End of Teaching Term

Yesterday was my last lecture of the term.  Whew!

This term was a bit more onerous than usual.  I taught my regular second year level introduction to political theory course to 275 students.  But my final year "Science and Justice" course was "supersized", from its usual 22 students to 120 students!  

I agreed to take on this additional challenge for a few reasons.  Firstly, to help the department as the university struggles to navigate its financial woes.  Secondly, I was curious to see how I could manage an interactive teaching environment for a large course.  I opted for a high-tech interactive learning classroom.  I did not want to teach the course as a lecture-based course, but instead was able to make it more of a hybrid experience.  

The classroom was composed of 15 tables with 8 students on each. And every table had two screens which showed my laptop projection.  The room was also equipped with audio and visual.  So I could provide lecture material and videos, and then give the class group discussion and debate time to digest course material in a more Socratic fashion.  

As it was my first time trying out such a room there were a few learning curves for me.  But overall I found it an enjoyable experience.  I was able to teach what I consider to be important content (the ethical and societal implications of the genetic revolution) to a much larger cohort of students, 6X as many students than in a typical year.  But the additional administrative burdens of such a large course, coupled with the modifications to the class design each week, did consume more time than I would have liked.  

I look forward to making some serious headway on research and writing over the next month.  In the winter term I have another large lecture course, my third year theory course with 270 students.  But my graduate level course will be a small seminar course for only a handful of students. That is my one and only class of the year that is not larger than 100 students.  Even after 25 years of "professing" one must be prepared to pivot and try and learn new things. Higher education is an industry that is always in a state of perpetual flux, as new technologies, global developments, student needs, budgetary constrains etc. keep changing.  While some of these changes are undesirable, as a whole I find the nature of this industry, even its adversity, helps me evolve my intellectual development and teaching skills.  Higher education in the 21st century really requires "plasticity".     

Cheers, 

Colin  

Dewey quote on the Predicament of our Times

 

Cheers, 

Colin

Background reflections

  

For the past month I have been preparing for an upcoming presentation on the public communication of translational gerontology in a warming and aging world, drawing on the main insights of this article and a new forthcoming paper.

My career pathway to this topic, coming first from philosophy, then moving into political science for nearly 25 years, and then engaging with issues pertaining to geroscience, will appear to many as an oddity.  But when I now look back on my career path, it in many ways proved to be the ideal fit.     

Philosophy taught me it is much more important to ask the right questions than it is to try to answer the wrong questions.  And political science taught me that everything is political, including science communication and advocacy.

And 25 years ago I consciously oriented my research towards "empirical ethics" and the genetic revolution.  First motivated by my curiosity with the potential significance of sequencing the human genome and the early gene therapies of the 1990s, I undertook the writing for this book.  I initially assumed it would take 5 years to research and write it.  But then I encountered the field of biogeronotlogy (as it was known back in the early 2000s, today it is "geroscience)), which added a decade to my research on the book.  

The fields of political philosophy and bioethics had very little in the way of normative theoretical frameworks to address population aging, let alone anything informed by the biology of aging.  There were arguments about imposing age restrictions on access to healthcare, the "fair innings argument", medical assisted dying and some philosophical discussions of immortality and radical life extension.  But the normative theoretical terrain was pretty much barren in terms of empirically informed normative theorizing about how aging impacts our health, and what translation science might offer in terms of promoting health.  So that required me to undertake some more substantive theoretical work....  

20 years later and I am still working through these issues, and find it the most engaging topic!

Cheers, 

Colin 

New Paper Forthcoming (Climate Geroscience)

My latest Opinion article entitled "Climate Geroscience:  The Case for "Wisdom-Inquiry" Science" has been accepted for publication in the Royal Society's Biology Letters.  

The abstract:

Why should, and how can, the fields of climate science and geroscience (which studies the biology of aging) facilitate the cross-disciplinary collaboration needed to ensure that human and planetary health are both promoted in the future of an older, and warmer, world?  Appealing to the ideal of “wisdom-oriented” science (Maxwell 1984), where scientists consider themselves to be artisans working for the public good, a number of the real-world epistemic constrains on the scientific enterprise are identified.  These include communicative frames that stoke intergenerational conflict (rather than solidarity) and treat the ends of planetary and human health as independent “sacred values”(Tetlock 2003) rather than as interdependent ends.  To foster “climate geroscience”— the field of knowledge and translational science at the intersection of climate science and geroscience— researchers in both fields are encouraged to think of novel ways they could make researchers from the other field “conversationally” present when framing the aspirations of their respective fields, applying for grant funding, and designing their conferences and managing their scientific journals.   

I will also be recording a seminar video to accompany the paper in the Royal Society's "ecology and evolution" seminar series.  Stay tuned for the paper and video in the coming weeks!

Cheers, 

Colin