Neo Cai, Marion Caldwell, Elizabeth Li, Sarah
DERESIEWICZ is an unsatisfied biology major at Dartmouth College. DERESIEWICZ and FREIRE are students in Introductory Biology who have drafted numerous complaints for the class and have taken the issue all the way up to DICKEY, the president of the college, and BURKE, an administrator. The four characters meet in President Dickey’s Office to discuss the students’ proposed changes to the curriculum of Introduction to Biology, and, by extension, introductory STEM classes as a whole.
[Scene opens. President Dickey and Administrator Burke are seated in the President’s Office. Deresiewicz and Freire enter and sit down. All characters open their laptops.]
DERESIEWICZ: Good morning President Dickey and Administrator Burke. My name is William Deresiewicz, a first-year in Introductory Biology along with Paulo Freire.
DICKEY: Hi students, what can we help you with today?
DERESIEWICZ: [Passionate and frustrated] We come today to petition for the restructuring of introductory STEM classes. Representing many students in the course Introductory Biology, we are “extremely dissatisfied” with this course as well as many other STEM classes (Wei). We “find the pace way too fast, the lectures near incoherent, and the support system insufficient for those who have fallen behind in the material” (Wei). We think this is problematic because “A real education [should send you] into the world bearing questions,” but for students in Intro to Bio as well as other STEM fields, it feels as if we are mindlessly barrelling towards a predefined, rigid pre-med track (Deresiewicz 82).
FREIRE: [In a calmer tone, serving to counter Deresiewicz strong emotions] In summary, Deresiewicz is saying that Intro to Biology is kind of like banking. “The scope of action allowed to [us] extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits” of information, but we don’t play an active role (Freire 72).
DICKEY: [Pauses and thinks for a moment] Deresiewicz and Freire, I can understand your concern, but that class has been around for years and has been successful. “Too many men—”
BURKE: —and women. You always forget women…
DICKEY: [Slightly awkward] I’m sorry, times have changed. Too many students “in a college who think they know just what they want can make… education too narrowly purposeful.” (Conscience and the Undergraduate) It’s too hard to change the entire structure of the class just because you think you are being subject to banking education. You must trust the process of learning and this class.
FREIRE: Well, we’re not saying that we, as undergraduates, know exactly how the class should be run, but as the students, we are an essential–perhaps the most essential–part of the classroom. Shouldn’t we strive for an environment where “The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach” (Freire 80)?
BURKE: Okay, it seems like you have some arguments in mind, what do you propose?
FREIRE: [Looks to Deresiewicz] Deresiewicz has some ideas.
DERESIEWICZ: We propose that Introductory Biology should be taught in a more liberal arts style.
DICKEY: What do you mean by “liberal arts” in a Biology class?
DERESIEWICZ: So by “liberal arts,” I mean an education that should “include the sciences and social sciences” and stands in “contrast to applied or vocational fields like nursing, education, [and] business” (Deresiewicz 149).
BURKE: Okay, at Dartmouth we pride ourselves on being a liberal arts focused college, how do you think biology should include more of the liberal arts culture we have here?
DERESIEWICZ: We propose replacing a proportion of lecture classes with interactive discussion, decreasing class size, and increasing the number of TA sessions. This is because as first-years, we want to “learn [how] to educate [ourselves]” before we plunge into the content (Deresiewicz 151). [Becoming angry, so furious that Deresiewicz almost bursts out of the chair] Otherwise, what type of graduate does this college want to produce? As we drown in midnight studying sessions, the answer seems to be “resume jockeys devoid of discernible passion carefully maneuvering their way to the top” (Deresiewicz 228). “Our country has itself appeared to lose all sense of purpose” (Deresiewicz 228)!
[Burke scrunches eyebrows. A brief silence ensues.]
DICKEY: [Hoping to calm the situation down] Alright Deresiewicz, I am beginning to agree with you and Freire. “There are many problems and shortcomings in the business of educating for competence. [It’s important that a] liberal education […] not be overrun by vocationalism if the college holds to its birthright and remains committed as a matter of purpose to serious concern with the issues of conscience” (Conscience and the Undergraduate).
FREIRE: Wait, could you please explain what you mean by competence and conscience?
DICKEY: Yeah, if competence is the raw skill to do things, “Competence without creating a corresponding sense of moral direction to guide the use of that power is bad education.” Conscience is that “moral direction” (Conscience and the Undergraduate).
BURKE: [Nodding] I agree with Dickey, it’s important that students have competence AND conscience but that does not mean one goes without the other. Deresiewicz, you should recognize that. Calling pre-med students “resume jockeys” is the type of stigmatizing language liberal arts proponents can use to “caricaturize” the other side (Deresiewicz 150; Burke).
DERESIEWICZ: [Crosses arms and leans back on the chair] Well, I am a student in a vocational class, so I have experience, and I’m not caricaturing it…
BURKE: [Sarcastic and passive aggressive] Some people, unlike you, need to have an education that guarantees them a job like pre-med because they can’t afford not to. If we just leave the liberal arts to those that can afford it, what Deresiewicz is saying is that we should let those who have to, like “petrochemical engineers, to just learn petrochemical engineering, but future politicians, leaders, policy makers, artists and so on need to learn in a more flexible and less prescriptive way” (Burke). The rich get more powerful.
DICKEY: Now, let’s all be respectful. Both of your points are valid.
DERESIEWICZ: [Pushes out a breath] Ok fine, I see where Burke is coming from, I’ll be nice.
FREIRE: [Maintaining a calm and reasonable demeanor] Going back to the previous points, I agree with President Dickey and Administrator Burke, and as a low-income student, I find the biology class to be problematic because it trains students to be biologists and just biologists. Lifting people out of poverty means teaching classes in a way that allows them to question the status quo and “to transform that structure” (Freire 74). “Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication” (Freire 77). Because the class is just lectures without communication, I haven’t done any “authentic thinking” in biology.
DICKEY: What do you mean by authentic thinking?
[Deresiewicz looks towards Freire, also curious.]
FREIRE: For me, authentic thinking is connected to the communication of unique ideas and taking ownership of a unique perspective and experience. Because there is no communication in the class, I don’t feel like “a conscious being”; instead, I feel like “the possessor of a consciousness: an empty ‘mind’ passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside” (Freire 75). [Hopefully] Office hours and TA sessions could be a great place for authentic thinking because we get frequent back and forth with the staff, but currently they’re not as accessible to low-income students who might be working jobs and don’t have time.
DERESIEWICZ: [Excited nodding] That’s right. And to second Freire’s point about “authentic thinking,” labs are a great way to think more critically because they allow us to “marshal evidence, evaluate existing authority, synthesize [our] finding within a logically coherent structure, and communicate the results with clarity and force” (Deresiewicz 150).
DICKEY: In most college environments “There is an irreconcilable contradiction between its approach to competence and its approach to conscience” (Conscience and the Undergraduate). In my opinion, competence is that strong knowledge you gain from a class, whereas conscience is more about getting that authentic thinking and questioning. As an educational institution we have had to grapple with hard questions such as “Is today’s college as well prepared as it should be to meet these needs of conscience?” (Consciousness and the Undergraduate). And I am glad you all are here to question that as well. I think maybe we can start by incorporating labs into class time so students can have access to professors during that time.
BURKE: And we can consider requirements to optimize office hours and TA session times to best meet those who have on campus jobs so that we can “[embrace] uncertainty” and critical discussion “where it is generative, necessary, and useful” (Burke). What do you all think of these solutions?
FREIRE: [Excited, allowing mature poise to slip in enthusiasm] Thank you for helping us come up with concrete solutions for our concerns! We can’t ignore the different backgrounds that Dartmouth students come from. “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies… that the world exists as a reality apart from people” (Freire 81). By acknowledging the economic diversity of the students in Intro to Biology, you’re acknowledging a reality that includes all of our backgrounds and needs.
DERESIEWICZ: Administrator Burke and President Dickey, I wholeheartedly agree with all these liberal arts style solutions because they will allow us to “see complex problems from a variety of angles” (Deresiewicz 152). I hope to see labs and more accessible office hours implemented soon.
BURKE: Yeah, “we can and should be reducing uncertainty where it has been engineered on purpose, where it is used to produce insecurity and precarity for the benefit of a few” (Burke).
DICKEY: Dartmouth loves its students, and while some classes and professors can seem confusing and not as effective or useful as you wish, they are teaching you to handle doubt on your own. Most students “learn to handle and respect [doubt] as a tool, but there are always some who, for a time at least, insist on treating doubt as an end in itself. Likewise, I think, many undergraduates go through a phase of being genuinely perplexed because the use of doubt does not produce uniformly satisfying results in all situations.” (Conscience and the Undergraduate) Thank you so much for using this tool of doubt to bring your opinions to me and BURKE. I can understand your concerns and feelings around this because I have also seen that “Today’s undergraduate feels very much more on his own in working his way through these things” (Conscience and the Undergraduate).
BURKE: Um, President Dickey, we have another meeting soon so unfortunately we will have to go.
DICKEY: [Nods] Alright, thank you everyone for the insightful feedback.
FREIRE: Thank you for your time today, President Dickey and Administrator Burke.
[Dickey, Burke, Freire and Deresiewicz all shake hands.]
DERESIEWICZ: I appreciate the admin’s time and efforts in addressing student needs!
BURKE: Thank you for coming!
[Freire and Deresiewicz exit. Scene closes.]
Works Cited
Burke, Timothy. “‘An Unconvincing Argument for the Liberal Arts.’” Chronicle.com, The Chronicle, 9 July 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/an-unconvincing-argument-for-the-liberal-arts.
Deresiewicz, William. Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Reprint, Free Press, 2015.
Dickey, John Sloan. “Conscience and the Undergraduate.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, Apr. 1995, https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95nov/warring/conscien.htm.
Dickey, John Sloan. “Dartmouth on Purpose – Foreword.” The College on the Hill, Board of Trustees Dartmouth, 1964, https://collections.dartmouth.edu/ebooks/hill-college-
1964.html#epubcfi(/6/16[fm1]!4/2/2[page_xi]/2/1:0).
Freire, Paulo, and Donaldo Macedo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2005.
Wei, Jaymie. Email to Neo Cai. 24 February 2022.