Nanotechnology, Biology, Ethics and Society: Overcoming the Multidisciplinary Teaching Challenges
- PDF / 358,152 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 45 Downloads / 210 Views
0931-KK01-09
Nanotechnology, Biology, Ethics and Society: Overcoming the Multidisciplinary Teaching Challenges Linda Vanasupa, Matthew Ritter, Barbara Schader, Katherine Chen, Richard Savage, Peter Schwartz, and Lynne Slivovsky California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, 93407 ABSTRACT One of the inherent challenges of teaching any emerging technology like nanotechnology, is the fact that its core competencies flux in the new disciplines’ early stages. Nanotechnology presents an additional challenge in that its underpinnings cross multiple traditional disciplinary boundaries. We have designed a course that aims to address some of these challenges through a handful of structural features: team-based learning; a “reverse of the learning pyramid” approach; team-teaching; embedded information literacy techniques; and application-centered content. Our course is organized around four applications that are in their developmental stages: gold nanoshells for cancer treatment; molecular manufacturing; tissue engineering of a vital organ; and a microfluidic glucose sensor. These applications provide natural contexts for learning biology at the cellular level, the molecular level, the organ level and the biological systems level, respectively. They also provide natural contexts to introduce ideas of scientific uncertainty in emerging fields. In this paper, we will present the design features of our sophomore-level course Nanotechnology, biology, ethics and society and some preliminary results. INTRODUCTION Nanotechnology presents a particular challenge for educators because its draws from several disciplines. As an emerging technology, many of the newest developments in this field exist in primary literature, such as journal articles (rather than secondary, such as textbooks). Additionally its potential applications, such as biomedical devices or detection systems for biological warfare, are also intimately tied to societal issues. Combined, these aspects of nanotechnology create a rich learning opportunity for educators to explore ethical and societal implications of nanoscale science and technology while building students skills to critically think. This paper describes the structure of our sophomore-level course, Nanotechnology, Biology, Ethics and Society, and results showing changes in students’ attitudes and motivations. COURSE STRUCTURE Our course, designed by a multidisciplinary team of faculty, strikes a balance between depth and breadth by exploring four applications of nanoscale science and engineering (NSEE). It was geared toward sophomores in science and engineering majors; each had a year of chemistry, physics and calculus. The four nanotechnology examples that we chose span four levels of complexity in biology: the cell level, the organ level, the biological systems level and the ecological level. Each application is intimately tied to NSEE and biotechnology and serves as a complete learning module. Figure 1 depicts the teaching framework for each application: we presented each module by starting w
Data Loading...
