Colorado Graduate Students Discuss Controversial Topics with CIRTL Faculty
Katherine Friedrich

Using a real-life controversy and two case studies, CIRTL faculty members Henry Campa and Nilhan Gunasekera engaged graduate students at the University of Colorado-Boulder in learning new teaching skills at workshops in January and March.

The January conference where Campa presented, “Scholarship of Engagement and Scholarship of Discovery,” was sponsored by the Graduate Teacher Program at UC-Boulder. In March, at the Collaborative Preparing Future Faculty Network Forum, “Preparing Future Faculty: Seven Years to Tenure,” Gunasekera shared insights about teaching with graduate students.

Campa, a professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Michigan State University, demonstrated a teaching method that uses scientific controversies. Discussing the controversies encourages students to apply their knowledge and think critically about “hot topics” in their fields.

"Students like case studies because they’re real,” Campa said. He uses storytelling to connect science concepts with current events. Students become more interested in the material and are more likely to retain it when they see its relevance. One of Campa’s students used what she’d learned from one of the exercises to answer questions during a job interview; she was hired immediately. 

Campa said scientific controversies are especially useful for classroom discussion. “There are controversies all over the place,” he said. “[They] are likely to become more and more complex as we learn more about science. To deal with controversies, you often have to have a strong foundation… in the discipline.”

The controversy that Campa presented has earned little press coverage in the United States. In Kenya, the Maasai Mara National Reserve faces competing pressures from tourists, the local Maasai, the Kenya wildlife service, and other stakeholders.

Campa divides his workshop participants into groups and gives each group handouts corresponding to their role. Then, he mixes the groups so that the different stakeholders can interact, and encourages each group to find a mutually acceptable solution. 

In case studies, Campa says, all participants are given the full story; in controversies, each person only has the information that their “character” would know.

Gunasekera, a chemistry professor from the University of Wisconsin-Rock County, used the case study method to facilitate a conversation about issues that were much closer to home.

The two cases Gunasekera used were published by the CIRTL Diversity Team in 2006. Both deal with controversies in science classrooms. One case study describes a conflict between a Haitian college student and her lab partner; the other addresses a biology professor’s decision to discuss sexual orientation as part of her course.

Gunasekera said he chose the sexual orientation case deliberately, since he felt that it was relevant to the recent gay marriage ban which passed in Colorado. He said workshop participants commented that it was important to discuss sexual orientation in biology courses; “It’s how you use it that is key.”

There is significant demand for workshops where people can discuss diversity in the sciences, Gunasekera said. “What I see is that [participants] have been thinking about these issues as things on the periphery that has happened to them, and now… they are hearing themselves speak out.” This has been particularly true of his workshops at minority-serving universities.

A debate developed during the discussion of the second case study.  A female scientist thought the Haitian student should be more assertive, while the rest of her group thought that the climate was unfriendly. Gunasekera handled the disagreement diplomatically. “I tried to reiterate what each of the women were saying, and then said, ‘Research shows that minority women do tend to drop out, and the way the class is structured does impact your success,’” he said.

“It’s a politically correct thing… to try to do group work,” Gunasekera said. However, group debate – both structured controversies and case study discussions – engages students in expressing their perspectives and connecting education and experience.

For more information on how to teach using case studies on scientific controversies, visit the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science.  

May 2, 2007

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