When teaching students about infectious diseases processes, University of Dayton biologist Yvonne Sun discovered a missing component in students' learning experiences.
“The disease mechanism and the illness narratives are two separate things, and what I’ve been helping students to learn is just one dimension of infectious disease,” said Sun, an associate professor in the UD Department of Biology.
She now brings in occasional guest speakers, including people living with chronic disease, to share their experiences, “so the students know this is not just schematics that we’re looking at in the textbook, but real people and their suffering and stories are involved.”
To further infuse human experiences into science education, Sun has partnered with Viorel Pâslaru, a professor in the UD Department of Philosophy, to plan a humanities-based curriculum and related minor for UD science majors.
Their project, “Educating the Whole Scientist,” is supported by a one-year, $38,200 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Its goal is to help science majors become better, well-rounded scientists through integrated science and humanities courses that support their overall development and learning.
“In the Catholic and Marianist tradition, education is about educating the whole person,” Pâslaru said. “That requires looking at the many dimensions of the person as an agent of knowledge and action, including the bodily dimension.”
Pâslaru has presented on integrating humanities with the sciences at philosophy of science conferences. His work on the NEH grant proposal was supported by a seed grant from UD’s Forum for Catholic Intellectual Tradition Today.
Pâslaru said the philosophy of science is relevant for educating scientists, “because they don’t live only within the lab, and even in the lab, there’s more to doing science than simply looking under the microscope and testing hypotheses.”
Sun and Pâslaru have discussed their proposal with external consultants, as well as UD administrators and program directors. They also developed a survey to solicit faculty feedback that they plan to distribute in February.
Sun said a group of faculty is discussing the topics they plan to teach next year, as well as the textbooks they will be using, to find ways to intersect. For example, if Sun will be teaching biology students about the influenza virus, there may be some influenza-related topics that can be incorporated into humanities courses.
For students in those related courses, the semester becomes more cohesive because their science and non-sciences classes inform one another.
“I do a lot of reflection in my classes and students usually are very excited when they notice connections — ‘Oh, wow, I just learned about this in this other class.’ Because I think when they see that happen, some sparks go off,” Sun said.
Photo: Viorel Pâslaru and Yvonne Sun