Engaged and Engaging Science: A Component of a Good Liberal Education

We live in a period of rapid and complex socioeconomic change. The forces driving this change are reshaping the educational landscape in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Many recent reports and hooks, including the 2002 report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU (b) changes in the demographics of the student body and patterns of enrollment and participation in postsecondary education; and (c) escalating demands created by changes in both the campus experience and the workplace that are driven by widespread use of technology and the emergence of high-technology industries and applications. In light of these developments, we must reconsider who teaches, what they teach, who learns, how they learn, and what our graduates will do with what they learn. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, nearly 60 percent of all students attend more than one institution as undergraduates, and they do so in a variety of ways over often prolonged periods of time. Increasingly, faculty must think about shared responsibility for improving the coherence and purposefuluess of their expectations for their students, not only by working with colleagues in other disciplines at their own institution, but also by working across institutional boundaries. Faculty and administrators are beginning to address a set of common questions that must be answered in order for the academic community to articulate the broad outlines of a common set of goals for undergraduate science education. We must work together to attract a diverse and talented group of students to the study of science while, at the same time, ensuring that all of our students enjoy a highquality education in which science plays a meaningful role. What Does It Mean to Be Educated? The basic skills required for successful entry into the workforce and reasonable professional progress are more demanding than they were even a decade ago. In The New Division of Labor: hotc Computers are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane (2004) argue that computers are better at deriving solutions than people when the problems can be described in a rules-based logic that provides a procedure for any imaginable contingency. What a rules-based system cannot do, however, is deal with new problems that come up, problems unanticipated by the program of rules. Most importantly, computers cannot capture the remarkable store of how-to or tacit knowledge that we all use daily but would have a lot of trouble articulating. As Levy and Murnane (2004) put it: "In the absence of predictability, the number of contingencies explodes as does the knowledge required to deal with them. The required rules are very hard to write. " One wonders, in fact, if the rules underlying creativity and innovation can be written at all. Increasingly, capacities such as cognitive flexibility, creativity, knowledge transfers, and adaptability are becoming the new basic skills of an educated generation. The Business-Higher Education Forum, in its recent report Building a Nation of Learners (2003), explores the "widening 'skills gap' between traditional training and the skills actually needed in today's jobs and those of tomorrow" and urges higher education to adopt new approaches to learning that offer more engaging and relevant content and experiences targeted to individual learning styles and needs. …