

AIDS was complicated. June Osborn, the first chair of the president's commission on AIDS, famously called HIV disease "multidisciplinary trouble." (Osborn 1986) As the set of issues she identified began to emerge in spiraling and stunning ferocity, some of us believed that a whole generation of young people would die. Many did. (That many did not is a topic that also deserves investigation.)

We needed to act. Cooperative agreements from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supported a national higher education response.² The agreements focused on work in policy development, teacher education, and prevention education. As the principal investigator and director of one of the first five national agreements, I looked over our efforts at Rutgers and other places. I saw some innovative co-curricular programs, some impressive bench research, and modest attention in pre-professional training targeted on what many were calling a "modern day plague." What I didn't see at Rutgers was anything about AIDS in the curriculum. You could take introductory biology and never hear about AIDS. You could major in criminal justice and not study the relationship of prisons to the AIDS epidemic. You could prepare to become a teacher and not receive instruction of how to manage a classroom situation in which child living with AIDS was enrolled. As far as AIDS was concerned, our college classrooms were, at least at first, zones of silence.

I wanted to change that, not because I cared so much about learning or science education, but because I genuinely wanted to save lives. I thought that if students had a chance to seriously and deeply learn about HIV, they would be inclined to act to reduce risk and harm.

We changed the condition of curricular silence by developing a course called "HIV, Biology, and Society," created and taught by talented educator Monica Devanas. Interest in the course was overwhelming; if I recall correctly, more than 600 students tried to enroll at its first offering. We finally admitted 450 or so. The students, mostly non-STEM majors who had put off taking required courses in science as long as possible, loved the course. We also created a whole set of what we called "wrap-around" courses, short courses in fields of student interest through which they could enter the foreign territory of biology (these ranged from journalism to Africana studies, poetry to criminal justice and teacher education). Thousands of students have been enrolled in the years since.³

I provided the money to get the course started and to have it professionally assessed and evaluated because I had hoped for particular results. The results I hoped for turned out not to be the results we achieved. Behavior didn't change much. We now know why — the subject of another article, but the short explanation is: you rarely get what you don't teach. Learning really did change, though. Indeed, the gains in learning were significant.

Why? Because of a few things, I think: one, the students were interested, they had a stake in what they were learning, and they had a need to know. That stake made the learning "sticky" to use Malcolm Gladwell's notion (Greenberg 1994; Gladwell 2000). The knowledge stayed around a while longer than a minute after the test. Second, the story of HIV — its emerging narrative — was one that gave students a framework, an intellectual skeleton, you could say, on which to "hang," organize, or fix the elements of biology, virology, immunology, epidemiology, and sociology they were learning as they confronted the trans-disciplinary phenomenon of HIV. Not only was HIV multidisciplinary trouble of the sort that they would see develop as a complex, capacious, civic question with political and personal consequences, but it was a story whose ending no one, neither teacher nor student, knew. We did know, however, that it was something we needed to follow, both personally and as citizens in a democracy.

Regarding their relationship to the science we hoped they would learn, the students in the AIDS course were what cognitive theorists call "novice" learners. Novices, that is, as opposed to so-called "expert" learners. Novices process traditional learning differently from experts (Bransford, et al. 2000; Etkina and Mestre, 2008).

But when novices are called upon to do real investigations of things that matter, they begin to function more like expert researchers do. By pursuing research interests and performing as scholars, novices are following a story, question, or interest and then going where the investigation leads them. They are not trapped in abstractions like those that temporarily ensnare students in a traditional introductory course. (I am thinking of the courses that, from the students' perspective may look like high hurdle races, but turn out to be academic bridges to nowhere.) The students in our AIDS course didn't have to ask "what do I need to learn this science for?" The course, itself, answered that question.

We saw that this way of teaching science worked not just at Rutgers, but nationally as well, after we established the CDC-sponsored Program for Health and Higher Education at AACU. It was through PHHE that I met Karen Oates, who had created one of the first HIV courses in the nation that was anything like what we had done at Rutgers. Karen later became my co–principal investigator in founding SENCER.

From HIV Prevention to STEM Education Reform

Karen and I discovered that we had an approach to science education that worked because it focused on matters that were real, relevant, interesting, and indeed vital to personal and civic welfare. The approach embodied what was known about how students learn. And it helped academic leaders achieve two elusive goals: improving the science part of the general education curriculum and assisting institutions in meeting their missions to educate students for civic engagement.

We were invited to make a proposal to a new program — the CCLI (Course Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement) "national dissemination" track — that the National Science Foundation was launching. We were also challenged by a National Science Foundation (NSF) program officer, Myles Boylan, to show that what seemed to be working on a matter of public health centered in bio-science — HIV — could work with other STEM-connected matters of civic consequence. With the help of a generous planning grant from NSF, we were able to respond to the challenge of diversifying our portfolio of both civic challenges and disciplinary applications.

SENCER has been made possible by the support that NSF entrusted to us. We see our role as working in support of NSF's mission. That mission embraces not just the advancement of scientific knowledge for the public good, but also advancement of the public's understanding of science for the good of our economy, our welfare and our democracy.

Why do these investments by NSF and others matter? Because at no time have there been more opportunities for more college students to pursue study in the STEM fields, and yet few students are making that choice. At the same time, our capacity for understanding and conscientiously dealing with issues we face as a nation requires the skills and habits of mind developed in STEM study. Beyond that, many of the most vexing problems we face are themselves products of advances in science, engineering, mathematics and technology. (For example, we have a stem cell debate because we have identified what a stem cell is; we wrestle with cyber privacy issues because we have invented cyberspace).

A lot is at stake: We now have institutions too big to fail, systems too complex to fail, and yet we experience failure with what feels like increasing frequency.⁴There seems to be more to do every day to meet the challenges that complexity and modernity have thrust before us, let alone the legacies of problems that we have inherited from the pre-modern era.

SENCER was created to give faculty, academic leaders, and students opportunities and resources to develop, teach, assess, and improve courses that teach through such complex, capacious civic questions to the basic science, or other canonical learning (be it in physics or economics or English literature) desired. In so doing, we hope to improve learning and stimulate civic engagement, in its broad variety of manifestations.

"The world is not parsed out like a college curriculum."⁵The best SENCER topics are so complex and so embody the idea of multidisciplinary trouble that they require the intellectual power of a variety of disciplines for their full elucidation and exploration. They break traditional boundaries and make the case for interdisciplinary inquiry, global learning, critical thinking, collaboration, and continuous attention and exertion. Even though the courses are often taught as introductory excursions in learning or capstone projects, as Robert Full has observed, they look like advanced research because their intellectual challenges resemble those being tackled by high-end research (see, for example, Full 2007) . They are essentially interdisciplinary, so they are more like the world itself than a typical undergraduate curriculum. In the words of one of our leadership fellows, this is "what a valid liberal arts education should include." (McKenzie, 2008)

While SENCER is a name we invented that is not as old as my daughters, it is not exactly a new idea, whatever a new idea might be in the twenty-first century!⁶ The SENCER approach has deep intellectual roots: in Aristotle, the enlightenment thinkers, the land grant and extension movements, the pragmatism of William James, in constructivist approaches to learning and knowledge production, and in the work of modern cognitive scientists and learning specialists like John Bransford and Rick Duschl, both of whom have advised the SENCER program.

NSF support and the ingenuity and enterprise of faculty and students around the country and in other parts of the world⁷ have enabled us to develop model courses and programs on the broadest range of topics in virtually all STEM disciplines. These have changed the story of undergraduate STEM education from the "definitions Daddy" content-laden and easily forgotten introductory courses that, in the words of one anonymous observer from one of our programs, encourage students to "dress up for parties they don't intend to attend and probably will never be invited to." SENCER courses, in their best manifestations, provide students and teachers to authentic experiences in discovering what science and mathematics have to tell us about what we need to do about some of the biggest issues that we will face, as individuals and members of a democratic society.⁸ They also help students learn the limitations of science⁹ and explore the connections between science, public policy, and personal and civic responsibilities.

Science Education and Democratic Education

Good science education supports good democratic education and vice versa. The relationships between scientific and democratic practices is too large a topic for this article,¹⁰ so let us consider just one common element between the approach to STEM education we take in SENCER and a cardinal element in democratic practice.

"Interest" is a driving force in the SENCER ideals, as central to our pedagogy as it is to democratic process. How does interest work in learning? Here is William James (1899), the great American pragmatist philosopher and a founder of what we call psychology, on interest, from a book called Talks to Teachers published near the end of the nineteenth century:

Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were, together; the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing. . . . 

The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing (94). . . . 

From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these. . . . Next, step by step, connect with these first objects and experiences the later objects and ideas which you wish to instill. Associate the new with the old in some natural and telling way, so that the interest, being shed along from point to point, finally suffuses the entire system of objects of thought (96).

James (1899) concludes:

The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections (96).

When he writes "the most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes," James is offering us a glimpse of not just of how to teach and how to reach students or one another, but of how to make a fundamentally democratic claim. What James is describing recalls Locke and Jefferson in reminding us of our inalienable rights — rights that democracies secure to individuals and that, when exercised in concert with other citizens, constitute what de Tocqueville observed and what political scientists have identified as "pluralism," itself something that begins in association. ¹¹

In democracy and in learning it is an act of generosity — and a savvy political strategy, as well — to genuinely engage a person's self interest, as s/he perceives it, and then to move to an exploration and consideration of other common or group interests. After all, democracy is a scheme that respects a person's interests and at the same time provides a system for permitting those interests to influence the work of democratic institutions.

The practices of scholarship — especially the research practices we employ in science and in scientifically inflected inquiry — correspond to many of the key elements in what I will call democratic practice.¹² Bringing these practices together in the study of matters of civic consequence in college courses, civic engagement activities, and/or authentic research constitutes a mutually reinforcing gesture and strategy.

On the fiftieth anniversary of C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" (1959) lecture that lamented the separation of scientific and non-scientific competencies among educated people, Congressman Rush Holt (2009), a physicist by training, had this to say:

The United States has had, over the centuries, really until roughly fifty years ago, a very scientific bend. It was not a coincidence that [the writers of] the Constitution called themselves in many cases, "natural philosophers." Back then, that was the equivalent of our word scientist today.

The founders were thinking like scientists; they were asking questions so they could be answered empirically and verifiably. That's what science is. It is a system for asking questions so you can answer those questions empirically and in a way that others can verify your empirical tests for those answers.

Every shopkeeper, every farmer, every factory owner throughout American history has had this scientific tradition. It was common for Americans to think about how things work and how they could be made better and made to work better.¹³

He observed:

We're at a time now where, if I talk to most of my colleagues in Congress, most of your colleagues at the college or university, or any American on the street, however well educated, however able, however smart, they will likely say, "Oh, science, oh no, I'm not a scientist. I can't understand that, that's not for me."

And thus we are deprived of the scientific way of thinking. The scientific way of thinking is important not just for developing new technologies, but for creating the kind of self-critical, self-correcting, evolving society we need to create. The whole balance of powers in our constitution, the whole idea of openness that we embrace as a democracy, these are very scientific in nature.

Now when Holt was speaking at a Capitol Hill event sponsored by NCSCE's National Center, he was a scientist/politician speaking as a scientist and a political theorist. But what he is describing about "method" isn't just the method of scientists. Historians don't just guess, or say whatever first comes to mind. Scholars of literature don't hide evidence that would undermine something they'd like to say. All good scholarship entails being self-critical and self-correcting. So I want to use "science" in the "natural philosophy" way that Holt suggests, as a way of speaking about a system of inquiry and a set of political and moral practices.

We can carry Holt's ideas a bit further if we speak about the intellectual and moral practices embraced within the STEM fields and research, generally. We can say that science is value-neutral, though that is a much-debated claim. That debate needn't concern us here. Whether neutral or not, science certainly embraces a particular value system, as does democracy. Both are processes to deal with realities that are changing or being changed through observation or perturbation, itself. Both have rules and standards for conduct. At their best (perhaps in their idealized states), both are deliberative processes that rely on honesty and integrity and eschew suppression of evidence, especially evidence that contradicts the desires of practitioners and proponents (we could use more of this in our democracy). Both see results and findings as provisional.

Democracy's work is provisional, temporary, the best we can do at this time. It is public. So is the work of science. In being held it up to peer and public scrutiny, our work gets critiqued, sometimes venerated, sometimes trashed, sometimes both venerated and trashed. The work of scholarship and the work of democracy is messy, tedious, unpredictable, often onerous. Teaching is even harder. The ingenuity that James credits with making for good teaching takes lots of energy and a bit of daring, too. Democracy, too, asks more from each of us in order for it to work. But as my mother used to say, "it's just work, so get busy."

It is work we do need to do, however, if we are to learn and if we are to advance knowledge and create a civil society that prizes liberty, stays fresh, and promotes something we can call a public good. It is work that our SENCER colleagues and students have embarked on campuses and in communities. This work has paid dividends to those who are doing it and to those of us who have reconnected STEM education and civic engagement. In part two of this essay, I will discuss some of the lessons we have learned in doing this work and I will suggest conditions that, if present, augur well for the success of future reform efforts.

About the Author

Wm. David Burns is the founder and principal investigator of SENCER, the NSF-supported national dissemination project. He is also executive director of the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement and professor of general studies at the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. Prior to establishing the National Center, he served as senior policy director for the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU). During his nine years with AACU, he established the CDC-sponsored Program for Health and Higher Education and created the Sumner Symposia dedicated to exploring the power that students have to improve the health of colleges and communities. David is the principal author and editor of Learning for Our Common Health and, among other publications, the article, "Knowledge to Make Our Democracy."

References

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Footnotes

1 The changing names for GRID, AIDS, HIV disease reflect emerging notions about the phenomenon. See Rosenberg (1962) for another example. I am indebted to Professor William Cronon for this suggestion.

2 The Rutgers program was supported by a cooperative agreement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of Adolescent and School Health. The program is described in this excerpt from an article in Public Health Reports: "In 1990, CDC awarded a cooperative agreement to a university in each of five States among those with the highest cumulative incidence of AIDS. Each university will establish a consortium of colleges, universities, trade schools, and other agencies in the State to develop and implement education programs that could prevent the spread of HIV infection and other health problems among college students in the State and to train school administrators and teachers to help implement effective health and HIV education. The five universities are Illinois State University, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, San Diego State University, Southwest Texas State University, and the University of Central Florida. Additional support has been provided to Rutgers and San Diego State to enable each of them to train teams of personnel from universities in other states who may be interested in establishing such consortia in their own states." (Moore et al. 1991)

3 I describe the genealogy and other dimensions of the project in more detail in Burns (2002).

4 The May 16, 2011, New York Times reports on the lax oversight of Japanese nuclear power plants, for example.

5 Woody Mckenzie (2008), a SENCER Leadership Fellow from Lynchburg College, wrote: "SENCER is essentially an outlet for me to validate my own ideas of what a valid liberal arts education should include in the information age. More emphasis should be placed on interdisciplinary courses. The world is not parsed out like a college curriculum."

6 Janet Emig (1983, 166) writes "I have fully described the notion that the presence of an explicit or at least tacit intellectual tradition is requisite for a full and self-respecting inquiry paradigm, as acknowledgement of that tradition is requisite for any self-respecting paradigm inhabitant... The reason the only decent and scholarly ploy is to know and to acknowledge one's sources is that, at this very late date in human intellectual history, it is deeply unlikely that at least those of us who work in the humanities — that non-cumulative endeavor — will have a wholly original idea."

7 As of January 2011, more than 1,800 representatives from 8 percent of all accredited two- and four-year U.S. colleges and universities have participated in SENCER Summer Institutes and the DC Symposia. These 393 institutions represent forty-six U.S. states and all major Carnegie classifications and thirteen countries outside of the United States. Leaders from many more institutions have attended other SENCER-sponsored workshops.

8 See the SENCER web site, www.sencer.net, for a complete list of SENCER model courses and search access to our digital library, hosed at Carleton College's Science Education Resource Center (SERC).

9 See the SENCER ideals at http://www.SENCER.net/About/pdfs/SENCERIdeals.pdf

10 Though we do not think of him as a democratic theorist, I cannot resist calling attention to Edmund Burke's famous observation that expresses the essential point I hope to be making: "The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori." (Burke 1871, 311). For more on democratic theory and some authors to whom I am indebted for my thinking, see, for example: Dewey (1929), Gutman (1987), Barber (1984), Thompson (1970), Connolly (2002), and O'Neill (2002).

11 That "special interest group" is now largely a term of derision is just one more unfortunate perversion of democratic ideals. See, for example, Dahl (2005) for a classical discussion of pluralism, a concept that has sparked lively debates and whose contemporary literature is especially relevant to those developing civic engagement projects. The Toqueville reference is, of course, to Democracy in America, where he writes: "Thus the most democratic country on the face of the earth is that in which men have, in our time, carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires and have applied this new science to the greatest number of purposes. Is this the result of accident, or is there in reality any necessary connection between the principle of association and that of equality? Aristocratic communities always contain, among a multitude of persons who by themselves are powerless, a small number of powerful and wealthy citizens, each of whom can achieve great undertakings single-handed. In aristocratic societies men do not need to combine in order to act, because they are strongly held together. Every wealthy and powerful citizen constitutes the head of a permanent and compulsory association, composed of all those who are dependent upon him or whom he makes subservient to the execution of his designs. Among democratic nations, on the contrary, all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow men to lend him their assistance. They all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another. If men living in democratic countries had no right and no inclination to associate for political purposes, their independence would be in great jeopardy, but they might long preserve their wealth and their cultivation: whereas if they never acquired the habit of forming associations in ordinary life, civilization itself would be endangered. A people among whom individuals lost the power of achieving great things single-handed, without acquiring the means of producing them by united exertions, would soon relapse into barbarism." (Tocqueville 1997, ch. 5).

12 This is a point that often gets lost on folks who equate democracy with voting and science with truth finding. One might fix speed limits though voting (though we generally do not), but we would never "determine" the speed of light by holding an election. This is not as simple as I have made it, however, as we witness with some frequency, contestants in civic questions "toting up" the numbers of scientists, members of the National Academies, and/or Nobel laureates who believe one way or another.

13 Again de Tocqueville, writing in 1840, has something to add to Holt's analysis and our understanding: "In America the purely practical part of science is admirably understood, and careful attention is paid to the theoretical portion which is immediately requisite to application. On this head the Americans always display a clear, free, original, and inventive power of mind. But hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge. In this respect the Americans carry to excess a tendency that is, I think, discernible, though in a less degree, among all democratic nations. Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences or of the more elevated departments of science than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society." (Tocqueville 1997, ch. 10) I suppose you could say that the National Science Foundation was created specifically to create that opportunity for "meditation" represented by investments in "basic" research.