Outside Sherryl Broverman's office hangs a photograph of some very threatening male insect genitalia. She explained how the male bean weevil evolved to puncture the female's reproductive organs during mating.
Broverman, a lecturer in the biology department, uses the picture in her class, Evolution and Society. "We do a lot of sex in the class," she confessed.
Her class is one of nearly a dozen new science courses targeted specifically at non-science majors and developed since the implementation of Curriculum 2000. The new requirements mandate that all students in Arts and Sciences take designated science, technology and society classes as well as courses in the natural sciences and mathematics. In addition to introducing new classes, several departments have revamped existing classes to make them more accessible to non-science majors.
Faculty members who have been involved in the process hope to engage the interest of people who would not ordinarily take science at the college level.
"It is important just in terms of general education. We think it's a great subject and one of the great achievements of Western society," said Harold Baranger, chair of physics, a department with six new classes. "I think it's important in terms of technology policy in the political arena. And, frankly, there is a very self-interested issue as well - that we depend on federal funding and we want to have a public that thinks scientific research is important."
With more students taking science, professors said the challenge is to make technical material interesting to a primarily humanities-focused audience.
Such students, some claiming that science is irrelevant, have expressed frustration with the rigor of past science classes for non-majors, such as Astronomy.
"It was supposed to be a science class for non-majors, but all we did was problem sets," said Matthew Newell, a junior who took Astronomy. "The fun stuff should be the core of the class."
Ronen Plesser, associate professor of physics, took over the class this year and has tried to highlight the sky rather than the science. He secured new telescopes that are simple enough for his students to use. Some students from his class also took their astronomy knowledge into elementary school classrooms to teach third graders. Using these strategies, he has made the quantitative aspects of the field appealing to students.
"They recoil when they see anything technical, but then when you explain it, they really get it," he said.
To help students "get it," a group of Duke professors will attend an August conference sponsored by Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities, an organization that aims to integrate science with life and to teach scientific "cocktail conversation."
"[Students] have to understand why it's going to benefit them," Broverman said. "I also don't think anyone's incapable of learning technical biology. They just need to know why it's relevant."
The topics for the new non-major classes center around current events and science in society. Physics for non-majors is now Physics of Forensics, while biology offers courses such as AIDS and Emerging Diseases and Biology of Dinosaurs.
"I'm really trying to get to this bigger picture of things," said former chemistry professor James Bonk. "Ultimately what we would like people to do is, as citizens, be able to make decisions about some proposed technologies."
Last year Bonk began teaching Chemistry, Technology and Society for non-science majors. Rather than assigning problem sets and titration labs, Bonk tells the evolutionary story of the Earth's origin to explain atmospheric pressure and molecular reactions. Students also research experimental technology and defend or reject potential scientific developments. All exams are open-note because, Bonk said, the goal of the class is scientific literacy rather than quantitative proficiency.
"This approach is totally new," he said. "There are no textbooks that do this."
In Biology of Dinosaurs, Gregory Wray, associate professor of biology, takes a similar tactic, using dinosaurs as a jumping-off point to talk about geology and earth science.
"It's much easier than saying, 'I'm going to teach a class on earth science,' and people say, 'Oh, yawn,'" Wray said. "But dinosaurs are exciting."
So far, students seem to be responding to the changes. One-fifth of students who took AIDS and Emerging Diseases, another class Broverman teaches, said in course evaluations that the class made them reconsider their future academic plans.
"It was great how [Broverman] used current events and news to incorporate the biology into a social base," said Brooke Spencer, a sophomore who took the AIDS class. "She did a brilliant job of teaching biology to students who were not science-oriented."
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