After nearly twenty years of teaching science at the secondary level, I have come to a concerning realization: being a Christian, teaching at a Christian School, and teaching Christianly are not all the same thing. Put another way, Christian curriculum does not guarantee Christian pedagogy. Through developing and testing materials for teachfastly.com (mainly tenth and twelfth grade Chemistry curriculum), I have begun to see the potential of Christian pedagogy and the impact teaching Christianly can have on both student and teacher.
One topic I have struggled to teach well at the high school level is the nature of science. Most science textbooks start the same way: lengthy, boring, and often trite descriptions of the scientific method and how it has saved the world from ignorance. Some versions feature a vignette about a famous scientist who overcame impossible obstacles to make some major discovery, likening science to a boxing ring and the scientist to Rocky. In my experience, most first chapters overtly suggest that my students compartmentalize their faith and their understanding of science. This has always bothered me both as a Christian and as a teacher of science. However, developing an opening activity about faith and the nature of science has given me a new start to the first day of class (see the “Faith and the Nature of Science” Activity Map at teachfastly.com for all of the activities referenced in this article). This activity aims to show the power of both faith and science and to begin asking how science interacts with faith—an essential question and an enduring concept in all my classes.
Sources of Knowledge
This activity is a “discover” activity, designed to offer a brief introduction to the topic that orients students and begins the learning process. As students enter class, they find two books on each desk: the Bible and a science textbook. Right away, this evokes the question of how to reconcile these two “sources of knowledge.” I then share this quotation with them: “[The] universe is before our eyes / like a beautiful book / in which all creatures, / great and small, / are as letters / to make us ponder / the invisible things of God” (Belgic Confession, article 2). The books are an invitation to ponder, to wonder. Questions, not answers, are the goal of this activity. What are the things we can properly learn from the Bible? What are the things we can learn from studying the universe? And what are the boundaries around what is learned in each class in the school curriculum?
Images of Science
After this introduction, it is time to go deeper. My next activity focuses on images of science. Together we examine a Google Ngram image that shows the prominence of the word “science” in all of the books Google has in its database, plotted according to the year of publication. We discuss what the graph shows about the place of science in society as a relatively new endeavor whose importance has risen significantly over time. Students are then asked to discover how science is viewed through the eyes of the Internet by searching for the word “science” in Google images. They are typically surprised to find that the most common images offer little more than cartoons and memes of Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson quotes. We explore how science is represented visually using a series of questions:
- Are scientists shown more often working alone or collaborating with others?
- Is science more often connected with a specific gender?
- Does science appear as authoritative and infallible or as a fallible process of inquiry?
- Is science tied to laboratory work, or are other kinds of science represented?
- Is there any indication that virtues or questions of ethics are part of the practice of science?
We compare the results with the first exercise’s invitation read the beautiful book of the universe. Students have the opportunity to learn that science is not just a school subject but something we imagine in varying ways, something requiring critical reflection.
Through Different Eyes
We further explore the nature, potential, and limits of science by considering how the world looks through different eyes. What does Marie Curie see when she sits at the beach? What about Maya Angelou? How might a poet, a chemist, and an agricultural engineer look at the same natural phenomenon, and would one of their accounts be somehow truer than the others? Could we shed some of the perspectives and make do with the poet or the chemist? What would we lose? And how might humility and pride be bound up in which perspective we regard most highly? This connects us to another theme, and we close with an activity that asks, does science need virtue? Students discuss the virtues that a good scientist should possess, such as prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and love. The goal of this activity is for students to connect the virtues that make a scientist good to the virtues that make a science student good—a lofty but worthy goal for the first day of class.
Opportunities and Challenges
I have taught the first day of school in this way for the past three years, and the students’ response is always the same. They enter the classroom with a certain degree of skepticism as this opening looks very different from the first day of their previous science classes. Skepticism morphs into curiosity as they slowly warm to the activities that engage them in various ways, ranging from Internet usage with images and word clouds to philosophical discussions with their peers. The discussions grow more and more interesting as the day goes on, providing the roving teacher a great opportunity to begin to learn their personalities and interests. In a discussion toward the end of the class period, I ask students how what they learned today will change the way they approach science class. My favorite response came from a young woman who said, “I guess I should care.” It struck me that this may have been the first time this student had truly thought about engaging learning in this way.
The challenge comes with the chapters that follow. If we are not careful, these potentially life-changing discussions about the nature of science fade from view when we turn to more mundane descriptions of matter. But questions about what science can tell us, how it fits with other ways of knowing, and what virtues are involved can continue to correspond to science topics in ways that allow us to harken back to that first day of class and keep the connections alive. This is one challenge I have taken away from working on these activities. Another challenge concerns how I view science.
When I was first exposed to this idea of science as making models (which is also featured prominently in the Next Generation Science Standards), I was struck by the philosophical significance of this simple truth. Science is about using models to explain natural phenomena. Countless scientific models have been proven wrong over the years and many more will continue to be refuted or at least altered in the near and far future. This reality, however, may do little to delegitimize the utility of a model; it simply undermines the model’s philosophical significance. Take for example the daily rising and setting of the sun. The modern consumer of daylight certainly knows that light and darkness are the result of the earth rotating on its axis as it travels around the sun. Early human beings, however, thought the sun was dragged across the sky by a chariot, yet they still knew when they could go fishing and work in their fields and when they needed to protect their livestock from nocturnal predators. Models are adequate to the degree that they answer the questions that are being asked. By the time scientists and engineers were figuring out how to get rockets to the moon, the geocentric model had been replaced by the heliocentric model, luckily for the astronauts. But if science is making models and models are only true to a point, then science is not necessarily absolute truth but rather a fallible strategy for modeling physical realities. Emphasizing this in my teaching allows students to see both the power and the limitations of science and the space left for philosophy and theology.
Certainly there are times when teaching FASTly (Faith and Science in Teaching) is scary and unfamiliar for students and teachers alike. As is the nature of risk, I have found this way of teaching science to be liberating and filled with countless rewards. In the past few years, I have engaged in far more lunchtime and after-school pop-in conversations on weighty matters. I recently had an hour-long conversation with a student about science, faith, and choice of college attendance. This student was beginning to see that his understanding of the nature of science and its intersection with faith would profoundly impact his future, as it should. There are still more questions than answers, but a virtuous and informed way of thinking and being is also working its way into students’ lives. If Aristotle is right in saying “we are what we do,” then doing science in a Christian way may help students and teachers become virtuous and wise reconcilers of theological and scientific thought.
Work Cited
Belgic Confession. Article 2. Originally written 1561. https://www.rca.org/resources/belgic-confession.
Brian Polk holds an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry, an MS in organic chemistry, and is currently pursuing a Doctorate of Educational Leadership. He has been teaching chemistry at the high school and college levels for over fifteen years.
