2004-05 Course Development Fellowship Recipient Karen Barad

Project Title

Women's Studies and Scientific Literacy

Nature of the Request

I am applying for a Course Development Fellowship for the 2005-2006 academic year to develop a new introductory Feminism & Science course for the Women’s Studies Department. The course aims to increase the scientific literacy of Women’s Studies students and the larger population that the Women’s Studies Department serves. The approach will be entirely innovative. It will depart in important ways from the standard “Gender and Science” courses offered at institutions across the U.S. and around the globe. This unique approach to feminism and science will attend to a multiplicity of shared concerns between feminist studies and the sciences and will not simply reproduce the common approach of examining science through “the lens” of feminism. In particular, students will be empowered to learn more about science and technology and the responsibilities of living in a high tech world.

Background and Rationale:

I am proposing to teach a course that is not only new to the UCSC campus but will constitute a unique approach to the teaching of feminism & science. (See Appendix I.) The goal of the course is to increase the scientific literacy of our students. This course is of significant interest to the Women’s Studies Department and will become a standard offering in the curriculum. Many Women’s Studies programs are looking to increase the number of courses that address issues related to science and technology. The UCSC Women’s Studies Department would like to develop a concentration in feminist science studies and this course will be central to this new concentration. The desire to improve the scientific literacy of all students is a widely recognized goal that is becoming increasingly urgent as the pace of scientific and technological development increases. Women’s Studies has a significant interest in supporting initiatives that help increase the participation of women and other underrepresented minorities in the sciences and engineering.

Much has been written about the difficulties of improving scientific literacy. As a physicist who has spent much of my career in a Physics Department I have tried different pedagogical experiments to help meet this challenge. One of the most successful was “Cultural Studies of Twentieth-Century Physics”, a totally new kind of course that I created while I was a faculty member in a Physics Department at an elite liberal arts college. (See Appendix II.) The course included a laboratory component, satisfied the science requirement, and was cross-listed with Women’s Studies and the Science, Technology, and Society Program. The course that I would like to develop at UCSC would be an experiment in “bridging the divide” between Women’s Studies and the sciences from the “other side”. I will no doubt draw from my expertise in developing and teaching this other course but I anticipate that a fully new structure and approach will be required. Support from CTE would allow me to work up some different models and see how to best meet the challenge.

Impact on Teaching and Learning:

This course aims to increase student interest in learning about science, develop the students’ ability to thoughtfully assess the advantages and disadvantages of new scientific research and technologies, gain an understanding of the nature of scientific practice and the culture of science, gain confidence in engaging with scientific and technological subjects and materials, and think about traditional and nontraditional approaches to scientific literacy and its relationship to the responsible practice of science.

Many students feel disempowered when the subject turns to science and technology. Course modules will be designed to build a progressive sense of student empowerment and responsibility. For example, a course module on the culture of science will help students reflect on: their own experiences in science classes, differences in pedagogical styles across disciplines, what constitutes traditional thinking about scientific literacy, how this thinking came about, and who is served by this approach. We will also consider the question of why scientists write in “code” and students will learn strategies for “decoding” the codes without needing to become expert. Students will learn how to read articles that cover scientific and technological developments (from sources like Discover Magazine, and “News and Views” articles in Nature, and Scientific American). Another course module will focus on the important question of objectivity. Students want to know how they are to understand conflicting information that comes from the science community. For example, earlier information on nutrition and disease suggested that a low fat diet is recommended for breast health but new evidence seems to suggest that the previous research was flawed. How can we assess these results? Does the fact that scientists disagree mean that science is not objective? Another module will focus on science and ethics. These modules are interrelated in important ways. We will discuss these interconnections and reflect on the course’s approach to scientific literacy. For most students this approach to science will be different from anything they’ve experienced previously and we will think reflexively about what works and what doesn’t work for whom and why.

I anticipate that this course will be of interest to faculty on this and other campuses. I envision this course as playing a role in promoting future conversations between Women’s Studies and the sciences as we jointly work to prepare students to face a world where science and technology plays an increasingly larger role.

Project Assessment:

The focus of the assessment will be on the interrelated questions of empowerment and literacy. It will be important to assess both the degree to which student’s sense of empowerment in approaching issues of science and technology has shifted and the degree to which their level of scientific literacy has changed. Since the students will be asked to reflect directly on the issues of empowerment and scientific literacy as part of the subject matter of the course, I would like to design a structure to promote the development of an assessment plan together with the students. This process could be very instructive for the students and help to further illuminate some of the main themes. For example, the class would need to face the challenge of coming to some understanding of what “scientific literacy” is in order to assess it. Participating in this process could potentially increase their sense of empowerment as well. I would consult with CTE to help set up a productive structure for this process. I would like to construct a small midterm assessment and a more extensive and involved assessment at the end of the quarter.

Plans for Continued Funding:

This project will not require additional support at least at the initial stages of development. I may entertain the possibility of adding a minimal laboratory component at some future date but this would first involve conversations with scientists on campus and possibly a proposal to NSF.

Appendix I

In the mid to late 1990s, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) launched an initiative to build bridges between Women’s Studies and the sciences (http://www.aacu.org/womenscilit/index.cfm). Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the “Women and Scientific Literacy: Building Two-Way Streets” project issued grants to ten colleges and universities for the purpose of a three-year curriculum and faculty development project. I served as an Advisory Board Member for the project and worked as a consultant for two of the selected universities. The board members jointly prepared a publication entitled “Frequently Asked Questions About Feminist Science” available on the web (http://www.aacu.org/publications/index.cfm).

The aim of the project was to build bridges between the sciences and women’s studies “by incorporating the new scholarship [on feminism and science] into undergraduate science, engineering, and mathematics courses and also by making science a more central part of women's studies courses”. This project was successful in stimulating new efforts to integrate the latest feminist research on science and science teaching into science courses. However, despite the best of intentions to integrate more science into Women’s Studies courses it is fair to say that little progress was made in this direction. As a physicist who has spent much of my career in a Physics Department teaching science, I feel strongly about seeing what can be done to meet this other challenge, to get the “bridge traffic” moving in both directions.

Appendix II

An innovative approach to the teaching of science informed both the classroom and laboratory components of “Cultural Studies of Twentieth-Century Physics”. The course attracted a diverse group of students, far more diverse than any course ever offered by our Physics Department. Sixty percent of the students were women and one-quarter of the students self-identified as nonwhite. Many students self-identified as nonscience majors and took the course to fulfill their science distribution requirement; however, forty percent of the students were declared science majors at the beginning of the course. By the end of the class the Physics Department had gained four new majors (a significant increase in the overall number of physics major at a small liberal college). The students’ backgrounds, expertise, and level of comfort with science differed greatly, spanning the full spectrum from senior physics majors to self-declared “science-phobes”. The course served the Physics Department well and the approach has subsequently been adopted by faculty at other colleges and universities. The philosophy behind the course, details of the approach, and results of the assessment can be found in an article that I published in 2000 (“Reconceiving Scientific Literacy as Agential Literacy, or Learning How to Intra-act Responsibly Within the World,” in Doing Culture + Science, ed. by Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek).