BSCS at 50 Years: Celebrating the Cycle of Teaching & Learning

In the February 2007 issue of The American Biology Teacher, BSCS Executive Director Rodger Bybee told you about the organization's history and the central role it has played in helping shape modern science education. In the April 2007 issue, Associate Director Janet Carlson Powell looked into the future and described how BSCS will continue being an agent for educational innovation. As the current Chair of the BSCS Board of Directors, I am pleased to provide the third in this series of editorials that celebrate the organization's 50th anniversary. Although I could easily relate more of what Rodger and Janet have already said, for this editorial I will tell a very specific kind of story about the BSCS influence on teaching and learning. The story is of my own development as a scientist/educator, which I represent using the metaphor of a natural cycle. Every biologist is familiar with cycles, which are defined as recurring periods within which certain (and often predictable) events or phenomena occur and complete themselves. We understand that biology involves cycles at many levels: The biochemical cycles of photosynthesis or respiration, the reproductive cycles of organisms, and the biogeochemical cycles that move nutrients through ecosystems are common examples. And of course, the process of doing science is itself an iterative cycle of thought that continuously revisits existing ideas and replaces them with better ones as new evidence emerges. But what we don't often recognize is that our personal journeys as scientists/educators represent cycles as well. My journey began as a child growing up during the 1950s in the arid scrublands of Southern California. I can still vividly recall the fascination I had observing the plants and animals that I encountered during forays into the natural areas bordering my home. When I got to high school in the late 1960s and took my first serious biology course, I had the good fortune of using one of the early BSCS textbooks. The richness of thought and content in that curriculum, replete with the innovative BSCS approaches to teaching and learning that go beyond simply memorizing terminology, took me to the next stage on my journey, that of appreciating the value of inquiry and investigation. It also introduced me to the idea of evolution, and the incredible power of that idea to explain and predict the living world around me. After I completed my undergraduate work at Stanford University and entered graduate school at Cornell University, my journey cycled to the stage of honing the research skills needed by a professional scientist. Although I wasn't totally conscious of it at the time, the early training I had received through exposure to BSCS materials (both in terms of understanding the importance of inquiry and the centrality of having an evolutionary perspective) formed the foundation of my research in animal behavior and sensory physiology. While serving as a graduate teaching assistant I also had the good fortune of being mentored by William T. Keeton, whose textbook Biological Science was one of the first college biology texts to take the synthetic, comparative approach to science education that BSCS pioneered at the K-12 level. Teaching undergraduates from the perspective of inquiry and investigation against an evolutionary backdrop therefore came easily to me. …