Hitching Coyote Mentoring to Scientific Learning Standards

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Permalink Reply by Nick on February 24, 2009 at 1:10pm

No particular solution to share, but a potential way to further this cause...I teach an upper-level university class in Zoology where part of the problem with the western approach is our way of breaking things down too far. At this school Zoology is separate from Botany, Microbiology, and other related disciplines. When questioning students about the habitat and environment of a mouse they caught, i once got a response "we don't do plants; we're zoologists." Yikes! I hadn't realized that the way their whole curriculum was set up before I ever saw them had already limited their potential to understand interrelationships. What could I tell them? "Let's start from scratch--go back to your days before college"(?)

Instead I went back to school myself. This time took a few classes from Tracker School, WAS (Kamana home-study), onPoint over the last few years. Now I'm trying a trickster approach and putting into practice as much as possible of what I've learned. I'm no expert, but I'm trying out a few ways.

We hear about "impartiality" in scientists. As scientists we were (are) taught in the western way that to do science well requires us to do it in an impartial manner. That's convenient--it comes with no responsibility. However, being impartial too often meant that I stood aside and watched things go wrong, nature be destroyed, and felt I wasn't supposed to let my personal opinions affect my viewpoint and responsibility as a scientist. Nowadays I figure I might have to be a good scientist in some ways at work, but I need to be a responsible human being otherwise. Sometimes I can even figure out ways to let the emotions come through while lecturing by saying outright that "this might not be the strictly scientific way of thinking about this, but it makes good sense." Or "I know I'm being teleological (or anthropomorphic, or whatever) in my explanation of this critter's behavior, but it sure beats the incredible awkwardness of trying to be strictly scientific in my wording."

The hardest thing to do sometimes is to get people to realize there are many different ways to think, that different people around the world and even next door think differently than you do. And those ways of thinking are just as valid as yours. Science is one way of thinking. By using Coyote's Guide-type activities where possible and a creative approach i can sometimes get them to realize this. Present the students with an idea that will shake their world just a little yet be relevant and easy enough to appreciate. No single way to do anything. Recently I read Melissa Nelson's edited volume Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (which I highly recommend--lots of common sense) and am now reading one of Greg Cajete's books Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. These help me understand the more holistic indigenous approach, especially the ditties related to the environment, and contrast it with the western reductionist approach. Gosh, now there is even more than one way to think "scientifically."

I am working on an upper-college-level textbook in which there is a chapter on Conservation. Trying to sneak in as many subtle references as possible to spiritual and emotional connections to the earth, and contrast them with the impartial science approach, hoping to show the crucial difference it will make for the earth. I hope it helps to quote some of the best known and respected deep-thinkers in the western scientific community like Stephen Jay Gould (whom Ellen quoted the other day on this forum), Edward O. Wilson, and Jared Diamond. Maybe it's no wonder these folks were so respected; they recognized impartiality as a roadblock to saving the earth and ourselves. Our science, like our culture, seems to be prone to taking itself too seriously and taking its own approach too far, losing sight of the greater good.

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Permalink Reply by Ellen Haas on February 26, 2009 at 11:19pm

Thanks for your full, thoughtful, experienced, and wise reply. Thanks for teaching as you are, with respect for scientific values, and commitment to slipping a little of Coyote's "whole truth" in where you can. One of my favorite quotations is from Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez where he says that although it was the same speciman, the scientist's fish in the formaldehyde bottle was different from the fisherman's fish. The fisherman's fish "didn't smell that way and was not that dead." I am much moved by E.O. Wilson's work to widen science out from, as you say, "breaking things down too far" into the whole ecology. Have you read his little "The Creation, An Appeal to Save Life on Earth" (pub. 2006) -- a fervent appeal to cellular and molecular biologists to embrace other dimensions, ecosystems, biodiversity, and evolutionary biology (and addressed to a Christian Pastor with an appeal to recognise sacredness in biological systems..) I've just perused the National Wildlife Federation's pamphlet called "Connecting Today's Kids with Nature" and am frankly dumbfounded by the weirdness of having to back up every commonsense argument thaat it's a good idea to connect with nature, with a scientific study that can prove it true, with statistics, percentages. I'm rambling. Have I a point? Perhaps it's this: The No Child Left Inside movement must also iclude a plank that lobbies for including in academic science objectives the kind of partiality, humility, holistic, indigenous..perspectives you speak of.
May the road rise up to meet you and the wind be at your back.

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Permalink Reply by Nick on February 27, 2009 at 5:34am

"...not that dead." Haha! Great quote and metaphorical thought from Steinbeck. I love it. Will have to go back and re-read that one some time. I have not read The Creation, An Appeal but will definitely look for it. Many thanks for the tip.

Some professors here too are very heavily into statistics in their research and view it as the only way to measure or test the validity of a thought. Often well-meaning and good people who like nature, but perhaps a bit inculcated with the impersonal approach that it all had to be boiled down to the numbers. Hypothesis testing was very big, especially burgeoning in the field of ecology, when I was in grad school a couple of decades ago. Opening an issue of one of the professional journals in that discipline all i would see is numbers, equations, statistics. Never did an image of an organism appear. Where are the plants? Where are the animals? Are we studying living things or spiritless numbers? Made me lose interest in that side of the science, and sadly I expect it might have for others of my generation of hopeful biologists sooner or later. Your idea that we need to strive to keep the humility and partiality as well as allowing and encouraging students to follow their own hearts is critical.

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Permalink Reply by Helena Wu on March 16, 2009 at 6:14am

Love all the thoughts and feelings being expressed here.
Infusing a wholistic viewpoint wherever we are teaching is revolutionary! or maybe just spiraling back to the future. Nick- thank goodness you are there doing this with your classes! Hopefully, we'll get some future scientists who can appreciate the limits of their own way of looking at the world and be willing to explore other viewpoints.
Something I tell students is- that if I were to cut off a piece of them and study that, would I be really be getting to know them? This hits home and they can relate it to what they are studying in such a reductionist manner. Zoom in, Zoom out for the big picture.
Lost Language of Plants by Stephen H. Buhner goes into this comparison of paradigms.
I teach about birth and herbal medicine and there are the same challenges. I find the Coyote's Guide so very helpful!

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