 This evening here in central PA, I'm not quite sure what the timing might be because I understand we're pretty geographically dispersed, but it's great to have you all with us. So, let's get started because I know that we've got a sort of a limited time frame here because we'll have other folks coming in behind us so we want to get into the content here and I'm going to do a little bit of an overview of how we're going to run the session today introduce our speakers and then tell you a little bit about what we hope to be the purpose of this particular session so this session if you're logged in is called embedding humanistic values into STEM education. And I'm joined by a number of content experts I would say scholars and researchers in this domain. And my role today will be to moderate a dialogue a conversation about some of the issues related to the humanistic values and where and how that fits into STEM education so let me start off by introducing I decided to do this by alphabetically to figure this out. That rarely do I have two As queued up at the top, but Robo will start with you. Robo Abbas is a lecturer at the School of Management, Operations and Marketing University of Walla Gong, Australia, so nice to have you with us. We also have Ariel on bar, Ariel is a president's professor, School of Earth and Space exploration at Arizona State University. So I like that background. We also have Pugna Mishra, Pugna is the associate dean of scholarship and innovation, also at Arizona State University. And finally Richard Pitt, Richard is the associate professor of sociology the University of California San Diego. Richard great to see you again. Thank you for being here. Yeah, and by the way, my name is Larry Reagan, I'm an educational consultant in online and remote learning and I've had the pleasure. Over the last so year and a half of working with my colleagues here on a particular project that we hope we're going to be able to share a little bit of the outcomes with you today. We're thrilled to be here and be able to contribute a bit of a framework and a little bit of a report on a project that we worked on this summer, and into the fall. And when I asked Ariel and pointing to share a little bit of this in a bit. Robo, if it's okay, maybe I can ask you to share a little bit of the context of this larger conference that we're participating in. Sure. Thank you so much, Larry and thank you to my fellow panelists to the audience members great to be here today. The PUN 2020 virtual convening which has co located today's program and events with the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society for 2020 is primarily about understanding the ethical and other implications of technology, oriented towards really achieving and creating a more just and equitable future. The theme of ISTAS 20 similarly on public interest technologies and in the lead up to the event what was really interesting was, it was an actual opportunity to meet first of all the PUN team, Andrew Inserly and Mary Woodworth from PUN and Katina Michael, the general chair of ISTAS 20 where we had discussions around the organization of the program and it became evident that we had some shared goals and aspirations for this event. And these primarily included exploring through a collaborative process, one that engages with speakers, members, attendees and other stakeholders, ways in which we can design and develop technology forward and technology that is in the public interest. Marvelous and I have to tell you that really resonates with so many of the themes that we heard coming out of this recent future of STEM education project that we'll get to in a little bit, but thank you for sort of providing that context for us that really does help. So what we'd like to do in this session are really three or four things, one is we want to explore a little bit about what this term humanistic knowledge means, and in particular sort of this structure that we use we call it the knowledge structure that we use during the workshop and in a minute we'll share a little bit of that with us. Also, as the sort of examples and non examples of how humanistic values may be incorporated into STEM education, I'm going to call on Roba and Richard to do that a little bit for us. I would also like to share some of the outcomes of this project. Arielle was our director maestro with Pugna in this project and it was a rather large and I'll say complex initiative and they pulled it off magnificently and I've asked Arielle maybe to share some of the results of the projects they were the interest and response to the project was a bit overwhelming. I'm sure Arielle will mention that, but also the level of projects that we received the level of participation was tremendous and it's very exciting to hear that. Finally, we'd like to maybe have a little bit of a conversation of where we go from here. How do we continue considering maybe not only humanistic with the other variables in the knowledge framework as well. So, with that Roba maybe I can ask you again to share. Oh, I'm sorry, I use that I already asked you that question about the context so I'm going to, I'm going to jump to Arielle thank you. Arielle one of the issues that we talked about a lot in the last year and a half in gearing up for this project was sort of the current state of STEM education. And you were very passionate about speaking about why we need to be reconsidering what we're doing in STEM education why it's so important to us would you share a little bit of that with us. Correct me that should I introduce a little bit about what this project was though would that be useful. Oh yeah that'd be awesome. So, so this is a project that was funded by the National Science Foundation, which approached me in a group of ASU that then we broadened out to hold a workshop originally was conceived of as an in person workshop about the future content of education what should what should be the, what should the STEM students of the future and students interested in STEM learn about. And this was a follow on to a couple of other workshops that NSF had had about the future of assessment and future of learning environments, and they realize they wanted to do something on the future of the actual content of what students should be learning. And, and when putting I started talking about this we quickly gravitated around a framework that when you will talk about, I suspect, in a moment. To infuse humanistic and what we call meta knowledge perspectives into STEM education alongside traditional foundational content knowledge and as, as Larry said it turned out that this was this notion turned out to be very interesting a lot of people. We were originally going to do an in person workshop, because of coven we had to pivot to an online workshop which of course had its downsides, but also it's amazing upsides and that we could, we could throw the doors wide open and we ended up with nearly 180 applicants. We ended up having a workshop of over 100 people, which was two or three times the size we could have accommodate otherwise. So as Larry said we were we were kind of overwhelmed and that was that was really awesome. There's a great yearning out there, and this was particularly from stem education professionals that's who most of these people were there mostly faculty who teach them subjects like me. I'm not an expert in pedagogical theory like that I'm a geologist and chemist who teaches these subjects at the college level. And as Larry said I become pretty passionate about the notion that that the way we teach them is is too narrow. We teach in general in silos stem students if they do learn anything outside of stem it is in a distribution requirement kind of mode it's a checkbox sort of thing. It's not taught in any way that actually integrates. And I think this is this is doing a disservice both to our stem students and to the wider society because I mean you can go into this from many directions but I mean from one of them, you know you you major in chemical engineering or you become a doctor whatever it is, and you go out into the world and you think you're doing this in order to affect change. And what you quickly find out I think is that to actually affect change requires more than simply being an expert in your field it requires a whole bunch of things that are beyond that. That's just in terms of your person, but also in terms of what society is looking for and how it values your scientific knowledge versus other forms of knowledge versus other perspectives. You are trained more broadly than a but in your stem discipline or the way that scientists think about things scientists and engineers and mathematicians think about things. You are going to be shocked surprise and dismay that how the world is not so receptive to your arguments, because your arguments are only addressing one piece of what people actually care about. And so that's one of the reasons I think that we really need to be rethinking how we educate our stem students to shape the future stem professionals to be more effective in the world. And then if you're talking about people who aren't stem professionals, lawyers, businessmen, whatever, what do they know about science, right? What do they think science is? And again to shape that correctly so that people turn to science for what it can offer and don't turn to it for what it can't easily offer, you need to again have a more holistic integrated approach to what stem education is so that when they take that one, two or three stem classes that they're going to take and at the college level. It's not something that is over there. It's something that they understand is here as part of what they need to be thinking about in their legal lives, their leadership lives, their economic business, whatever it is they're doing that they need to see what the integration is, where the boundaries are and understand what's relevant and what isn't. And so again, those stem courses for non-science majors also need to be taught in a way that actually draws those connections fairly and intelligently. And for the most part, we don't do that. So that's. Arielle, can I, this is going to be a surprise question for you a little bit. I'm just wondering as you were speaking there, why now, why do you think, you know, the history of stem education was such and now we seem to be at this pivot point to considering something different. What do you think is the impetus for that? There are many, like any, like any transformation like this. There are many factors that's a confluence of things. So I could name a few right one of them is of course the world is a smaller place. I mean, there's no doubt about that within the US context that the nation's becoming more diverse, which requires more thought and care to different perspectives and points of view. I think there's also been maybe just a little bit more of a personal take, but I think it's probably true. I'm not a historian or sociologist, but but I think that there has been a, you know, science had its zenith right in the immediate post war period. You know, the atomic bomb ended the war science and technology engineering physics. We put people on the moon. Right. There was this ascendancy of science as as as the solution everything somehow. Right. And I think that that as that worked its way through the society people saw, wait a minute, science isn't answering everything. It's not the answer to everything. And I think most of the society has kind of realized that are intuitive that I think frankly STEM professionals. Some haven't, there's only are some curricula don't quite perceive that right. And so I think there is we've reached a society's evolved and I think I think we've sort of reached a bit of an inflection point we realized that what we thought was the answer is not quite the answer. And that leads I think to a rediscovery of some older wisdom that you find in all sorts of writings and philosophy, and a read and a need to reinvent that for the modern world and a re synthesis. I think we're in that kind of a moment in in history of our, the development of our societies, Western society. It's really exciting, a little bit scary and I, and I think it goes back to the, the need if you will to describe and think through intentionally. And when you you gave us a bit of a framework to do that with can you tell us a little bit about the knowledge structure that we used for the project. Sure, thank you Larry and thank you to all the other panelists. So this has truly been an exciting project and I think there are two aspects I think that are important to think about. One is the framework Larry that you mentioned and I think the other part is how the workshops, which were actually what we call design studios, where we're implemented. But speaking of the framework and this coming back to the point that Ariel was making a little while ago, which is that these have been issues that we have been dealing with forever. In the 1990s, Herbert Spencer wrote this essay called what knowledge is of most words, and his answer was science. And I think this is something that as a field as a civilization as a nation, as a, you know, human beings we need to be revisiting and asking those questions because context are continuously changing. So what seemed like the right answer and Herbert Spencer Stein clearly doesn't work today. What we used in this was some work that was done by myself and a graduate student, a few years back where we got interested that they were all these frameworks with 21st century learning. And we were interested, like they all seemed very different from each other so we did sort of like a meta analysis, and essentially what emerged with three clusters of domains, so to speak. What was clearly the jobs of the future or the work of the future will require a strong foundational knowledge you have to know your math you have to know your science, you have to know your technology you're engineering. You can't get away without that foundational bit, however, as important to that is how we would learn that and how we would work operate in the world. And typically 21st century skills, such as creativity collaboration. So what we're doing are things that people mentioned that space, but what was also interesting was the third, and I want to reemphasize this was not a framework that we created. It was one that emerged from our analysis of around 20 other frameworks so it's sort of like a meta framework. And the most interesting one that emerged is what are sort of what we call humanistic knowledge, which is sort of the ethical and the moral values that we bring to the task that we do to the choices we make. And I think about when we design a curriculum, there are the whole range of choices we're making, which voices are we including which are we excluding are these, you know and I know Richard will speak to his work around sort of the nature of identity formation whether you feel like you're a part of this process or not. In fact, I remember hearing this one of the former heads of NSF talking about the fact that all the problems that they tackle like you know that solution that emerged in the 20th century are now the problems of the 21st. You know, and so the advent of technology has its own, you know so thinking about those values. So, again, I think the biggest point that we try to make in this that these three are important but we cannot see them as being separate from And I think what the ultimate goal of the whole studios and workshops and the webinars was to get people to see them as being integrated that you cannot tease apart that can be developed curricula where you are not saying oh go take a class on psychology on the humanities and that should check off your box is that these ideas need to be deeply embedded within the curriculum itself so you when you're engaged with a course on let's say engineering or computer science you're also thinking of the ethical consequences of your decisions that you're also thinking of alternative voices you're also working and learning in a collaborative sort of you know creative innovative sort of way. But again, the values that we bring become critically important in that. And so in some ways if you could think about the foundational is what it is that we need to learn the meta is how we learn how we approach that knowledge and the humanistic is deciding what is it is it that we need to be paying attention to why I think it's answering that critical question, which I think very often, given our busy lives and given our disciplinary you know blinkers, we tend to forget we tend to not ask those questions so I think it's just an attempt by us to go back to that question that Spencer had asked, you know, back in the 1890s and try to come up with an answer which is more relevant to the times that we are in today. You know, thank you, thank you, and I have to say that having been pretty involved in that project the, the knowledge structure that we used really seem to resonate with the participants it was kind of you know, easy to understand each of the gents and I know as they were going through their projects which Ariel will share with us a little bit. They thought out hard about how do we pull pieces how do we integrate these three elements. Richard I thought what when you just said is a beautiful segue into into your work into your scholarship and research. You and Katina Michaels were a guest for us during one of our initial webinars where we're kind of laying the foundation but you share with us a little bit about your domain of research and if I can help lead you in it with a question is how why is that important to us as we're thinking about the future of STEM education. Thanks again for inviting me thanks Larry for guiding us through this conversation. Um, so I always am nervous when I enter these conversations right I'm a sociologist I'm not a chemist or geologist or an electrical engineer. So, you know, anything I say feels like an easy for you to say kind of conversation. I want to sort of give people a little more information about the struggles in my own discipline, and then sort of walk into this conversation to answer your questions. So in my discipline sociology, which is often seen as a humanistic science, right because some of us asked questions around sort of what's the reason for that behavior right what did it mean to social actors, rather than just being content with running models and finding causes and predictive outcomes. And yet, in my discipline pretty consistently since its origins we've been having these little battles about how positivist, we can or should be. We have some science envy, if you will right where we want to be like geology and physics, where there are natural laws and universal truths that we can apply to people like other scientists do rocks and stars and zebras. And so I think we keep landing in these conversations where we think it doesn't matter with your races or whether or not your religious, when you do science, why should that impact the questions you ask why should that impact the analytical wins you use why should that impact the lessons you learn from your scientific research. The other side of this is that it also suggests that we don't have to think about those things again race and gender and religiosity of other people when we actually engage in science. Right, and so you can see this in some of the natural sciences more clearly than in the social sciences right where it's like, why should I care about environmental justice or environmental races racism as a civil engineer. Right, why should race matter when I'm trying to get people to sign up for vaccine tribes. And even if we're smart enough to realize that bodies are socially constructed in these sort of racialized and gendered ways that wind up being scientifically significant and meaningful. You know, people still ask the question why do I have to worry about history when trying to recruit a sample why do I have to worry about culture. When I'm trying to recruit a sample of black people right I should be able to recruit black people just like I recruit everybody else. Well, that's difficult if you don't think about the history of the Tuskegee experiments, or you don't think about the long standing distrust of medicine that exists in the black community. When we look at all the black women dying for example just trying to have a baby. So, so the problem with these approaches right this science is positivism where we don't care about anything that doesn't look easily measurable with numbers. So one of these approaches in my discipline I argue with other stem disciplines is that, you know, this approach has some problem, you know, obvious issues, right people engage in science, and therefore science what we study, how we value what we value science what we decide well that's scientific and that's not scientific that's worth investigating and that's not even and I think this is, you know, probably the most frustrating part of this whose opinions, we value as scientists you know do I, if I have a woman postdoc do I care. What her perspective is as a woman why should that matter well it might pass because we find very consistently that people say I don't need a woman in my lab to do good science. I think the sort of first problem is right is that we forget that science is a humanistic exercise right that is bound up in meaning making by the people doing science. And then I think the other thing that becomes important here is that everything science produces will interact with the social world at some point. So, we have to be able to not only ask the question, can we do this right the sort of foundational meta knowledge kinds of things, but really be able to ask the question, should we do this right are there impacts on the social world and on humans by our scientific engagement and scientific investigations. So, we certainly have to be more intentional in our thinking about these ideas right identity and group processes, ethics, justice and equity culture history as scientific knowledge producers and learning how to be intentional in that way. It's not going to fall on them out of the sky right learning how to be intentional in that way starts with our training of aspiring scientific knowledge producers. And who you suggested this, we can't leave it up to chance that students will wander into my sociology race course or wander into a philosophy of gender course, or an environmental science course for that matter. And those things in humanities and arts courses we can't be guaranteed that's the case my research on double majors, in fact shows that when undergrads double major in stem. Right, so they're chemistry major and a physics major. The first thing to go out the window are social science courses they just don't quite fit in the schedule. And then right behind that would be humanities courses and the arts, right because the schedule becomes so full of science requirements. Again, where people are learning cultural logics around that exclude humanistic values that we can have students go through four years of college with colleges having graduate distribution requirements and students not getting much of something when it comes to humanistic values, but more importantly, our evidence also shows the students aren't as capable of into incorporating and integrating what they learned in the humanities classes into their ideas about what science means. And what science ends ought to be right and so you know this conversation that we're having says let's not continue to leave it up to chance that students will be able to construct some coherent view of humanistic values in their science endeavors right these dynamics have to be integrated into science education. We're wrestling with it in my humanistic discipline. So you can imagine it's even more of a challenge to do so in the natural life sciences and engineering right the productive applied sciences. These dynamics have to be integrated if they're going to affect these cultural logics that exist in science disciplines and institutional logics and science spaces. We have to do a better job and it has to happen in the training in an intentional way. We have to let go of sciences we are beyond values attitude, because you can't be beyond values when you live in a social world, where as I said, you have values, and the people you're in acting your science on ultimately have values as well. Richard do you used a number of words there that really sort of, you know, like light fires in my brain, you know the word intentional. The expression that these things, nothing happens within a silo nothing happens in isolation things that happen in science, have an effect in society they're all connected in an interwoven so thank you for kind of laying that groundwork. So you have a background in ethics. And I'm wondering, having listened now to Richard and when you're in Oreo. How does ethics fit into this because I can't imagine what we would do with ethics why we would need ethics in science studies right. Yeah. Well, just based on what we've heard from our speakers so far is just not in my head and so much of what each of our speakers what Richard was saying what you were saying what I was saying, really applied to at least my experience in in stem education so just to preface this discussion on ethics I guess I might mention my career just very briefly as an educator so I've taught across three distinct schools the first being computing and information technology, the second electrical computer and telecommunications engineering and now management and marketing specifically focusing on operations information systems and digital business based subjects. And I mentioned this experience to highlight what I feel is the main challenge pertaining to the integration of ethics into stem education which are observed to varying degrees in my various roles across these three schools, and which our speakers articulated so well now. And some of the points that I will probably cover now we have already heard of but I might describe them from the perspective of technology and engineering based design and development processes. My belief is that the primary, I guess, challenge and back to your sort of idea, Larry there would why do we actually need ethics and that's a common perception in the stem disciplines. My primary belief is that the challenge actually originates from an instant amplified by the dominant mindset in the stem disciplines that ethics is an afterthought and not a precursor to core technology and engineering based design and development efforts. And so what I mean by this is that only when the technological artifact or the system is operational, do we typically think about the ethical consequences and implications, and the humanistic values, if we think about them at all. This is certainly mirrored in in some of my research into socio technical systems design from a human centered perspective. So we count, we count a similar challenges there and this very mindset around ethics and humanistic values is problematic because it's almost like a flow on effect and we unveil the additional challenges, which have been reflected in a number of decisions those deliberate decisions and deliberate mindsets that Richard was talking about so deliberate decisions and that when you mentioned as well. So deliberate decisions reflected at the subject and program levels, and even beyond so when students actually enter industry and then belong to specific professions and professional associations you have this cycle that just repeats itself. So my list. So we've got that common mindset I think around ethics and from that we have additional challenges that stem so much on that particular philosophy around ethics and and the need for ethics in the stem disciplines and and some of these additional challenges are in the first instance the lack of subjects dedicated to ethics and humanistic values in actual stem programs. The second is really ethics being treated as a minor or minor component really, or a bolt on to existing subjects, primarily to satisfy accreditation requirements in a practical sense that's usually because the accreditation bodies demand that there's some ethical integration in courses in order to to a credit particular program, and this is something that's commonly observed and another challenge I think is that the study and integration of moral philosophy is often equated in the technical domains to compliance with safety and quality standards, or a traditional requirements analysis process where we, where we ask the user we speculate but it tends to be more speculative so we speculate when it comes to the needs of users and somewhat speak on the users behalf, rather than consulting with them, and these processes of requirements analysis are taught in our stem disciplines in our stem programs as well. And I might just highlight there are many of these such examples I might highlight one more just in the interest of time. And so all of these things that I mentioned I think result in yet another challenge in which the study of ethics and humanistic values is actually considered to be on the scope of standard education and that's been mentioned already. And in cases where ethics is integrated into the stem curriculum, or a stem curriculum, corresponding lessons are generally taught by educators from other disciplines, using terminology that students are not familiar with. And this makes it increasingly difficult for for ethics and humanistic values to actually be applied in practical sense and again I can just go on and on in terms of the examples there but So why is ethics important is I guess the underlying question here. And I think as as mentioned by Richard, and by Ariel as well, I think now more than ever we need to claim responsibility for the socio ethical implications of, and the other implications of the technologies and the innovations that we're developing, particularly given the far reaching consequences so we spoke about the well being, you know, seeming a lot smaller now and I think our emphasis will have to be on collaborative approaches on integrated frameworks if we're going to decide and develop and innovate in a manner that's responsible, and also in a manner that accounts for these ethics and humanistic values. Thank you. Again, there's an awful lot there to unpack and what I would have always loved about working with scholars like you is that once you get started, you know you have lots of examples to draw from and you have a lot of inferences and things to share. And I have about a dozen questions. I'm going to try to frame them a little bit. I want to make sure that we also get to the questions coming in through the q&a and see if I can tie those together so give me a second I'm going to work one of these in in a second. I want to go back to Ariel though and oil. Relatively quickly, just thinking of time, tell us a little bit about the experience of the of the program the project and what some of the output was like. You're on mute. You're. Sorry. There we go. Sorry. Yeah, we were on mute a lot when we shouldn't have been that was that was half the experience now. So we, we had, you know, hundreds or so mostly some education professionals there and who really, as you said resonated with this framework. And they came up with a very great diversity of projects of concepts. The notion of workshop is when you said it was designed workshop the goal was to. We broke up the reading the teams that we actually we asked to apply in teams so most people actually came in as a preexisting team of three four or five people. And the notion was that each team was going to just design some sort of a output. It could be a degree program of course certificate program whatever they wanted to do it had to be something that would be actually training students somehow in STEM with an eye towards infusing humanistic as well as meta knowledge concepts into into into the stem training and what emerged were then you know 20 25 or so different different things we've taken what we had degree programs certificate programs, components for courses, full courses curricular alignments, professional development programs. The one that struck struck out to me is pretty interesting was a tool for or an instrument for ethical reasoning, the ethical reasoning instrument, which was a notion being essentially a sort of structured set of questions for creators of biology courses or programs to ask themselves as a way of reflecting to see if they are infusing ethical considerations into their course or their program. So, so a whole range of different things that we're still sorting through and organizing, but all very high quality and really quite amazing we had. We had this hundreds of people there for a week this this was, you know, half a day or more each day for a week and everybody see it engaged and the outputs are really quite substantive. Thank you. Thanks, Ariel. I wanted to jump up just for a second back up to Richard in his domain. And as you were speaking Richard it kind of triggered a thought in my mind which is related to a couple of the questions that are coming in sort of a theme in a sense and that is this question of the integration of the humanities and such with with the computer and the hard sciences. What, as you're looking at this as a sociologist, what hope do you have for for how these things can come together like what's the potential you see, as we begin to come forward you're talking to scientists now in different ways than you might have been say 10 years ago. How does that excite you for the future of where we're going with this. One of the things that that always tickles me is that people are applying for NSF grants training grants and other things in science disciplines, and NSF and NIH requiring them to employ a social scientist as part of their team interest right and so I've been appreciative of that move right at this huge institutional level right you don't get a grant. If there is no sociologist or anthropologist in your team, thinking about what the impact of your research will be on human beings. Right so I've been appreciating that. And again if that's led by the grant agencies. You know that forces people to do all kinds of things they otherwise say well that's not my problem. So I've been appreciative of that so I believe it can be done. I think there's some folks who never sort of have to encounter thinking about these things right. It's the social scientists for the most part who have to deal with institutional research boards, right because we're dealing with human subjects. So, you know, if you are only thinking about the people I'm engaging I'm doing my research on those humans need to be thinking about. Maybe there's some value to have chemists and geologists and civil engineers have to go through IRB so that they also have to do some of that thinking about the impact of their work on human beings. I feel like there's all kinds of ways right you all discovered them union Ariel couple weeks ago that people can think about how to make these things sort of get past the usual strongholds, get past the usual gatekeepers who are like we don't care about that that's going to cost money that takes us away from our ends, right our goals. I think there's a move of foot. Right we're in an international conference right now talking about these things. So I think I'm, I'm, I'm hopeful, right I think that the kinds of isomorphic pressures right coercive pressures, the medic pressures normative pressures that have caused science to do all kinds of things that 20 years 40 years, 70 years ago, scientists weren't interested in doing and could not figure out how they could possibly do. Right. I think those isomorphic pressures can be brought to bear on incorporating humanistic values and humanistic ideas and context. Both in these ways we're talking right in the STEM education space, but also without requiring people to do all the work of re educating themselves themselves right it's going to take a generation for us to get enough engineers and physicists to know the stuff they need to know to feel competent to actually engage students on these questions of ethics and justice and identity right and so what is great is that there are people like me who are more than willing to be on committees more than willing to be guest lecturers in your chemistry course or your math course or your engineering course to just engage students in real ways with the kinds of conversations we're having about stem right about stem outcomes. Being able to have those kind of conversations that way this current generation of folks who might feel a little weary about doing this kind of work. You know, you don't have to do it alone there are enough of us who care about incorporating these values and stem education we are more than happy to join you and your students in conversations. We're talking about the things I said right about identity and why that might matter about history and why that might affect what your science can do and can't do and what the barriers will be to the science projects that you're interested in. You're inviting that need to reach across the silos right you know it just doesn't work like this anymore it really needs to be that integration of ideas and not only should you be invited into a science class but vice versa right you ought to have a scientist coming into the sociology classes talking about when when these things are employed within our society. What does it look like and what are the implications. I was pointing about the ethics were the implications for how we think about the design of this. I have a question here from Amanda I want to read to you and I'm trying to think they tell us you know in moderating pick a panelist to direct it to not quite sure when you I'm going to start with you so I'm just going to ask you to get tuned in here. The question is as an instructor I encounter non major students with fairly ingrained anti science attitudes, based in conspiracy thinking can't imagine where it comes from. I also encounter North, a non major students with science skepticism, due to personal or familiar experiences of medical racism. How do you apply your, your approach to these types of students, we talked a little bit about Richard just spoke about, you know, the, the fan, the funding agencies beginning to change and thinking about this, but we haven't talked about the students and point you can I start with you as a response to that and maybe we'll hear from the others here. You know, I think there's sort of a side discussion going on even in the chat here, where I think Richard pointed out the variety of reasons why students come into science courses, and that we have to see it. Understand where they're coming from and I just now speaking to sort of Amanda's main question. So it's not that it again. We cannot address these beliefs or ideas that students are coming in with unless we confront them. So I mean there's a lot of research on sort of the kind of misconception that student have right about about basic physics and so on. And what has been clear from that research is that unless until you can pinpoint the students what the consequences of those misconceptions are. They have to change their minds on these things right and that there are lots of pedagogical moves that one can make, but foundationally they have to do with conversation and dialogue and listening. And, you know, and persuasion. So all a range of techniques which we have to sort of bring into our classrooms. That misinformation about science is rampant, either because of conspiracy thinking or because of as Richard so eloquently, you know, described of histories of entire groups of people who have been in this advantage, often very deliberately so, which leads to suspicion, right. But unless and until those things become a part of our curriculum. You know this is a fantastic research to show that you know this is really interesting like this is fourth graders being taught about the atomic theory. And this person did this research on them and showed that they could explain and or answer every question that he asked them, till he asked them one question like do you believe it and they said no. So which means they understood the thing inside out, but they're like, there's no way stuff is made up of this invisible things. Right. And so I think that's, I think and so in order to get there, it's much more than factual information. I think that that to me is one of the sort of key reasons why these three kinds of sort of domains that we're speaking of become critical. We have restricted ourselves, dominated to the foundational. As I think Ariel mentioned in previous conversations that we have put some attention on how teaching in STEM should be done so we have more project based learning, we have more collaborative projects and so on, but somehow this third point is to why we should be learning it why it is important, what consequences it has for our lives, and how we can ask questions of science as well. Right. And the decisions that we make and think about sort of the, the, the consequences whether clear or whether what one calls the adjacent possible, which is things that one cannot even predict, how do we even think about these things. And I don't think there's a simple answer to this. But I think the critical point is that unless and until we bring this into the conversation, it's not going to change anybody's mind. I suspect I each panelist would like to respond Ariel, you actually have your hand up so you get my hand up yeah I thought about it. First, at first I'm glad you asked Punea first, but then I thought about it. So, you know, I teach about Earth history and the planet and climate climate science is something that I deal with sometimes so climate denial of course something that I think about. So I've been kind of struck by something I learned from Catherine Hayhoe, who's evangelical Christian climate scientist and who has made a large part of her, her career now. She has an outreach and education around climate science with evangelical communities. And, and, you know, her advice and she has a very nice right up here that I'm just going to get over here to just refresh my memory. You know her advice is that to approach teaching climate science to communities that are resistant to it. You know you don't begin by talking about climate science. You begin by finding something you can agree on. Right, you find me agree on where climate is relevant and then you move into climate by connecting the dots. Right, but you ground the conversation in something that's agreed to. Now, when you ask about what what do people agree on I mean in heavily than now you not maybe not not only be usually more often than not, you're in the realm of values right. It's like, you know, you care we both care about future of our kids. You know, let's have a conversation around that and then well, you know how does climate start to impact that lots of value laden conversation right I'd root what I've done is I've taken this objective fact based thing of climate science and I've rooted in something we care about, and that we agree we care about and then the conversation becomes very different. Right, and so I think I think that's probably generally true in terms of anti science attitudes right the person is talking to you that they care about something. That's why you have the conversation in the first place, probably if you dig around a little bit you'll find that there is a shared caring shared basis of, oh we both care about this. Maybe we disagree about how science impacted but let's, let's begin the conversation with figuring out what it is that we agree on, before we get into the nuances of what we disagree on. You know, and I appreciate your comments in the past about first dealing with people as human beings and that's what you're saying, let's find a thing that connects us as human beings and then we can deal with this. Robo you're almost inevitably, you're almost inevitably then the humanistic space right. Hey there you go right. Perfect segue thank you. Just a response to this but I wanted to ask you to respond to a second question if you would as well. Do you have a thought you want to throw into this particular topic. And just to sort of second some of the thoughts that I'm a punya sort of mentioned around the way in which we can do this is there's no easy answer, but I think informing students and engaging in consultative processes is the way to go and and I will give you the really important turn value and value later and I guess I think I'm perhaps an appropriate way forward with a skepticism or resistance to these ideas and these values is to engage in consultative processes in which the design of the curricula is achieved with students force, not not for students which is the traditional approach right so engaging them in value sensitive design in value based design processes even around the structure of courses and empowering to have a say into and into how to actually develop access points where there is that skepticism and that resistance and and I think I'll stop there as Richard I think had a point to make as well. Yeah, so again, what we don't want to do I think this is the challenges, putting on to faculty, more stuff that they have to learn. So they can get right at it right. We're about to hit the iceberg here. And some of it is like helping people figure out where the lifeboats are not spending so much of our time trying to figure out how to avoid the iceberg. I think we all encounter people who have learned everything they've learned through a Twitter argument, right through an Instagram argument through a series of Facebook comments. I have come to realize that well I'm not going to teach you anything. You know I feel like I was in a conversation, an argument quote unquote the other day with someone where it's like, I'm not going to convince you of something in, you know one minute a couple of interactions that are 15 weeks to teach undergrads. Right and so I think some of it is being patient with students and earning their trust, right that, you know just like doctors have to earn the trust of patients who come in saying, I think you're going to kill me. And I actually forget that we have to earn the trust of students that our agendas and embedding humanistic values in STEM education is an agenda. Right, I think we have to figure out how to earn the trust of our students so that they are willing to put their heart in their minds and their lens on the world. Risk losing some of that, because they know that we won't destroy it in our fervor to apply our values again values around justice and values around equity and values around ethics etc. We're not going to them without sort of doing what we've been talking about which is taking into account, they come into these spaces with orthodoxies and our job, just like helping under students understand if you drop a ball. It's not likely that it will float into the air but we can find a context where it will. Right, we have to be able to do that work and recognize it takes some time to do that work just like it takes time to teach somebody organic history. And this is maybe a, I don't know, I'll say an odd observation but I'm just wondering, or thinking myself how important the concept of trust is in this whole dialogue. I trust you as a scientist that you're not going to push concepts on me that might not be able to handle just yet you're going to trust me as a sociologist to accept and understand, you know, it's about that. So I'm going to start with Ariel's comment about, you know, connecting first as people, building up that trust level to say I may not change your mind Richard on that topic, and you may not change my, but let's have the dialogue about it. The question I wanted to float past you was at early one we got and we're getting lots of great questions here. I'm sort of struggling to keep up with these but it was from Chateau who asked about the institution and government funding agencies, not valuing some of the humanistic studies some of the social sciences as much as the sciences. So we talked a little bit earlier about, you know, the issue of getting students, at least an open mind to some of these concepts we're talking about the sciences and understanding and exploring, even if they're not a science major. What do we do with our administrations. How do we help bring them along in this discussion to figure out this is really important stuff. And particularly in this current climate is a discussion within having quite a lot over the past few weeks and months actually, it's a great question by the way and one that can answer in a number of ways I think at an institutional level and something perhaps we haven't addressed is the connection between research and teaching to the research teaching nexus and need to play between those two areas and where funding and institutional frameworks are concerned. I think it's making a case beyond the multi disciplinary, even beyond the interdisciplinary through to a trans disciplinary view so trans disciplinary projects so let's let's unpack those three terms so multi disciplinary you get a range of diverse disciplines. Let's talk a little bit more in the comment about their respective opinions and provide commentary about, let's say, embedding humanistic values and ethics in stem. That's great. That's a starting point beyond that. Let's think about interdisciplinary, where multiple disciplines again come together towards achieving unified objectives so we're getting better and refining, refining these projects and refining refining our in order to integrate in a better fashion ethics and values again, although granted that interdisciplinary is more suited than multi disciplinary but even beyond that. The trans disciplinary where you have the stem disciplines you have the social sciences the humanities, the arts law education and so on collaborating not only in terms of achieving unified objectives but beyond that the development of new theories methodologies and frameworks to address the challenges associated with this integration. And I think that's the only way it will work. At the moment I'm involved in a few projects that are attempting to achieve this and we're not quite there yet. But I think when the case is made of having these multiple perspectives, working towards the goal of the unified goal of developing new frameworks and so on that's that's perhaps a good starting point I'm not sure what everyone else thinks about that. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm watching our time we're down to three minutes and I want to throw a question out for the panelists and let whoever respond. Why is this important to society. Why, why this dialogue what, what does this mean to us as we look forward. To see it in three years, five years, 10 years, what's the impact. Well, I mean, I mean it's some, at some level it's obvious right we want to create scientists who are not decoupled from the other important dimensions of the world. So they can be more effective in the world I mean from as a scientist that's why I look at it. I imagine if you're, I mean to be interested in your perspectives from from other directions right because scientists of course we think about is, how can science be more effective in the world. So, so that's, that's a very, it's kind of a almost utilitarian reason for me to do this. I suspect there are better answers or is this from other perspectives would be useful on. That's a good that's a good lens, Richard. That's only one lens and I think I think I think truly incorporate the humistic truly corporate humist humanistic perspective is to realize oh that's only one lens on this. They're going to be others. Great point. Yeah, for me one one one benefit of this is that science is better. Right, so it's not just that scientists do better but science will be better, right. And we find in our research on double majors that when we come when students couple stem major with the humanities major and arts major they are more creative scientists, right they are more thoughtful scientists. And so we are convinced that if we have students again learning to engage this other part of the mind, and these other dynamics entirely in terms of sort of thinking about learning processes that ultimately the science will be better on its, you know, period. But, and again that would be the science done by white cisgendered men will be better. But we also argue that as we think about these things in spaces become comfortable places for people who aren't white cisgendered men. Because the values of these other folks become important in the training not as this extra thing that I have to think about but nobody engages in the classroom. And that folks will actually stay in the disciplines and their very presence will change and make science better so it's both expanding sciences ability to be creative by actually thinking about some other things but also by having other people in the space, thinking about those things. And so two of you took it from a different lens. And that's a great way to sort of wrap up our program today. Thank you so much for your energy and your, and your mindset here very interesting conversation I feel like we can go on for hours but I know we need. I think that I'm off. Thank you all for participating I do apologize we didn't get to the list of questions they're great questions. Maybe there'll be future opportunities but thank you all.