Over the past ten years, St. Lawrence University has developed an environment conducive to and encouraging of interdisciplinary faculty development, an environment necessary for success with the women and science grant. We have developed an interdisciplinary, team-taught First Year Program, created an alternative distribution track focused on cultural encounters and international study, and developed interdisciplinary courses within the sciences. Additionally, the departments of physics, mathematics, biology, and chemistry have been engaged in curriculum development projects for the past few years. These projects have been designed to increase the retention of students in the sciences. In developing these projects, the literature on women in the sciences has been influential. For example, several members of the mathematics department have been working since 1991 to improve the way that calculus is taught at SLU. Changes include an increased emphasis on writing, more cooperative learning, less lecturing and more emphasis on students discovering connections on their own, and the use of technology to help students visualize what is going on. Research in mathematics pedagogy shows that these changes are particularly beneficial to women. Patti Lock, a second tier project team member, is a member of the Harvard Consortium, a nationally-known group of leaders in calculus reform. A knowledge of research on women and science has also informed changes in the teaching of the introductory biology laboratory and introductory physics. Nadia Marano has started, in small ways, to make chemistry a science in which women are included. These include mentioning women scientists when possible, making hypothetical chemists in problems be women as often as men, using examples from everyday life to explain chemical principles, but not those traditional examples that men tend to identify with such as sports, and ensuring that women get a chance to answer questions and participate in discussions even when men are more aggressive about volunteering. Institutionally, there has been a desire to increase the number of female faculty in the sciences and to increase the number of female majors. Recent hires in the sciences have included a number of women participating in this grant. Additionally, the proportion of science majors who are women has averaged 40% over the past three years. At the same time, the gender studies program, created in 1987, has become a significant presence on campus. In an average semester 10-12 cross-listed courses are offered, with a total enrollment of approximately 200 students. Although students at SLU are not required to complete a minor, approximately 10 students per graduating class are gender studies minors. The sciences and gender studies have collaborated in a number of ways: by co-sponsoring a lecture by Anne Fausto-Sterling, by having two member of the sciences participate in a feminist theory faculty development workshop, with one of the 10 sessions focused on science, and by sending the coordinator of gender studies and the chair of physics to a conference on feminism and science together. Our goal has been to work to develop greater connections.
The project that we are proposing would involve a series of curricular changes, beginning with both the introductory science courses and the introductory gender studies course, and culminating in the introduction of a team taught course in feminism and the scientific method. In addition, the presence of at least one course per year in our interdisciplinary first year program that focuses on science and the scientific method provides the opportunity for a regularly offered lower-level team-taught course that addresses women and science. The central component of on-campus faculty development will be a year long seminar. This seminar will provide the opportunity for 15 faculty members to explore women’s history, the history of science, scientific method, and epistemology. It will meet once every 2-3 weeks will be supplemented with lectures and seminars by outside scholars. We would include interested students in these seminars. Funding for speakers will come jointly from this grant, a PEW grant, and from the Dean. In addition to the changes in courses outlined below, we will work together to design and teach a course as part of SLU’s talented juniors program, a program that brings high school juniors from all over Northern New York to the campus. Our goal is both to encourage young women to pursue science, and to provide a concrete project for the faculty involved in the seminar in year one. What we create for this course will also carry over into our individual courses. Additionally, we will work together to create two presentations for the SLU faculty fora on pedagogy. The first will focus on gender in the sciences, the second on science in gender studies courses. Thus we hope to bring our explorations to a larger audience of faculty.
There were 10 people interested in being team members for this project, and who will be centrally involved in it. Those designated as project team members are Maegan Bos (Math), David Hornung (BIO), Catherine Jahncke (Physics), Valerie Lehr (Gender Studies/GOVT), and Nadia Marano (Chem). In two cases where both junior and senior members of a department were interested in participating, junior members, who will work closely with senior members of their departments, were chosen because they had not yet had the opportunity to attend conferences focused on science and women. These two junior faculty members also have an interest in making this project not only part of their teaching, but also part of their scholarship.