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In today's podcast, Ilona speaks with Kimberly Tanner, an Assistant Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University. Trained in neuroscience, Kimberly uses her understanding of learning and applies it to enhancing science teaching and learning, from kindergarten through college levels. Her research program, called SEPAL, investigates how science is learned, and is aimed at rectifying common misconceptions in biology, especially among "emerging experts" in the field — undergraduate biology majors. She recently published a book, Transformations, which is a collection of essays about innovative approaches to science teaching written with her colleague, Deborah Allen. Listen to this podcast to learn how transforming science education can impact both a kindergartener and a senior scientist. [12:39]
Full transcript
ILONA MIKO: Welcome to the latest edition of NatureEdCast by Nature Education. I'm Ilona Miko, and today we're talking with Kimberly Tanner from San Francisco State University about education specialists in science.
Kimberly Tanner is Assistant Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University. Trained in neuroscience, Kimberly uses her understanding of learning and applies it to enhancing science teaching and learning from kindergarten through college. Her research program is aimed at identifying and rectifying common misconceptions in biology, especially among emerging experts in the field, namely, undergraduate biology-major students. She aspires to train a new generation of scientists and science experts who are not only knowledgeable but can also communicate that knowledge readily to others in whatever professional setting they land in. Kimberly also works with science teachers at the K–12 and college level to help them think about ways to improve their communication strategies in the classroom and elsewhere. She recently published a book called Transformations, which is a collection of essays about innovative approaches to science teaching, written with her colleague, Deborah Allen. Welcome, Kimberly.
KIMBERLY TANNER: Thank you — thanks for having me.
MIKO: Well, I'm glad you're here. So you've characterized yourself as a "translator." Would you tell us what that means, and why you think that word best describes your position and your work?
TANNER: So let me tell you a little bit about the position I hold. So I'm an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University, and I was hired here as a tenure-track biology professor — just like anyone else — but my specialty is in biology education, which relates to the term translator because you wouldn't necessarily expect to find someone specializing in biology education within a biology department. But that's actually something that appears to be growing in interest across the country, not just in biology, but across the sciences. And so the position I hold has been termed a "Science Faculty with and Education Specialty" position, which is a mouthful, so we call them SFES positions (or Education Specialist positions). And I'm just like anyone else in the department, except as opposed to having a lab that studies Immunology, or a lab that studies neurobiology, my lab actually studies the teaching and learning of biology. And I think that the reason I refer to myself as a translator is I feel like much of what I do, in my academic work and my research and the writing that I do for the biology community, is take really good ideas that have come from other disciplines — some from cognitive science or psychology, science education, developmental psychology — and I translate those ideas into our own setting, which is undergraduate biology education, because many of those ideas from those disciplines are applicable to teaching undergraduates, and yet most biologists aren't familiar with that literature, aren't familiar with the language of those disciplines, and, as a result, don't really access that information and apply it to their own work.
MIKO: So, when you do this with students, and you improve their ability to communicate what they know, how can improving that kind of skill at the undergrad level actually impact outside of the college at the K–12 science education level?
TANNER: So, we have a philosophy in my research group here, which is called SEPAL, we have a philosophy that says: anyone who majors in biology, or any science for that matter, when they go out into the world, whatever their professional pursuits, they're going to have to teach the science they know to other people. So if you are going to be a clinician, you're going to have to be doing patient education — you're going to have to explain complex biological concepts to them. You could be working in a non-profit, you could be obviously a researcher mentoring graduate students, or you could be a K–12 teacher. So one of the really critical things that we believe is that it isn't enough in the modern age to know the science that you learn as an undergraduate. You need to be able to apply it in new situations, and you need to be able to teach it to other people. One specific example of that that's very powerful is that pretty much every kindergarten through twelfth-grade teacher, who teaches kids in our private and public school systems, at one point was they learned their science ,especially their biology, and [through] their undergraduate course work. And so if we can change the way students who are going on to be K–12 teachers think about biology and talk about biology and think about the teaching of biology, then we can actually have a very powerful indirect effect on K–12 education.
MIKO: That's really interesting, because a lot of times people are thinking about the effects it would have at the graduate level, or when that student advances up the academic chain, as they say. But it's nice to think about it actually having that effect — I don't think people realize that.
TANNER: Yeah, I think one of motivators for — the reason that I took this position six years ago — is I had actually been working with K–12 teachers for quite a while, since in graduate school I sort of was moonlighting working with kids and teachers in K–12 settings and just loving it and learning a lot and having a lot of fun. But then I went on in my professional career, I worked in professional teacher development, and over and over I heard stories from teachers about — I would ask them, "Why do you teach Biology this way?" Or, "Why don't you teach more science for elementary school teachers?" And very often the stories I heard were, "Well, I was really bad in science as a college student", or "I was really scared of science", or "I didn't have good experiences in my science classes in college." And so, I think that those stories which are anecdotal, although there are people who have certainly done research on this issue, those stories of how K–12 teachers do or do not teach science at all, and then how they teach it, that is shaped in their undergraduate career. If they have only experienced science as being a lecture-based course, then it's not surprising that they go on and they teach science only through lecture-methods, whereas we know that some of the effective ways to change people's minds about how the world works and to change their concepts in biology is by engaging them in looking at problems, or doing hands-on experiments, or doing thought experiments, or writing about it, but not really only experiencing science through listening.
MIKO: So, going back to the college level, for a second, I understand that with some colleagues like you in the Cal-State University system (some other education specialists), you together wrote an article called, "How to hire an education specialist," which was published in the CBE Life Sciences Education Journal. Would you tell us what motivated the writing of that article?
TANNER: If somebody had asked me six years ago if I would be doing research and publishing on science faculty with education specialties, I would have been perplexed. So yeah, we published this article on how to hire an education specialist for your science department because my colleagues are six of us that work together including myself — spread out around the Cal-State system — and now a couple of people have actually moved out of the Cal-State system. We met at a meeting and we found ourselves in a room where we were charged to think about creative ways to increase the engagement of scientists in issues in education. And it was intriguing — we had a whole agenda planned for that meeting — but what became clear within about ten minutes is that half the people in that room were folks like me who had recently been hired as an education specialist in the science department and the other half of people in the room were senior science faculty or administrators, like chairs and deans, who were looking to hire somebody like us. And so we quickly sort of shifted the conversation, and what came out of that conversation at a meeting was a white paper, a position paper if you will (not a research paper), that tried to lay out what were the kinds of things that a science faculty with education specialties would do in a department, what might motivate a department to hire them, and what were questions that a faculty should ask themselves about this kind of a hire before they sort of launched into a search for a person like this. I'm at San Francisco State and I just can't say enough really positive things about the Department of Biology at San Francisco State. They're a very pioneering department; there are a lot of people very committed to education who came before me in the history of this department, which is I think one of the key reasons that I was hired or that this kind of position was hired in the department, And they were very committed to the idea of having somebody down the hall that you could go and say, "Hey, I'm having this really challenging time teaching photosynthesis. I don't know why. I can't get people to care about it. And do you have any ideas?" And so that's definitely part of what I'm here for, just like if you wanted to have a bioinformatics expert down the hall — I'm that biology-education sort-of expert down the hall. So I feel like this issue of hiring education specialists — it's not unique to Biology, I should say, there has a been a long history of physics education folks being hired in the physics department for the last, depending on how you count, twenty or thirty years. Chemistry: there has been a pretty rich tradition. And biology is sort of coming up, I think, a little more recently in the idea of hiring these folks.
MIKO: So you're kind of like an internal specialist, because you're a scientist in your own right, but you have this whole other developed side of education that people can take advantage of within their department, which I think is a really interesting idea because a lot of people think, "Oh, well, I can go talk to somebody else in the university who's an education specialist." But having somebody internally, it definitely helps to make it more familiar, and you're actually a direct colleague, so the trust issues are there.
TANNER: Yeah, I'm a direct colleague. There's no question that being another tenure-track faculty is important — that I do research; I publish research publication in journals like everybody else. I mean, not everybody has this same situation, but when I was hired it was clear that my background and my scholarship would be different but that I would be evaluated in the same sorts of way as everybody else.
MIKO: That brings me to my next question. So, as many of us know, teaching science is not necessarily rewarded — teaching science well is not necessarily rewarded in the typical tenure-track system — so as a result, teaching accomplishments don't carry the same status as other accomplishments . . . say, primary research in science, you know, or research publications basically about data and discovery of scientific principles. Outside of creating more positions like yours, what can universities or research funding agencies do to promote this kind of education specialist in their departments?
TANNER: Fundamentally, all science faculty need to be education specialists, for the most part, for those people who are at teaching institutions. But I think there are a variety of things that can be done, I think [1] it would be great if the rewards system changed, and that there was more of an emphasis on people's commitment to their teaching and their experimental approach to their teaching. Really, I mean, I think that there's been growth in the biological sciences over the last decade of journals that are dedicated to publishing scholarly articles from faculty who have tried something new in their classroom and collected some evidence about it. So it's not like every science faculty needs to become an education researcher, but there are a variety of ways that you can use the scientific skills that you use in the lab every day and just use them in the context of your classroom. I mean, frankly, just collecting some evidence about how your students think about a topic before you teach it and then analyzing that — even if you have a class of five hundred students, you ask them to write down what they think on an index card and you read even just 10% of them (you know the first fifty cards), you'll have a much better idea of where you need to go with those students in the next class. So anyway, I think changing the rewards system would be great. [2] I think increasing the profile of educational activities through publications or what's called the scholarship of teaching and learning is really helpful. [3] And I think a place where I would love to see a lot of shift — and I've worked on this a lot myself, but I would like to see it shift in a policy realm — is to integrate training and how to teach into the training of science. So here at San Francisco State, we have courses that allow our undergraduate majors and our graduate students to do that, but imagine if everyone who had an NSF training fellowship or an NIH training fellowship, if every single one of those scientists had to have boot camp for how to go out and be an effective teacher and be able to teach the science they know, what a difference that would make! So, I think integrating pedagogical training, as we would call it (training in how to teach the science you know), for emerging scientists in the next generation of scientists is where I would kind of put my money on how we could get a lot of change in the profession and a lot of positive change in terms of having science be more accessible to a larger group of people.
MIKO: Certainly at the graduate level, teaching and learning how to teach is an afterthought or something you do on the side, and not really part of one of the primary goals for achieving your degree. So, that's definitely something that could be planned at the university or at the funding agency level. Well, thanks, Kimberly — that was really interesting, and thanks for joining us today!
TANNER: Oh yeah, thanks for having me!
MIKO: Thanks for listening to this edition of NatureEdCast. You can find this podcast and others at www.nature.com/s-c-i-t-a-b-l-e. Please join us again next time.
