Is there an easier way to teach scientific writing?

Each winter semester for the last 5 years or so I’ve taught a course for upper-year and grad students in scientific writing. My course has three components to it: (1) a series of (mini) lectures; (2) an accompanying series of small-group workshops; and (3) a series of assignments, via which each student submits, piece by piece, a first draft and then (following comments from me) a revised draft of a scientific paper.

I’ve just wrapped up this year’s version, which (rather sadly) will be my last, as I’m retiring at the end of this year. Every time I teach the course, I come to the same realization: teaching scientific writing the way I’ve been doing it is hard.

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My most heterodox scientific-writing lecture (or, how I annoy my colleagues in a good cause)

I’m well into my Scientific Writing course now, and I’ve just given the lecture that consistently annoys my faculty colleagues the most (well, it annoys many of them). It’s the one on writing the Methods section, and it’s heterodox in two rather different ways. This lecture stands out a bit – I don’t think my approach to IMRaD structure, or the content of the Discussion, or outlining, or writer’s block is all that different from the approach anyone else might take. But the Methods is different.

I said what I teach about the Methods is heterodox in two different ways.

Exciting news: I’m (co-)writing another book!

I’ve been itching to share this news, and now I can: I’m writing another book! Actually, even better: I’m co-writing this one, with Bethann Garramon Merkle. It’s been hard to keep this quiet for so long, but we’ve just signed a contract (with the University of Chicago Press), so now it’s official. Hooray!

What’s it about, you ask? Well, our working title is Helping Students Write in the Sciences: Strategies for Efficient and Effective Mentoring of Developing Writers. Writing is a huge part of the job of a scientist, and it’s hard – but teaching and mentoring writing is too, and it’s harder.

Why I’m teaching online again

Our semester starts this week, and I’m once again (co)teaching an online course. This is very much swimming against the current, at least at my university, so why am I doing it? I don’t pretend that my answers here are jaw-droppingly original, but I think they’re important to what university education ought to look like, not just now but years or decades on. So I’ll explain.

First: my university, like many, is busily pushing hard to re-establish “normal” – or at least, what our senior administrators imagine that students (and prospective students) think is “normal”.

Maybe it’s time to stop teaching “the scientific method” in 1st year biology

Recently, my department held a search for a new instructor to oversee our 1^st year labs. An important part of our search process is a “teaching talk”, in which we pretend (poorly) to be students, and the candidates give a lecture they might deliver in one of their assigned courses. We set the topic (so it’s the same for all candidates), and this time, we asked them to deliver a lecture for 1^st-year biology on “the scientific method”.

We were lucky to interview three wonderful candidates (I’d have been happy with any of them), and I think they did the best job possible with that lecture topic. But the experience crystallized something that’s been bothering me for many years. I’m becoming convinced that even the best job possible of teaching “the scientific method” to first year biology students simply isn’t worth doing. Or, to be a bit more forceful: it probably does more harm than good. I know, that’s nothing short of heresy.

Why do pre-meds want to do research in my ecology lab? And should I let them?

When I got my (first) academic job and my lab opened for business, I got a surprise. I expected undergraduate students to ask me about doing research in my lab. After all, as an undergraduate myself I’d learned an enormous amount by doing research with mentors – some of whom I still talk science with today. I expected to have a lot of fun sharing my love of evolutionary-ecology research with students who were as excited about it as I was. But, as I said, I got a surprise.

It turns out that, over the years, many of the undergraduate students who’ve inquired about doing research with me aren’t actually as excited about evolutionary ecology as I am. That was the surprise: pre-meds wanting to do research in my ecology lab.*

Why would a pre-med student want to do research in my lab?

How many university instructors phoned it in during the pandemic?

Another one of those tiresome articles made the rounds the other day, asserting that online instruction during the pandemic was an outrageous failure and that students hated every moment of it. No, I’m not going to link to it; it doesn’t deserve your time (but you can find it, and a dozen of its shallow kin, easily enough if you must).  These articles are worthless for at least three reasons. First, they rely on self-reported student satisfaction, and surely by now we all understand that this correlates loosely at best with instructional quality. Second, it’s not a mystery that these articles are a product of motivated reasoning: people want to be outraged, so media produce stories that feed that outrage – whether they represent the situation fairly or not. And third, what exactly would objectors to online instruction like us to have done? If we could simply wish a pandemic away, we’d already all have ponies. Flying ponies. I want my pony.

But there’s a legitimate question lurking in these otherwise facile articles.

Is science communication unteachable?

Have you ever read a scientific paper that simultaneously left you in deep admiration, but also crushed?  I have – just now. It’s Rubega et al. 2021, “Assessment by audiences shows little effect of science communication training”. In a nutshell, several of the authors teach what sounds like an absolutely terrific graduate course in science communication; they used elegantly designed methods to test whether taking the course helps students do better at science communication; and much to their (and my) disappointment, they found that the answer was a pretty convincing “no”.  To which I can really only say “argh”.

How scandalized should folks be if I re-use my prerecorded lectures?

Scandals are on the horizon. Many of us poured effort into recorded lectures during the year of the pandemic, and as those courses reappear in our teaching rotations, we’ll be tempted to just upload the same lectures over again. Horrifying, right?  Well, maybe not. I’m not (yet) sure.

I’ll face this dilemma soon for my Fall 2021 courses.

Online teaching and self-fulfilling prophecy

My university is in the throes of figuring out what Fall 2021 looks like for teaching – while working under the enormous handicap of not knowing what Fall 2021 will look like for anything else: student demand, vaccination uptake, variant persistence, not-yet-relaxed Public Health limits on classroom capacities, you name it. This has of course brought with it another round of existential-angst-ridden debate over whether another semester of partly-to-mostly-online teaching will be a way out of our conundrum or the end of higher education as we know it.

It’s easy to be tempted into “end of higher education as we know it”.