During these last few months, I have been thinking a great deal about creating community in both the undergraduate and graduate level courses I teach. In my January 2018 editorial (Schmidt, 2018), I focused on building community in the classroom based on the four key motivational conditions for adult learning outlined in the work of Dr. Raymond Wlodkowski – establish inclusion, develop positive attitudes, enhance personal meaning, and engender competence. In this editorial, I would like to focus on the idea of intentionally building a scientific community in the classroom. The underlying impetus for this idea comes from the book Making Scientists (Light & Micari, 2013). I recently ran across the Making Scientists book on the desk of a colleague I was visiting. The intriguing nature of the title, as well as a quick look through the book, caused me to quickly purchase a copy of my own; and I must say, it was well worth it!
Based on their own transformative experiences, Light & Micari contend that the learning environment is just as critical to academic success in the sciences as a person's individual ability. As such, the book identifies and discusses six learning principles that characterize the environment in which the best science is conducted: 1) Learning deeply; 2) Engaging problems; 3) Connecting peers; 4) Mentoring learning; 5) Creating community; and 6) Doing research. Collectively, these six principles provide a practical framework for designing and implementing educational practices and innovations that are consistent with the actual practice of science. Instead of just the simple acquisition of facts about science, the focus of these principles is making scientists. As described by Light and Micari (2013), the best science learning “engages students with science materials through cutting edge learning approaches within legitimate science communities (p. 14).” The main outcomes of these “cutting-edge”1 learning approaches are intended to be essentially the same for students as they are for their science professors and other practicing scientists – construction and discovery of ideas that are new, exciting, and meaningful. Though for students, the learning will seldom be truly original compared to the research scientist, “but the learning and personal construction of knowledge are nevertheless new, exciting, and deeply original for the student and his or her peer group (p. 14).”
Though it was just a few weeks before the Spring 2018 semester was going to begin, I decided to incorporate these six principles into the graduate level course I was about to teach, Food Science and Human Nutrition 595 Water Relations in Foods. As I worked to embrace and embed these principles into the fabric of the course, they became my own, so-to-speak. The more I learned, the more excited I became about making scientists! On the first day of class, I introduced the six learning p
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