Teaching an Integrated Course in the Biological Sciences (1953)

Under the spur of student interest and the promptings of a small faculty group imbued with the spirit of integration, we have been teach ing an integrated course in the biological sciences at the State College of Washington since 1946. Accordingly, we have had opportunity to experi ment with the teaching procedures and slowly to evolve our handling of a one-semester course which has grown on us as it grew up. We have taught bona-fide integration from the word go. We survey the biological sciences, but not in the common hyphenated sense (botany zoology). We make use of principles, but the priority that we give to these principles gives the course a flavor different from that of the usual principles course. While a good course for non majors, and hence a desirable course in general education, we have designed it to provide a good introduction to professional courses in the several biological disciplines. The cardinal or first principle that provides the basic pattern of the course and governs the presentation of the material and the examination of the students over this material is the holistic hypothesis. we aim to do in the course is to discover the major biological wholes. The course has a simplicity of structure and the least endowed of students can follow the outline with out too much difficulty. The method of presenta tion is governed primarily by our conviction, which is supported by our experience, that inte gration is something the student must discover for himself. To this end we use lectures, weekly conferences, and examinations. There is a clear and unmistakable method in our presentation. We use the lectures simply to present the facts. We do not in these lectures attempt to generalize or interpret, but leave the process of synthesis or integration to the students in their weekly conferences. The examinations, in turn, are de signed to test the students' ability to integrate the material, and their grade is a measure of the size of the whole they find in a given body of fact. Their grade is always represented to them as a fraction of some whole. The method used with any block of material involving lectures, conferences, and an eventual examination, is repeated with each block. Our first block, for example, deals with the Nature of Life which in turn is split into a considera tion of (1) the Structure of Living Things and (2) the Activities of Living Things. Using the scientific method as a tool of instruction, we first state the problem. For the structure of living things our problem is: What is the essential structure of living things? We then analyze the problem in the lectures, slowly cutting our way through all that multiplicity of structure associ ated with plants and animals. By our analysis we are able to show the student that the essential structure of living stuff is not to be found in its organization into organs or tissues. This an alysis is reinforced in conference. We reach this conclusion by providing the student with a simple classification of living things. An appreciation of what animals and plants are suggests that the essential structure of any living thing must be that structure associated with every living thing?large and small, multicellular and uni cellular?and must eventually be found in the least of living things, even in entities as small as the virus. After consideration of organs and tissues as the essential structure, we have a long look at cellular organization. To assist with this ana lytical problem, we present the cell theory. Under sharp questioning in the conferences the student discovers that an evaluation of the cell theory requires a definition of terms. What is a cell? What is cell division? A very careful analysis is made of cell division, that synchronization of cytoplasmic and nuclear division that produces uninucleate masses of protoplasm. But proto plasm may also increase its mass in other ways. It may employ free-nuclear division where there is no synchronization of cytoplasmic and nuclear division. The two processes are different; the products are different. If the first is a cell, the second is something different ; if the first is cellu lar, the second must be noncellular. So by an analysis of syncytia and plasmodia in plants and animals and by a consideration of the techniques used by different organisms to increase their mass, we discover, as modern-day cytologists have dis