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Gender Issues in Biology: An Approach to Teaching

In the spring of 1994, as I was finishing my dissertation in the department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, I was given the opportunity to teach my own course: a freshman writing seminar on a subject of my own choosing. Eager to step to the helm after years of TAing, I leapt at the chance. But the experience of teaching writing from a non-traditional vantage point— by means of a field other than English— was much more rewarding that I could ever have imagined. The course that I designed taught students to write by introducing them to a subset of science studies: gender issues in biology, historical and contemporary perspectives. I called the course “Women in Biology and Biology on Women.” The terrain of science studies was unfamiliar to all of my young freshmen; the value of a humanistic perspective on science, the idea that science and culture are integrally related: all this was new to them. Many of them also came to the course resisting the gender focus and all too ready to announce, “I am not a feminist!” But in the end, every student— eleven women and two men— came away with a broadened sense of the meanings of feminism, a heightened awareness of gender issues in science and, most important, an ability to think critically, argue cogently and write clearly. Because so many universities are currently experimenting with teaching writing across the disciplines, I herewith offer a successful example of a course that fulfilled that ideal. I was trained to teach writing in Cornell’s John S. Knight Writing Program. The purpose of the Knight Program is to teach college freshmen to write clear, concise expository prose by introducing them to the subject matter of a particular discipline. The instructors, experts in their own disciplines, take a training course the semester before they teach, in which they design an assignment sequence and read extensively in theory of freshman composition. The freshman writing seminars are small (never more than 17 students), and are offered by instructors in more than 30 departments; the students end up taking two, one each semester of their freshman year. While the offerings are varied, the Program requires that the course leaders assign at least 30 pages of writing, allow opportunity Gender Issues in Biology: An Approach to Teaching Writing