Whiplash in science reporting and the "textbook science" problem

Reporting on hot scientific research has got to be tough. Every conflicting bit of information is worth a journal article (in a high-profile journal like Nature or Science if possible, but the disciplinary journals will do if necessary). The articles are written as if the conclusions are the last word on the subject, and the press releases tend to emphasize the revolutionary (or in current NSF-speak, "transformative") aspects of the work. The common understanding that underlies the research is taken for granted in the articles, so that even if the writing is clear and concise, it's hard for someone to walk in from another expertise (even another scientific expertise) and make sense of what the journal article says.

It's no wonder that reporting on climate change (or, for that matter, anything to do with medicine) gives readers a case of mental whiplash. (Articles from yesterday on the subject: Andy Revkin in the New York Times, Andy Revkin's Dot Earth blog, John Fleck in the Albuquerque Journal, Real Climate.) Part of the problem, as John Fleck points out, is a disconnect between the science that people learn as students and the way science is done on the cutting edge:

One of my great frustrations as a science journalist is what I take to be the fundamental public misunderstanding of science.

It arises from textbooks, where were most of us have most of our brief contact with the world of science. Textbooks are about fixed bodies of knowledge - the questions that have been settled. But real science, out where working researchers poke at questions day in and day out, "is this turbulent interface between what we know and what we don't know," as atmospheric physicist Andy Dessler once told me.

That got me thinking. Because textbooks are usually part of classes, and that means that teaching (especially introductory courses) is part of the problem. (And I know one of my commenters last week said that it's probably hubris to expect to change the world through teaching intro classes, but if we're part of the problem, I guess we've also got to be part of the solution.)

The problem is that students don't learn about how scientists really work in an intro class, as Anne Egger pointed out in her talk at the Teaching Intro Geoscience workshop. (Powerpoint file alert!) She argued that we should find ways to teach the real process of doing geoscience - not just the cartoon version of The Scientific Method that kids memorize in high school, but the real way that geoscientists try to make sense of the world. (I would add some examples: Why do we do field work, and what do we see, and how is that science, anyway? How can we test hypotheses about things that have already happened? How do we decide that we were wrong about something - or how does the community decide that an explanation is wrong? What happens when different approaches imply different explanations? And what are models, and are they really just exercises in curve-ftting?)

The workshop generated some suggestions. I'm curious whether the geoblogosphere has had experience with any of these approaches, and whether you've found them useful.

I could divide them into a few categories: 1) having students experience some parts of the scientific process, 2) introducing students to research that you (or grad students, or undergrads, or visiting speakers) are doing, and 3) being explicit about where ideas and data come from (including discussing history). I've used all of these a little, but except for the first one, I haven't given a lot of thought to my goals. I won't talk about the first one, because that's a blog post in itself, and I'm talking about it at GSA, but I can give some rambling thoughts about the other two.

2) Introducing students to researchers. Anne does this explicitly at Stanford. She's got great opportunities - cutting-edge researchers to talk to classes, a lecture series featuring grad student work-in-progress, etc. (Stanford isn't called a research university for nothing.) I've got fewer opportunities - undergrad researchers, a couple of Four Corners Geological Society talks a month, and my own research on topics I've cut out of my intro class. I've encouraged students to go to FCGS talks (and given extra credit for it), but I don't get enough participation to judge whether it helps or not. If I wanted the intro students to think about how the speakers did the science, as opposed to just absorbing the conclusions, I would need to get the students to reflect on the research. I'm not sure exactly how to do that, but it might be worth thinking about.

3) Using history of ideas. Geologists are uniformitarian, after all; the past helps us understand the future. A lot of intro books try to explain plate tectonics by going through the history of the development of the theory. And, well... I don't think they succeed. The theory was developed in a really roundabout kind of way - the key data that changed people's minds in the late 60's, those magnetic stripes on the ocean floor... well, they're weird. It's hard to tell the story without getting bogged down. (And I know that students have left my discussions of flipping magnetic fields more confused than they were than they started.) And I'm not sure that the textbook stories make the most important points, at least when it comes to understanding what's going on in unresolved debates.

I've have more luck talking about history of ideas in my upper level plate tectonics class. I've got more time (and I make them read some of Naomi Oreskes' work). And the tectonics students are advanced enough that I can make them read and discuss recent papers that have generated debate. But with the intro students - making sense of moving plates is difficult enough. (And, well... something controversial in the 60's doesn't seem very immediate. Kids these days...)

The history just doesn't work very neatly as a narrative. It's messy. (There's a reason why AGU meetings and movies are different. And it's not just that women talk to one another at AGU.) And the work that led to plate tectonics was collaborative, as well - there were contributions from many different researchers with different expertises, and some of the best ideas occurred to different groups at the same time. (So there isn't a clear protagonist, a personality whose ideas triumphed in the end.) And that's part of the point that I would want to make, so I wouldn't want to sacrifice it to tell a good story.

Anyone had better luck than I have? (Or any students have examples of things that worked for them?)

Structural geology and tectonics: the past, the future?

The newest newsletter from the GSA Structure/Tectonics division is out, and there's some interesting historical stuff in it. The current division chair, Bill Dunne, was working on revising the by-laws, and he discovered that the definition of the division needed revising. Eric Erslev, the incoming chair, is going to be leading a discussion at the division business meeting about what "structural geology and tectonics" means today. (Oct. 30, 5:30 pm. I'll be sitting in the back with my Advanced Structure students, ready for a conversation about what the discussion really meant.)

The original 1981 definition of the division is pretty intriguing (as Bill Dunne pointed out):

Of general interest are process-oriented research, mechanical interpretation, and field examples that are sufficiently well-documented so as to serve as models for the interpretation of other areas. Mountain-belt structure and tectonics would lie within this range of interest, but one would probably exclude geometrical and plate tectonics, a topic adequately covered at the AGU meetings. (emphasis mine)

Wow. In 1981, the new GSA structure/tectonics division considered plate tectonics to be a specialized concept, relegated to discussion at those crazy AGU meetings. And here I had thought that my high school earth science textbook was absurdly out-of-date, leaving out any significant discussion of plate tectonics in the early 80's.

And now, plate tectonics is so integrated in every aspect of geology that it is difficult to say what it should or shouldn't include. And that makes it hard to decide what to cover in an undergraduate tectonics class (such as I'm teaching this semester*). I just finished talking about various geophysical techniques that were important in developing plate tectonics (and which are still important in understanding tectonics). I'm going to spend most of the rest of the class talking about how various tectonic settings are recorded by different types of rocks, and about how continents behave (what do you do with rocks that don't behave like rigid plates, anyway?), and about studies of other planets that don't have plate tectonics, but do have mountains.

So I'm curious: what does "tectonics" mean to the geoblogosphere? (And is it arrogant for the structural geologists to claim it as theirs?)

* In case it's hard to keep track of what I'm teaching: currently I'm teaching Earth Systems Science, Geologic Methods, Plate Tectonics, and Advanced Structural Geology. And labs. If I'm missing from the geoblogosphere next week, it's because I'm grading too many exams.