Doubt, Inquiry and a Liberal Arts Education

When I first started my career as a professor in a liberal arts college, I spent most of my time thinking about chemistry classes, my chemistry research, and my role within the chemistry department. Over time however, I have become increasingly interested and concerned with what goes on in other departments, what type of overall education our students are receiving (beyond my department), and whether the liberal arts education that we offer is cohesive or coherent.

As part of educating myself, I have started reading and thinking (and discussing with my colleagues) the nature of a liberal arts education, and the role that the sciences play within this framework. This past week I finished Michael Roth’s Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014). Roth takes the reader through the ideas and history of liberal education in the U.S., but much of what he discusses is strongly relevant in the discussions surrounding the direction of higher education in the twenty-first century.

In the final chapter of the book, Roth devotes a chunk of time to discussing the ideas of Dewey. Roth writes (p168): “Learning in the context of living means modifying one’s behavior on the basis of experience; it means trying things out and revising one’s attempts through collaboration. It’s not that one gets and education in order to do things in the world; it’s that doing things in the world and getting an education are part of the same process. One is not prior to the other.” This sounds very much like what many of us would like to do in the sciences by having scientific inquiry as part of the core curriculum that all students should experience. Furthermore, our major courses should reflect a research-rich curriculum. These, along with Living Learning Communities are buzzwords in higher education at the moment.

Roth goes on to say (pp168-169): “Conformity is the enemy of learning because in order to conform you restrict your capacity for experience; you constrict your plasticity. Doubt is the antidote to conformity because doubt about the way things are (or are said to be) encourages inquiry… With learning, there is always risk, and educators harness the energy of that risk for creative purposes.” This certainly encourages to be a bit more risk-taking in my teaching as I’m hoping to attempt in one of my classes next semester. I’ve also challenged the students to join me in the risk-taking attempt.

Doubt, however, is not something one typical associates with science courses. Having taught an interdisciplinary scientific inquiry course composed of first year students, only some of whom are considering being science majors, the idea of scientific doubt is very foreign to the students. It took a while to get them to be less worried about “what is the right answer” and move to “how does a scientist inquire?” The idea of uncertainty, which they have no problem grasping in thinking about life issues, seems to them antithetical when discussing “the facts” of science.

One approach I have used is to raise the “doubt” questions in the historical context of the scientific issue at hand to exemplify how inquiry works in different scenarios, with the hope that as students mull over current scientific problems, they will make use of the inquiry skills they have learned. Another approach is to pose a puzzle (students often enjoy these as long as they are pitched at the appropriate level, not too obviously easy or excruciatingly difficult) that requires them to work together towards a solution by probing the puzzle through inquiry. Do I successfully “harness the energy for creative purposes?” Not always, but I keep trying and incrementally improving my approach. Now that’s a skill I would like my students to learn!