More than anything I want to create great curriculum from this experience.  I want to show that collaboration between the humanities and the sciences is possible.  Basically, I want to put the “A” in STEAM.  Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Steve Jobs’ biographer made an interesting link between the Apple CEO and other great thinkers, such as Ada Lovelace and Leonardo Di Vinci. He calls them “innovators” and assigns a new, specific meaning to the word: people who gain a high level of both scientific and artistic knowledge and apply both to their work. In schools today, we don’t seem to be focused on raising young innovators. We create scheduling restrictions that force students to choose between taking band or taking advance science classes. We reward the passing of advance courses with extra points on GPA’s, thereby discouraging the most competitive students from taking classes in the arts. Even the geography of schools encourages a separation. The arts have a “wing,” the sciences occupy a newly renovated shiny building, and classes like English are tucked away in a mildew hall that hasn’t been updated since the 1930’s.

I think that we’re doing our students a disservice, not only by restricting the courses that they take but by imprinting them with the idea that STEM disciplines are distinct from everything else. Worse, we give them the idea that the types of thought required to be a good scientist, a good critic of literature, or a good sculpture are drastically different processes that can’t, and shouldn’t, overlap.

In completing my lesson plans for my Kenan Fellowship, I want to pick up the idea of innovators, but make a particular change. To some degree, the word “innovator” doesn’t adequately encompass the brilliance of someone like Lovelace or Jobs. Jobs himself said that he wanted to exist on “the intersection of technology and art.” The idea of an intersection, of two distinct paths that converge and overlap, seems a more fitting metaphor for the type of thinking we should strive for. Our aim in education should not be to teach students to apply different disciplines of knowledge on a hierarchy, but rather to make use of them simultaneously. Imagine, for instance, that a dance teacher and a physics teacher collaborated on units where students would apply their knowledge of physics to become better dancers, and their knowledge of dance to test and explore their understanding of physics. Fun fact, the reason women are able to complete say the 32 foute turns at the end of Swan Lake and men are not is because breasts provide a counter weight to help the dancer maintain the centrifugal force of the movement.

My learning goal for my time in the lab was to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that control gene expression and find a possible route of application to what I teach. I played with the idea of genetics as a language, but I quickly found that it is far more complicated than even the miraculous complexity of the signifiers and signified. In my Junior Language and Literature class, my students spend a semester unpacking and defining a series of contexts from an inclusive, global perspectives. One of these contexts is community and its role in shaping the lives of individuals and societies. In broad terms, the idea of DNA, histones, and enzymes as a community appealed to me. Just like a human community, we have distinct parts with distinct roles working together. Chemicals may not have a consciousness of their shared purpose, but I would argue that we really don’t either.

During our unit on community, we read the novel The God of Small Things by A. Roy. The thesis of the novel, if I can apply that term generally, is that of all the macro- and micro- forces that govern our lives, it is the micro-, the small things, that have the most sway. This is somewhat of a paradoxical idea and if you’ve read the novel you know that Roy presents it in labrythinan and abstracted terms. Students have a hard time accepting that a moment of fear on a bus ride through the mountains can have more of an impact on an individual’s life than a monsoon or a war. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to integrate some of what I learned here, for what could be smaller and more profound than what happens in the nuclei of our cells.

This connection gave me the idea for what I’ll call the “Small Things” project. In this project, students will get to extrapolate how concepts they learn about in their science classes impact human individuals and communities. They will also become crossroads thinkers as they simultaneously apply STEM knowledge with a humanities focus.
Working in their biology, chemistry, and English classes, students will craft answers to the following questions:

1) What are examples of Roy’s “micro-forces” from the sciences? Which am I personally most interested in?
2) To what extent does my micro-force of choice impact individual human life?
3) To what extent does it impact specific communities?
4) Can the analogy of a community be applied to understanding my micro-force? How?
5) How can I harness my understanding of this micro-force to improve human life?