Rhubarb

Hot Seat for Biology Teachers

Author Name: Dr. Rebecca W. Keller | Feb 21 | Category: Education
Tags: biology teacher, Education, Politics, Science

On January 28, 2011, the journal Science published an article called “Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the Classroom.” They reported results by the National Survey of High School Biology teachers which found that of 926 “nationally represented participants” 13% of high school biology teachers advocated the teaching of creationism. In the same survey,  it was reported that only 28 percent followed the guidelines for teaching evolution. The rest of the article is dedicated to the “cautious 60%” who “are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives.” The authors conclude that this undecided 60% is “undermining science” and “hindering scientific literacy in the United States.” In my opinion, this is completely unfair, and places biology teachers in the hot seat. It burdens them with the responsibility of having to wade through the political mud fights currently obscuring authentic scientific discourse.  It also illustrates just how little awareness the scientific community has about the nature of real scientific investigation and demonstrates an ignorance about how to give our kids a “good” science education.