Post by Ana Jimenez, Ken Belanger, Catherine Cardelús, Jason Meyers, Julie Chanatry, Patricia Jue, Anne Perring, Joe Levy, Di Keller, Rebecca Metzler, and Hans Benze.
An area deeply affected by the pivot to remote learning has been the laboratory sciences. Most of our work in the sciences is based on the premise that laboratory work is absolutely fundamental in learning and applying scientific concepts. Labs support active learning, the development of authentic student inquiry, and students’ understanding of the scientific process. In laboratories, we do hands-on work alongside our students. All of which is to drastically change in the coming months due to social distancing guidelines.
During the Summer of 2020, a group of Colgate scientists across most of the NASC departments have been meeting to talk through the challenges of teaching laboratories within the new construct imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this blogpost, we summarize our work and highlight how we are thinking about pedagogy across departments that strongly lean on laboratories to fulfill part of their course work.
To begin our thinking process, we anchored on our pre-existing laboratory learning goals, and then creatively thought about how we may retain these goals during the Fall of 2020 (Click to continue reading the full post).
