NCSE's Education Project Director Louise Mead will be teaching a course on teaching evolution, on-line through Montana State University, from September 17 to December 7, 2007. The course description:
Evolution is a powerful and generative concept that is fundamental to a modern understanding of biology and the natural world. Evolution offers insight into how we came to be, what our future may hold, and how we interact with the living world. However, despite its centrality to the modern biology classroom, teaching evolution can be especially challenging. Unlike instruction on many other topics covered in pre-college biology courses (organ systems, cell structure, ecosystem interactions, etc.), evolution instruction may encounter unique sources of resistance and misinformation in addition to more typical misconceptions and teaching challenges.
This course is designed to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to teach evolution effectively. In this course, students will get an overview of evolutionary history and theory, an introduction to current topics of evolution research, tools for making evolution relevant to the science classroom and students' lives, and strategies for lesson development, as well as practical techniques and background knowledge for responding to challenges to evolution instruction.
Ultimately, of course, the goal of this course is to change how its students teach in their own science classrooms. We hope that participants in this course will increasingly emphasize evolution in their K-12 classrooms through dynamic and coherent lessons that help their students overcome misconceptions and see how evolution is relevant to their lives.
The course is aimed primarily at science teachers teaching grades 7-12; prerequisites are a bachelor's degree and preferably teacher certification with one year of teaching experience. For further information, visit the on-line course announcement.